With the winter of 2023 on the verge, most peaks and mountaintops can already be seen blanketed in snow as temperatures plummet and chilly winds grow. But not all snow-covered valleys tell tales of a paradise on earth. The Karakoram Mountain Range, for instance, that runs through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India is now witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe that is beginning to look like one of the worsts in modern history.
The current Pakistan government, which issued November 1st as a deadline for all undocumented Afghan refugees in Pakistan to leave or else, has made true all its threats. The deadline left the refugees, a staggering total of at least 1.7 million people, with less than a month to either voluntarily leave the country they’ve called home, some for decades, to return to a homeland they’ve never seen before, or face forced deportation. The order that asked undocumented Afghan refugees to leave before the deadline expired, specifically stated that the Afghans will be allowed to cross the border with only limited belongings, a maximum of 50,000 Pakistani rupees ($178), and would have to leave their livestock behind. The government also made announcements to Pakistani landlords prohibiting them from accepting any more Afghan tenants.
While Islamabad claims that the deportations happening are all voluntary and are being carried out with the full cooperation of the refugees, Kabul has consistently rejected all such claims, calling out the actions as ‘unilateral’ and ‘humiliating’. Plenty of evidences and pictures emerging from Pakistan suggest that the Pakistani authorities have done more than just ‘forced deportation’ over the last fifteen days. Though some of them fearing persecution, have voluntarily moved towards Afghanistan, many unwilling Afghan refugees have been rounded up by force from across Pakistan to be bundled into overcrowded trucks headed for the Afghanistan borders. Many reports have surfaced of how landlords and business owners have forcibly evicted Afghans from their homes and workplaces in lieu of this order. Police have reportedly even asked clerics in some of the city’s mosques to inform the worshippers of their ‘duty’ to tell on Afghans in their neighborhoods. Over 2,000 people were arrested and many residences were razed across Pakistan in the week since the crackdown began after November 1st. Many documented Afghans too have complained of having been threatened with deportation despite having government-approved identification documents.
Authorities in Pakistan had started rounding up Afghan refugees even before the deadline had expired, and Pakistani police have been accused of the harassment of both illegal and legal refugees. In the Chaman camp near the Afghanistan border, Abdul Rasul and Mir Agha, both Afghan refugees, were amongst the many who related their experiences of harassment by the Pakistani authorities.
Mir Agha, aged 23 was heard complaining, “I was born and raised in Pakistan. All my siblings were born here. We had proof of refugee cards given by the UNHCR but they were scissored by the police after they arrested us.”
Abdul Rasul, a middle-aged man seen pushing the wheelchair of his 26-year-old sister Fari Bibi, at the Torkham border, had been employed as a security guard for more than 29 years in Rawalpindi after seeking refuge there from war-torn Afghanistan. It had taken the 46-member family, including Rasul’s six sons, sisters, aunts and their families, more than 48 hours to reach there.
“I came to this country when I was four years old with my father,” Rasul explained. “I still have my Afghan identification document from when I used to live there. My siblings were born in Pakistan. My parents and grandparents are buried in Pakistan. Please tell me, why am I being sent back?”
In his statement he has accused interim Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar and Interior Minister Sarfaraz Bugti of breaking their word to expel only undocumented migrants.
“Didn’t Kakar and Bugti and all the other ministers come on TV and say anybody with legal documentation will not be thrown out?” he asked, showing the government-approved Afghan citizenship card he and his family members received in Pakistan in 2017. “The police came to our house and humiliated and forced us out on October 31, even though my landlord tried to stop them. This isn’t justice. This isn’t humanity,” he cried.
Who Are the Afghan refugees?
Afghanistan, a landlocked settlement towards the north of Pakistan, is rarely ever remembered for its strife-free days. But that is not to say that it never was a peaceful state. Modern perceptions of Afghanistan overlook many aspects of its culture, such as its artistry, intellectualism, hospitality, eloquence and poetry. The Bush administration of the United States, in its infamous, white-supremacist rhetoric has reportedly even called Afghanistan, ‘a place that was beyond international law’, effectively making it a wild land of savages that could only be tamed by ruthless force. Famously called ‘the graveyard of empires’, Afghanistan is a long standing example of foreign countries trying to lay claim to power in the region including the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. Like many wars between Western powers being fought on proxy grounds, Afghanistan too got caught in becoming a battlefield for foreign meddling soon after the Second World War.
