A People’s History of Afghan Displacement in Pakistan
Sanaa Alimia’s “Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan” chronicles the lives of Afghan migrants in Pakistan’s cities to reveal neglected dimensions of Pakistan’s urban history.
First published with UPenn Press in 2022, Refugee Cities is being published in Pakistan with Folio Books in 2024. To reflect on local and global events since the book’s first release, Alimia shares the new foreword exclusively with Jamhoor.
Book cover of Refugee Cities published by Folio Books (L). Afghans at a stall in Peshawar (L) (Credit: Sibth Ul Hassan)
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
A poet is murdered.
A mother clasps the shrouded corpse of her beloved child.
A surgeon operates on a child without anesthesia, only for that child to die in agony from wounds sustained in an aerial bombardment.
The genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel – a genocide aided, abetted, and directly funded by the West – has, at the time of writing, killed well over 40,000 people. Unknown numbers of persons are buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings. Tens of thousands more are injured. As Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war, the numbers of dead will continue to rise.
“How many Palestinians are enough? How many massacres are enough?” Refaat Alareer asked after an earlier Israeli assault on Gaza in 2021. A poet and educator, Alareer was known for his humor and scathing critique of the Israeli occupation. On December 7th 2023, he and his family were assassinated by the Israeli Occupation Forces.
This genocide is a specific phase of the 100-year war on Palestine and Israel’s settler colonial project. Its horror should not be conflated with lesser crimes. Yet in its racist, imperialist essence, it lies on a continuum that relates to the story of this book. Supported by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the European Union (EU), and other client states of the Global North, the genocide is part of the same family of violence that has shaped our world for over 500 years: white supremacy, colonialism, militarized capitalism, and the international system of nation-states that creates refugees as a matter of routine.
“Azadi rings hollow, parochial, if it is only for you and yours, not us and ours, not us all together.”
For those of us concerned with creating a world defined by justice and liberation, in which we are all free from tyranny, racism, casteism, sexism, from a fixation on the able body and unsustainable exploitation of the earth, the genocide in Gaza is a moment of rupture that demands reflection on our moral, ethical, political, and intellectual universes. The horror of destruction in Gaza is a reminder of our obligations to one another. A reminder of the work we still need to do for those around us and for ourselves in the struggle for truth, justice, rights, and freedom. Azadi rings hollow, parochial, if it is only for you and yours, not us and ours, not us all together.
In this moment, we are also reminded that injustice is not easily hidden, nor easily erased from popular memory. For however well-funded oppressors may be, however powerful their weapons, those who are subject to injustice, be it via the more heinous crimes of genocide (as it is for Palestinians), or, in the case of Refugee Cities, mass deportations and imperial war (as it is for Afghans), cannot, must not, and will not be silenced. For those who live the truth show us the truth, for they are the truth.
Refugee Cities is a people’s history of Afghan displacement in Pakistan over the past 40 years. This moment forms a crucial reminder of the responsibility of the scholar, especially those of us who choose to write social and peoples’ histories as a means of disrupting power; of documenting and bearing witness; of creating space for the people’s truth to be heard; and of rendering visible structures and conditions that allow injustice, inequalities, war, colonialism and imperialism to persist.
Closer to home, we have witnessed the oppressive power of the Pakistani state in yet another iteration of violence against the protagonists of this book. In October 2023, initiating what it called “phase one” of a three-stage plan, the caretaker government of Pakistan announced its intention to deport what it called “Illegal Foreigners”, citing a figure of 1.7 million primarily Afghan “persons of concern” – a figure that appears to have been pulled out of thin air. There are – or were – 4 million Afghans living in Pakistan in 2023. As of March 2024, well over half a million Afghans of all ethnic backgrounds – Pashtun, Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek, Hazara, and others – are recorded as having been forcibly expelled. Today, Pakistan’s Afghan population is closer to 3.7 million persons.
