Islamabad’s container habit comes with a bill no one seems eager to pay

Islamabad has a way of turning political nerves into roadside architecture. This week, between 1,500 and 2,000 shipping containers were placed across the capital as authorities prepared to block a planned march by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. The result is a city that looks less governed than cordoned off, which is not quite the same thing, however often officials try to blur the difference.

The march was planned to set off on September 27 from Peshawar and later pushed back to October 4, with PTI citing strategic reasons. It is the party’s latest attempt to pressure the government over Khan’s release after more than three years in prison. Islamabad has seen this routine before. In August 2024, a judge described the capital as a container city, and the phrase has aged with unfortunate ease.

Talal Chaudhry, the state minister for interior, says the measures are standard practice and based on intelligence assessments rather than the formal announcement date of any protest. That is the official line, neat and administrative, as if steel barriers were merely another line item in the federal stationery budget. The numbers, however, are less soothing. Islamabad police initially sought about 820 million rupees, or $2.9 million, for a week of security arrangements. With the march delayed, officials now expect the final bill to exceed 1 billion rupees, or $3.6 million.

Container rental sits at the centre of that sum. One estimate puts the daily cost of more than 1,500 containers at 46.5 million rupees, or $167,000. In a written reply to the National Assembly in March 2025, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said the government had spent 1.35 billion rupees on law-and-order deployments in Islamabad over five years, with spending peaking at 724 million rupees in 2022-23. The reply listed personnel movement, housing, meals and anti-riot equipment. The word container, curiously enough, did not appear.

Transporters say the missing word is not the point. Muhammad Owais Chaudhry, who heads the All Pakistan Goods Transport Owners Association, says the trucks and welded containers taken by police can cost 30,000 to 40,000 rupees a day as they sit idle. He says no transporter has been paid compensation for past protests, despite repeated meetings with officials. Talal Chaudhry rejects that account and says legitimate rentals are documented, paid through proper channels and traceable in official accounts. In other words, everyone has paperwork; nobody has money.

One of the men caught in the middle is Haji Atlas Khan, provincial general secretary of the All-Pakhtunkhwa Goods Federation. His driver called one evening in early September to say police had impounded his lorry shortly after it entered Islamabad. Three more trucks were added in the following days and were held at police stations across the capital. Khan says neither he nor the police knew under what authority the vehicles were seized.

He is not alone in that confusion. Drivers waiting near the fruit and vegetable market say they have received no written explanation, no timetable and no reassurance that their vehicles will be returned before the next protest, or the one after that. Muhammad Saleem Jaffar, who drives one of Khan’s trucks, says nobody has told him when he can leave. Farooq Khan, 22, says the single washroom at a nearby fuel pump now has an hour-long queue, and there is nowhere to bathe. Muhammad Naseer, waiting beside another truck, says the vehicle he is minding is worth close to 15 million rupees, or $54,000. He does not talk about loyalty as if it were a slogan. He talks about it as a duty to the owner who entrusted him with the truck.

The damage extends beyond the capital, and that is where the entire exercise becomes even more expensive than it first appears. Mehmood ul Hassan Awan, a Karachi-based customs agent and importer, says many of the stranded containers belong to foreign shipping lines. He says penalties of $150 to $300 a day accrue on those containers and flow out through the State Bank. Sajid Amin Javed of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute says the loss is not just the rental bill but the signal sent to investors, businesses and tourists. Danyal Adam Khan, an Islamabad-based researcher, notes that the metropolitan area formed by Islamabad and Rawalpindi is the country’s third-largest, and that shutting the capital cuts across a wider economic web.

For now, the containers remain where they have always ended up: on the roads, in the way, and somehow still defended as prudence. The government calls it security. Transporters call it lost income. Drivers call it waiting. The capital, as ever, gets the barricades; everyone else gets the invoice.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com