What started as a friction between the then superpowers USA and USSR, dragged both Pakistan and Afghanistan in a very unwilling and unprecedented civil unrest, with the USA using Pakistan’s ISI to arm and train rebels on Pakistani soil to sow the seeds of discord in Afghanistan. USSR in turn backed the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and subsequently, invaded Afghanistan after the PDPA Secretary was assassinated. What ensued, as expected, was the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979 that lasted nine years, and caused the deaths of between nearly two million Afghans, and displaced about 6 million people who eventually fled Afghanistan, mainly to Pakistan and Iran.
In 1996, the Taliban took over the reins of Afghanistan, partly supported and funded by Pakistan, in a rule that lasted for nearly a decade in which 400,000 Afghans died in internal conflicts between 1990 and 2001. In the October of 2001, following the attacks of 9/11 in the United States, USA invaded Afghanistan in their search for Osama bin Laden, the prime accused in the attacks. The United States and United Kingdom jointly shelled Afghanistan in their search for ‘terrorist camps’ at a time when the country was suffering from an acute famine, the highest infant and child mortality rate in the world, the lowest life expectancy, and severe food shortages. The US invasion of Afghanistan and rule through interim governments for almost two decades left its infrastructure in ruins and Afghanistan remained one of the poorest countries in the world because of a lack of foreign investment and government corruption.
In the April of 2021 American troops announced their withdrawal, following the Taliban’s return to power after long insurgencies. Taliban to this day is a government that is not recognized by many countries and international organizations including the United Nations. As such, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund halted their payments to Afghanistan and hardly any aid trickles into the country.
After half a century of turmoil and instability, combined with destructive natural disasters, nearly 7 million Afghans have fled Afghanistan to find peace for their families and children. While many have returned during the course of time, according to a UNHCR report in June 2023, 1.3 million registered Afghan refugees still remained in Pakistan, while 1.7 are unregistered and are now faced with forced deportation. A large share of Afghan refugees also resides in Iran, a border nation with Afghanistan.
The refugees consist of migrants from various walks of life. Some of them came from affluent families with political and personal connections outside of Afghanistan and have managed to see their days through with liquifiable assets. This group travelled out of Afghanistan in cars and trucks owned by them and easily managed to integrate into Pakistani society by participating in commerce with self-owned businesses. Another category of the refugees come from the professional class and include doctors, engineers, teachers, NGO workers and journalists who have offered their services to the Pakistani society. But the largest population of refugees, almost 60 per cent of them are Afghans who arrived on foot with nothing to sustain for themselves and are entirely dependent on the benevolence of Pakistan or the international community.
Why Deport? Why Now?
Pakistan blames the Afghan refugees, for the rising militia in their country of protection. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant group that aims to overthrow the government of Pakistan, operates along the borders of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a border region of Afghanistan, dominated by an Afghan refugee population. Pakistan says the TTP enjoys safe havens in Afghanistan and uses its soil to launch attacks against Pakistani security forces and installations. Afghan authorities have consistently denied the allegations, saying they have nothing to do with Pakistan’s internal security concerns. Pakistan’s resort to ruthless force and collective punishment for the acts of a few militants, aided, abetted and protected by Pakistani citizens themselves, is coming off only as an implausible, unplanned, vent of frustration at dealing with government and intelligence failures at the administrative level. It cannot be forgotten that the Taliban itself, both the Afghanistan and Pakistani factions, were idealized and created within Pakistan as the joint efforts of successive Pakistani and US governments to topple and seize power on both sides of the border. From the looks of it, Pakistan’s terrorism problem is a pet gone rogue that has returned to bite its master.
Despite having initially welcomed the Afghan refugees in Pakistan, presumably because of the tempting aid being offered by the United States in return for their asylum, Pakistan in reality did not take long to retract. The United States aided Pakistan with nearly $160 million in funds in 1984 which rose to nearly $630 million in 1987. Since 2002, the United States has provided more than $273 million (nearly Rs 62 billion) in humanitarian assistance for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, with nearly $60 million in 2022 alone. Considering the role of the United States in creating the refugee crisis and displacement in the first place, its aid can only be seen as the least of efforts to save face amongst the international community. What it says about the US government is less of its generosity and more of the fact that it places a $273 million value upon the lives of nearly 4.4 million Afghans displaced and dispossessed because a few white men chose Afghanistan as a free military base for almost two decades.