“Phase one of the deportation drive has been one of the world’s largest refugee expulsions of the modern era”
Phase one of the deportation drive has been one of the world’s largest refugee expulsions of the modern era; more is yet to come. In April 2024, as Refugee Cities went to press, the government of Pakistan and the state’s real power holders, the military and intelligence services, started to implement phase two of the deportation drive targeting Afghan migrants who are registered with the International Organization of Migration (IOM) (part of the United Nations (UN)). Phase three will target refugees who are under the protection of the government of Pakistan in coordination with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
In some respects, the expulsions demonstrate a bid to ethnically cleanse Pakistan of Afghans. Ethnic cleansing is the practice of deliberate and systematic displacement or removal of an identifiable group from a given geographic area. It can involve killing and often accompanies genocide – the attempt to wipe out a population – as we see in Gaza. Whilst the Pakistani state is not involved in the mass murder of Afghans or genocide, it is trying to cleanse Pakistani territory of Afghans. And though Afghans are in theory a “national” rather than “ethnic” group, in practice they are routinely ethnicized and racialized by public discourse and policy in ways that function as a form of ethnic/racial discrimination.
The ethnic dimension of their mistreatment is especially evident in Sindhi cities like Karachi, where, as this book shows, the Sindhi-dominated federal administration and Muhajir/Urdu-speaking municipal authorities have long engaged in “urban ethnocracy” – a process whereby dominant groups “appropriate the city apparatus to buttress… [their] domination and expansion”. Consider that in the last expulsion drives, 16 percent of all Afghans expelled from Pakistan were from Karachi, even though only four percent of Pakistan’s Afghans live in Sindh province.
“The need to ethnically cleanse Pakistan of Afghans via population transfer is also... an attempt to make the “blurred” “Afghan/Pashtun” border between Afghanistan and Pakistan clearer. ”
The need to ethnically cleanse Pakistan of Afghans via population transfer is also, as I explain in chapter 5, an attempt to make the “blurred” “Afghan/Pashtun” border between Afghanistan and Pakistan clearer. The border is not just made at the geographic frontier, but it is made through control over movements of people, citizens and non-citizens alike, and is upheld by regimes of documents and ID cards.
To the charge of ethnic cleansing, representatives and apologists of the Pakistani state will say they are “repatriating” Afghans to their territorial and national homeland. What they fail to understand is that Afghans in Pakistan are no longer foreigners. They are, at least in sociological terms, Pakistani Afghans who are a part of Pakistani society – and, in fact, many should be legal citizens. Their removal is not “repatriation”, but a forced state-led population transfer underpinned by abuse, harassment, and violence. Motivated by warped calculations of “strategic interest”, it shows callous disregard for upended lives and a social fabric torn apart by the forced removal of entire communities.
As the November 1, 2023, deadline approached, thousands of Afghans and migrants began leaving Pakistan, fearing detention and deportation by the Pakistani government. Image: AFP-Jiji
Contrary to the claims of Pakistani authorities, it is also a violation of the customary legal principle of international law, non-refoulment: the idea of not forcing refugees back across an international border whence they have fled.
How has this been possible, and why is it happening now? To address this question, allow me to plot out five points here.
First, as this book explains, Pakistan is able to deport Afghans because other, more powerful states are doing the same thing. If the leaders of the so-called free world and liberal democracy are deporting Afghan refugees on different pretexts, Pakistan has the green light to do the same. In fact, in government talks between Pakistan and the US in Islamabad in December 2023, “off the record”, Pakistani officials claimed the US did not object to Islamabad’s deportation drive and instead said the process should be slowed down during winter.
Second, a great deal of responsibility lies with the international humanitarian aid and refugee system, in particular the UNHCR and, more recently, the IOM. Whilst these agencies pay lip service to human rights and international and refugee law, over the years they have not pushed for the best interests of the people they claim to represent but more for the concerns of the states in which they operate. In Pakistan they could have, for example, demanded pathways for the legal and local integration of Afghans, policies that are being successfully embraced in countries with similar numbers of refugees such as Kenya; instead they have vested their energies into state-sanctioned coercive repatriation schemes. As Pakistan plods out phase two and plans for phase three of the expulsion drive, UNHCR and IOM officials feign concern at the government’s actions, but these organizations’ actions (and inactions) have created the conditions for the situation we find ourselves in today. In its current liberal form, humanitarianism has failed to stand up to power. Instead it has reinforced the status quo and even significantly contributed to a worsening of the Afghan position in Pakistan.