Despite the amount of aid, the government of Pakistan has enjoyed all this time in return for the protection of Afghan refugees, the inequalities and harassment against the community have never been a secret. The refugee community remains largely unrepresented in Pakistan, completely muffling out their voice for security and needs. Though the government had already stopped issuing food rations to refugee villages, post 9/11, Pakistan blamed the refugees for terrorism and forcefully repatriated 1.52 million refugees in that year and another 5 million over the following six years.
Terrorism apart, Pakistan also puts the blame of the unemployment in Pakistan upon the shoulders of the Afghans. At least 71 percent of registered Afghans had no formal education, and only 20 percent were in the labour market of Pakistan. Afghans are traditionally more willing to do the menial and laborious tasks that are popularly ignored by much of the Pakistani population. According to a 2007 report, Afghans were willing to work for lower wages than the average Pakistani. The harassment and bias of Pakistan’s own people owe towards the obstacles that come in the way of the Afghans being unable to educate themselves. Of the 3.7 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, only about 6,500 Afghans had managed to successfully make it to a university in 2011.
The lack of registration of the migrants combined with poverty usually becomes the cause for Afghan children to drop out of any formal education.
Afghan refugees arrive in trucks from Pakistan at the Afghanistan-Pakistan Torkham border in Nangarhar province [Wakil Kohsar/AFP]
Why are So Many Afghan Refugees Still Unregistered?
The United Nation High Commission for Refugees is the only organization that can grant the Afghans a legal refugee status in Pakistan. Pakistan is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention 1951, which orders participants to protect the refugees fleeing bordering nations. Pakistan however has an agreement with UNHCR that allows the organization to give Afghan refugees Proof of Registration (PoR) that enables them to stay in Pakistan. This card is the only protection that an Afghan refugee has against the harassment of police and authorities in Pakistan, but they can only receive it after the UNHCR has heard their asylum case and designated their status as a refugee. This processing backlog is extensive and classifies many refugees as illegal, especially those who came in the past year, after the Taliban takeover. The financially affluent bribe their way out when asked for a registration card while the other helpless ones are thrown in jail.
In a petition on behalf of hundred asylum seekers filed in January with Pakistan’s National Commission on Human Rights (NCHR), Islamabad lawyer Umer Ijaz Gilani wrote that both UNHCR and the Pakistani government had “failed to do justice to these refugees”.
“This is the hypocrisy of UNHCR, that on the one hand they claim to be a protection agency for refugees, and on the other they seem to have completely stopped processing refugee cases in Pakistan.”
“The problem is that UNHCR is the main agency that processes refugee claims in Pakistan,” Gilani told The New Humanitarian, adding that “there is no other mechanism” to determine an Afghan asylum seeker’s status in the country.
UNHCR declined to address Gilani’s allegations head on. “We understand that Afghans who have fled to Pakistan in recent months are in a precarious situation, made more difficult by the lack of a means to apply for asylum and regularize their stay in Pakistan and in turn hold a document that enables them to legally reside in the country,” said Aoife McDonnell, a spokesperson for the agency.
“UNHCR deeply sympathizes with the anxiety and frustration, and understands the difficulties that families uprooted from their homes are facing,” she told The New Humanitarian by email.
Ruqayya, (name changed), who escaped the catastrophes in Afghanistan in April 2022, arrived in Pakistan in search for a better future. Previously a gender director for an American organisation, the 25-year-old’s family was unable to obtain a visa via the Pakistani embassy in Afghanistan, hence resorting to the black market, where a single visa can cost up to $700. While she managed to escape with six family members, her family’s asylum case is still pending with UNHCR putting them at risk of arrest and deportation.
“Even with a valid visa, we are treated like we are criminals,” Ruqayya told The New Humanitarian. “We were forced to come here. We had full lives back in Afghanistan, but were forced to come here out of necessity, and we’re just asking for some basic honour to live with while our refugee claims are settled. This is against humanity.”
Under Pakistan’s current laws, even registered refugees do not have the right to work, while even opening a bank account or obtaining a SIM card is difficult without their registration. Ruqayya says they only want permission from the Pakistani government to live with dignity, free from the many difficulties they have to face in Pakistan. “What we are going through, we never asked for ourselves,” Ruqayya said
Can Afghanistan Accommodate the Influx of Refugees?
Afghanistan is a country that has been engulfed in wars and natural disasters for almost half a century. While western media kept gloating to the world of all the good that the US invasion was doing to the people of Afghanistan, constantly hiding images of the destruction caused by the US military, it was only after the Taliban takeover in the April of 2021 that some glaring and ugly statistics were brought to the forefront. The resident Afghan population, was dwindling at the bottom most rungs of all indices of the welfare of a people. A United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report in 2020 showed that Afghanistan would have needed US$300 million a year to meet the SDGs (Standard Development Goals) by 2030. It was estimated in 2021 that US$2 billion would be required as aid to Afghanistan to lift the incomes of all poor people up to the poverty line. The COVID-19 catastrophe, combined with instability, absence of access to basic healthcare, unemployment, inflations, recurrent droughts and floods, damaged infrastructure, and a fractured administration revealed a humanitarian catastrophe of an unprecedented scale. A record of nearly 23 million, more than half of the population required food assistance. For all the hue and cry about the ‘well-intentioned’ presence of the United States in Afghanistan, Afghanistan remained an impoverished and instable country even after twenty years of US invasion.
Foreign aid accounted for 40 percent of the country’s GDP. With the Taliban takeover in 2021, most international governments and organizations including the World Bank and IMF refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the Taliban as a government, hence halting all aid and freezing the Afghan reserves held abroad. Despite the positive economic indicators coming in from Afghanistan, two years is hardly a sufficient time period to be recording a colossal success rate that defeats the realities on ground. In 2022 alone, the region has suffered from four episodes of flood and drought that have further exhausted an already depleted economy. 670 people were killed between May and August 2022 from a series of unfortunate floods and earthquakes.
The most recent of its earthquakes occurred in October 2023, of which the World Health Organization estimates 1,482 fatalities, 2,100 injuries, and 114,000 people requiring humanitarian aid. Beyond 21,500 houses were destroyed, and 17,088 buildings including 21 healthcare facilities and 21 schools were severely damaged. With more than 15 villages destroyed, the National Disaster Management Authority said in several villages, only 100 out of an estimated 300 houses remained intact.
After Pakistan’s announcement of deportation, Afghanistan’s Taliban government has urged Pakistan to give the undocumented Afghans in the country a little more time to leave as the country grapples with inadequate resources to suffice its own resident population. 29.2 million resident Afghans, as of 2023, remain at a risk of starvation with Afghanistan in a desperate need of at least US$3.2 billion in immediate aid to suffice its people. Add to that the number of returnees from their countries of refuge and the calamity is multitudinous.
The daily number of arrivals of returnees from Pakistan to Afghanistan now ranges between 9,000 and 10,000 individuals, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The Regional Refugee Response plan to support 7.3 million Afghans hosted in neighboring countries, is only 15.4% funded out of the $613 million requested to meet the needs.
What is Happening at the Borders?
Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Sarfaraz Bugti remains unrelenting despite the evident carnage that is to happen if 1.7 million people are forced out of their homes, in the middle of winter, with nowhere to go and nothing to eat. Bugti said: “There will be no compromise against illegal refugees. We have the data on who are staying illegally in Pakistan. We are going door to door, and we have done geofencing. We will detain and deport them. We have arrested dozens across the country so far, including in the capital.”
Afghan refugees have been arriving at the borders of Chaman, Torkham and Quetta in truckloads as the crackdown intensifies across Pakistan. Several refugee camps have sprung up along these borders where thousands line up for registration and await their fate as people sleep outdoors with limited access to food, water and healthcare. Amidst severe winter, there are no heating sources present other than open fires, no lighting, and no toilets, resulting in open defecation and poor hygiene.
Gul Mohammed, an Afghan in his 50s, standing at the Chaman border, having lived in Pakistan for most of his life, remained clueless as to what he would do in Afghanistan to make ends meet for his family.
“I will see what I can do to survive in Afghanistan after I reach there. I have tried to contact those who have reached Afghanistan to know how they are doing, but I failed. Uncertainty waits for many of us,” said Mohammed.