“In its current liberal form, humanitarianism has failed to stand up to power. Instead it has reinforced the status quo and even significantly contributed to a worsening of the Afghan position in Pakistan. ”
Third, it is crucial to remember that the present phase of Afghan deportation began under a caretaker “hybrid” military regime in Pakistan without any democratic mandate, during one of the most oppressive periods in the country’s recent history. At the end of 2023, Pakistan was demoted to an authoritarian regime in global rankings of political freedom (what its status will be in 2024 remains to be seen). Journalists, opposition parties, dissidents, and the general public have been targeted via military courts, detention without trial, and enforced disappearances. Afghans who seek to speak up or Pakistanis who try to advocate on their behalf are, in these circumstances, apprehensive or reluctant to do so. Consider how in October 2023, when human rights campaigners including well-known figures such as Afrasiab Khattak, a former Pakistani Senator and Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), tried to host a talk on Afghan refugees in Islamabad, law-enforcement agencies surrounded the event to stop it from happening.
Fourth, and most crucially, as this book and the scholarship of political scientist Fazal-ur-Rahim Marwat and others show, for over 40 years Afghan lives in Pakistan have been subject to the violence and vagaries of changing geopolitical winds that are driven by Pakistan’s military and intelligence interests. The latest expulsion drives are “leverage” to negotiate with the Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Pakistani establishment regards as overly tolerant of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a loosely organized militant organization responsible for the rise in terror incidents in Pakistan. Simply put, Afghan refugees in Pakistan are being collectively punished for the messy relationship between the Pakistani state and Afghan Taliban, which is bitterly ironic given that most Afghans in Pakistan have either never lived under the Afghan Taliban or fled the country to escape them.
Finally, the current expulsions are made possible by Pakistan’s use and misuse of international and national law. This is the “how” of the expulsion drive –the mechanisms of power (the law) that are used to enact and justify the ongoing violence of population transfer.
Pakistan has historically disregarded national law to exclude Afghans, both by refusing them rights and, in recent years, by refusing to recognize their claims to refuge. As Refugee Cities shows, from the beginning of the Afghan mass movement into Pakistan in the 1970s, successive Pakistani governments refused to award Afghans long-term legal rights in the country. During the height of the Afghan-Soviet War in the 1980s, the military-led regime of General Zia ul Haq received Afghans in Pakistan as “heroic mujahids” because it was useful to help defeat communism in Afghanistan (and Pakistan by extension). However, then, as now, Afghans were for the most part (bar some key political allies) denied pathways to legal integration, such as resident status or citizenship, which underlines the limited nature of the “hospitality” they received.
Pakistan has also never signed the UN 1951 Convention Relating to Refugees or the 1967 Protocol, which has helped maintain legal ambiguity over the position of Afghans in the country. To be fair, in 1951 the white world order never wanted the Global South to join the Convention – UN refugee protections were initially only concerned with Europeans, ensuring the colonized/decolonizing Asian, African, and Caribbean peoples did not descend into Europe. Still, since 1967, the Convention and its Protocol has been extended to the rest of the world and does offer some crucial foundations of rights and protections for refugees, as well as pathways to naturalization in signatory states.
Pakistan has also never developed a national refugee law. The only parliamentarian to raise calls for a National Refugee Bill is Mohsin Dawar. In February 2024, Dawar, known for his political activism for greater democracy in the former tribal areas, was shot by the frontier constabulary – a federal paramilitary force – in Miranshah, North Waziristan. Four of his companions were killed.
Pakistan’s citizenship laws are, however, quite progressive and, in theory, anyone born in the country after 1951 is eligible for citizenship. However, the law is willfully ignored. Thousands, if not millions, of second and third generation Afghans, many who have never even visited their “homeland”, should already be Pakistani citizens. And as anthropologist Zehra Hashmi shows, even Pakistan’s Pashtuns, especially those from the former tribal areas, find they are stripped of legal citizenship or residential status in the country, an abuse of the law that underscores the depth of anti-Pashtun and anti-Afghan sentiment in Pakistan.
Yet Pakistan today has moved even further from refusing to accord rights to now denying Afghans refugee status altogether. Driven by shifting geopolitics, the state is using legal cunning to transform Afghans from “refugees” to “illegal migrants”. Think about it. Since the 1970s, Afghanistan has been in a condition of perpetual war. This means that the definition of who is a refugee, that is someone needing to flee their home because of war, has not changed but in Pakistan, legal definitions have.
As the book details, from the late 1970s until the mid-2000s, Afghans were recognized as refugees on a prima facie basis: any Afghan who entered Pakistan was considered a refugee. But post-2001, under the “War on Terror”, led by the US with Pakistan as a key ally, it became expedient for Afghanistan to be declared a "safe country". The upshot of this was that Afghan claims for refuge in Pakistan, and elsewhere, became null and void. This was something Pakistan was quite happy to go along with, because, it wanted the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to be clearer.
Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, the UNHCR issued a non-return advisory for refugees to Afghanistan – another way to say Afghanistan under the Taliban is not a safe country and that refugees or asylum-seeking populations should not be returned there. But new Afghan arrivals in Pakistan find it near impossible to gain refuge and asylum.
Today, official terminology categorizes Afghans in Pakistan in three broad groups. First are “registered refugees”, who are issued a Proof of Registration (POR) ID card managed by the government and UNHCR Pakistan. Second are “migrants” who have an Afghan Citizen card (ACC), which is managed by the IOM. Third are those without any type of formal documentation deemed acceptable by the state. As the first US edition of the book went to print in 2021/2022, the book focused mainly on the first two groups. Since then, in the context of a Taliban government, at least 600,000 Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and most now fit into the third category. Some of these persons have been classed as being “in transit” as they awaited resettlement in the UK, Germany, France, Canada, and the US, but the government flat out refuses to recognize these persons as refugees. Instead, in October 2023, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Afghans who entered Pakistan after 2021 were “illegal immigrants” or visa holders which had, by 2023, expired, making them also “illegal immigrants”.
This legal chicanery must be called out.
Progressive lawmakers, lawyers, and scholars are doing the crucial work of pushing for Pakistani law to be fairly applied to Pakistan’s Afghan refugees alongside calling urgently for the development of a national refugee law and asylum framework and the just application of international law. These are calls that need to be amplified and supported, but they must be done whilst also underscoring the need for a political resolution to Pakistan’s Afghan question.
To the political dimensions of this question we now turn.
Afghans walking along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as they move to Afghanistan. Image: AFP via Getty Images
A debt owed
In Pakistan, the expulsions are framed in securitized terms, as removals of “troublesome Afghan Islamists”. Few of those who support the move appear to have asked themselves a basic question which lies at the heart of this situation: why are Afghans in Pakistan in the first place?
In a 2023 solidarity statement with Afghans in Pakistan, a group of political organizers, academics, and concerned observers, the Afghan Reparations Collective (ARC), characterized the Afghan presence in Pakistan in terms that echoed the British Sri Lankan anti-racist intellectual and activist, Ambalavaner Sivanandan: “We are here because you were there”. Afghans have faced over 40 years of wars attributable to the failures of Afghan elites, but also disastrous interventions, invasions, and occupations by imperial powers and neighbouring countries, including Pakistan.
The past 40 years of wars in Afghanistan directly build on the tradition – in legal, military, political, and epistemological terms – of bloody British colonialism in which Afghanistan and the Pashtun territories of British India were, even by colonial standards, placed in a space of exception where the “noble [Afghan/Pashtun] savage” was to be equally valorized and feared. The resulting discourses and modes of governance that accompanied these perceptions have persisted in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and have taken on a new life in the War on Terror.
In the War on Terror era, Islamophobia has been expertly applied to Muslims in the West and, as increasing bodies of scholarship show, to Muslims in India and Kashmir and in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Yet we seldom recognize how Muslim states are also willing to mimic Islamophobic War on Terror discourse to target racial, ethnic, and political minorities in their own states. In Pakistan, tropes of Pashtuns as “tribal” religious fundamentalists remain common and are often applied to peoples and geographies of Afghanistan, especially Afghan Pashtuns, where much of the War on Terror has played out.