At the Torkham border, a 32-year-old Muhammad Zahid called the last few days, the most ‘miserable’ of his life as his landlord pocketed his rent in advance and kicked him out with the support of the local police. He points to a large metal container of his belongings atop a truck and says he has spent more than 200,000 rupees to rent it. His brothers could be seen unloading the heavy possessions the family had managed to bring along with them as the women and children stood in the lines for immigration.
“We have spent two nights under the open sky and in the rain, going to a country where we don’t know anybody — no family — and with no money,” says Zahid. Surrounded by members of his 16-person family he explained, “I got my Afghan citizenship card thanks to my parents, both of whom have now passed away and are buried here. My brother is married to a Pakistani woman, and he is being forced to leave her behind because the police are harassing us and not accepting his document.”
Kayal Mohammad, a resident of Peshawar for the last seventeen years sits under the open sky in a camp near the Torkham border crossing. He along with his family of five children was forced towards the border along with many others. He says he was prevented by the authorities to take household belongings with him, forcing him to leave behind everything he owns in Pakistan.
“We cannot ask the Taliban government,” he said. “They have nothing because they are yet to be recognized as a government. There are families who have nothing here, no land, no home. They are just living under the open sky. No one is helping,” Kayal laments as his seven-year-old daughter weeps from the cold, and relies on tea for breakfast, in a cup made from a cut-up plastic bottle.
The organizations’ teams reporting from the borders which the people are headed to from Pakistan, The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), all described utter confusion and mounting desperation amongst the returnees. Grave concerns of survival and reintegration into Afghan society loom over the refugee population even as winter grows mercilessly
The country directors in Afghanistan, Neil Turner, from NRC, Zia Mayar, from DRC and Salma Ben Aissa, from IRC have all emphasized on the need for the international community to intervene and respond with urgent humanitarian aid and assistance.
What lies ahead?
Pakistan’s rushed vengeance, has not just plunged the Hindukush and the Karakoram in an unforgivable humanitarian tragedy, but also invited the ire of the staunch Taliban upon themselves.
Afghanistan’s interim Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund has reportedly said Pakistan’s decision to expel refugees violated international laws. “You [Pakistan] are a neighbor, you should think about the future,” he said.
“This is injustice, an injustice that cannot be ignored in any way. The forced expulsion of people is in conflict with all the norms of good neighborliness,” Bilal Karimi, the spokesperson for the Afghan government, told Al Jazeera.
In a more scalding warning, Prime Minister Akhund’s deputy Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai warned Pakistan to “not force their hand to react over the move”.
“We expect Pakistan’s security forces and civilian government to change their behaviour. The reaction of Afghans is historically known to the whole world. Most of the time they don’t show any reaction, but if they do show, they are recorded in history,” Stanikzai said during a news conference in Kabul.
Abdul Basit, researcher at S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore believes that the expulsion of refugees is Pakistan’s way of gaining leverage over the Taliban government after two years of failed negotiation attempts. Leverage seems hardly in the making from the massive humanitarian toll that Afghanistan will be dealing with because of the unthought of actions of the Pakistani government with deliberate, foreseen, callousness, that has shown a clear disregard for the value of life of those from across the border.
Former government officials, members of the security forces that supported interim US governments, journalists, NGO workers that protested the Taliban takeover are some of the people who along with the uncertainty of survival also face the threat of reprisal from the now powerful Taliban administration. Afghanistan’s stringent policies, their laws against the education and employment of women, lack of recognition from international organizations could be some real obstacles in the path of those returning to a home they’ve never lived in. Even with Pakistan’s extension of the expiry dates on the register cards provided to the refugees until the end of the year, many lives still precariously, hang in the balance.
With the Afghans known for their hospitality and generosity, a bleak light of hope glimmers in the distance as the government urges wealthy Afghans abroad and in Afghanistan to work with the High Commission to support the returnees with transport, accommodation and shelter. Afghanistan’s slowly improving economy, albeit at snail-pace, is a promising marker for the future of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. But how the 1.7 million Afghans will be accommodated, fed and sheltered without the necessary aid and help of the international community is a dreadful question that looms large over the snow-covered peaks of Afghanistan.