Medical anthropologist Anila Daulatzai and political scientist Sahar Ghumkhor pointed out that even progressive Indian and Pakistani scholarship and political discourse racialize Afghans and Afghanistan in Orientalist fashion. Afghans are constructed as heroic or terrifying; they are imagined through one-dimensional prisms of suffering – of the refugee, of poverty, of girls denied an education – or defined by backward notions of an unchanging “tribalism”. In practice, more often than not they are ignored in the global left’s expressions of solidarity against colonialism and imperialism. In other words, the people of Afghanistan and its diaspora have long been sidelined in anti-colonial and anti-imperial imaginaries.
Over the past 40 years, the numbers of people killed, injured, and displaced in Afghanistan are monumental. In the Soviet-Afghan war (1979 - 1989) well over one million Afghans were killed and, out of a population of 14 million, over eight million were made refugees. In the 1990s, although accurate data is not available, it is reasonable to assume tens of thousands, if not more, were killed as warlords and the emergent Taliban fought for power in Afghanistan. Then, during the War on Terror (2001-2021) at least 170,000 Afghans were killed, as well as over 67,000 Pakistanis, predominantly Pashtuns in today’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, including the former tribal areas. None of these numbers account for the people who died as an indirect result of these wars – through a lack of access to employment, food, healthcare, and sanitation. Nor do they encompass the multi-layered forms of deprivation and purposeful neglect endured by the Afghan people – sufferings which continue in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and extend to the global Afghan diaspora, which includes over 8 million refugees in 103 countries as well as legal citizens of other countries. (Pakistan and Iran remain the largest “host” states, home to over 90 percent of Afghanistan’s global refugee population.)
Instead of recognizing the role of external actors in creating the conditions of death, destruction, and displacement in Afghanistan and creating easier pathways of asylum and local integration, we find consensus across the Global North and South that it is acceptable to deport the exceptionally Orientalized Afghan body to Afghanistan. As anthropologist Shahram Khosravi says, deportation has been normalized as a “way of life” for Afghans. This global deportation regime is made possible by omissions of history, facts, and context – most fundamentally that Afghans have been made refugees because of the actions of external states, including those engaged in the mass deportation drives of Afghans today.
Today, Afghanistan is not classified as a safe country, but hundreds of thousands are being forced there. Alongside Pakistan, tens of thousands of Afghans have been deported from Iran and Turkey. Iran deported 631,000 Afghans in 2023 alone. India has added restraints to Afghan – and Muslim – asylum. The Gulf Arab states use and spit out Afghan labourers as they do so many others. In the first half of 2023, Germany sent 650 Afghans to Afghanistan. In 2023, the UK told over 1,000 Afghans, who fled the Taliban in 2021 with British support, that they will be made homeless, an attempt to create a hostile environment meant to “encourage” (read: coerce) Afghans into “self-repatriating” to Afghanistan. Additionally, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and the US made little effort to evacuate many of the thousands of Afghans they promised asylum after 2021 and who managed to reach Pakistan.
“In a just world, Pakistanis would be reflecting on our nation’s historic role in creating instability in the region through support for retrograde forces that threaten Pakistani lives too.”
In a just world, Pakistanis would be reflecting on our nation’s historic role in creating instability in the region through support for retrograde forces that threaten Pakistani lives too. We would be initiating a conversation among the various countries responsible for Afghanistan’s predicament around reparations owed to the Afghan people. We would create spaces for more of Pakistan’s Afghan voices – labourers, scholars, artists, organizers– to be heard on their own terms. And we would acknowledge the entitlement of Afghans to refugee status, asylum, and realizable legal pathways to residency and citizenship in our own country as well as others.
Those who speak sanctimoniously of the populations they torment as “illegal immigrants” would do well to remember: Pakistan itself relies on remittances from large numbers of migrants that comprise its global diaspora, many of whom reach their destinations through irregular channels. Pakistan Zindabad, ya Pakistan se zinda bhaag? (Long live Pakistan or run away from Pakistan alive?), we know.
In the global North, Black, Brown, and Muslim citizens are often subject to discrimination. The US, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, and the EU have created a system of militarized global apartheid where a regime of abuse, incarceration, and deportation shapes the lives of so many migrants from the Global South. Here, Pakistan’s poorer migrants find themselves alongside Afghans, Somalis, Iraqis, Eritreans, Congolese, and others. Often, as they attempt to cross Fortress Europe seas or land borders they become comrades in death as boats sink in the Mediterranean or hypothermia sinks in whilst seeking shelter in a forest near a border crossing. At other times they face purposeful neglect, left in limbo in refugee camps and “jungles”.
Why not, then, reflect on these common experiences to develop a common language that connects the struggles of Pakistanis in and outside the country with those of our Afghan siblings facing deportation from their own homes?
To live, to witness
The 2023 expulsions affected many of the neighbourhoods and communities described in this book. Many Afghans in Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, and other smaller towns and cities tried not to leave their homes for fear of being arrested, physically assaulted, and deported.
In October 2023, with barefaced cheek, the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, Zahra Mehran Baloch said that Pakistan’s expulsion drive was “compliant” with international law. It was not. It is not. It will not be ahead. During the 2023 expulsions, lawyers, non-governmental civil society organisations, journalists, and activists such as the Joint Action Committee for Refugees (JAC-R), Aurat March, the HRCP, and the international Human Rights Watch (HRW), documented how law enforcement agencies subjected Afghans to physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, forced them from their homes, neighbourhoods, and communities, and incarcerated them in detention centers. HRW recorded how police “demanded bribes and confiscated jewelry, livestock, and other property, and bulldozed homes”, whilst Afghan women were “sexually harassed” and “threatened with sexual assault.” This was not, as government’s spokespersons claimed, a dignified return.
In a final act of insult and extortion, many expelled Afghans were not allowed to take their livestock and belongings with them. In 2023, confiscations at the border were justified by then caretaker Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti, who said Afghans were only allowed to take a “maximum of 50,000 Pakistani rupees ($180)” out of Pakistan in cash. Today, Bugti has been rewarded for his actions against Afghans and is serving as the Chief Minister of Balochistan province.
Others, as journalists Jamaima Afridi and Mutee-ur-Rehman report, were fleeced by fellow Pakistanis who were happy to take advantage of Afghans having to sell goods and possessions quickly. Families, parents, and children were ripped apart across borders as Afghan women married to Pakistani men were allowed to stay, but Afghan men married to Pakistani women weren’t.
In keeping with the Pakistani elite and state’s discrimination against its own citizens residing in, or originating from, regions that border Afghanistan, Pakistani Pashtuns were profiled, detained, and in some cases deported.
Once across the border, many Afghan Pakistanis found themselves in a “homeland” they had already left or never been to, confronted by an internationally isolated Taliban government facing multiple crises including ecological disasters, water shortages, and food insecurity. International sanctions against the Taliban have exacerbated the impoverishment of the Afghan people, especially the most marginalized: girls, women, internally displaced persons, and refugee returnees. Unconditional humanitarian aid, not sanctions, should be the responsibility of the international community to Afghanistan, but this is not forthcoming. “We are grappling with empty hands and competing disasters”, Taliban officials say.
This dire situation is compounded for those whose lives are directly at risk from the Taliban, including artists, journalists, and activists. Forcibly ‘repatriated’ Afghans who have family or friends in the country seek refuge with them. Others must cram into already overpopulated informal housing settlements in cities like Jalalabad without any support from a Taliban government in crisis.
Afghans resting in a camp near Torkham, Afghanistan after they leave Pakistan, Nov. 17, 2023. Image: AP/File
Holding up a mirror
Across class and ethnic lines, political and religious divides in Pakistan, there has been a vocal uproar against Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza.
This is needed and welcome. Pakistan, like many countries, has amends to make when it comes to the Palestinian struggle. Historically, the Pakistani state has dealt direct blows to Palestinian resistance. In 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan sought to crush the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a certain Pakistani Brigadier, Zia ul Haq, who would go on to seize power in a military coup in 1977, led Jordanian troops in operations against the Palestinian resistance. More recently, Pakistan has held backdoor talks with Israel towards ‘normalizing’ relations, and purchased spyware technology from Israeli cybernetic companies presumably to use against its own population.
Despite this, the Pakistani people have historically always stood solidly with Palestinians: workers, peasants, poets, and thinkers of the Marxist anti-colonial and feminist Left – from Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Eqbal Ahmad to today’s socialist-feminist Women’s Democratic Front and many more. As Faiz wrote from Beirut in 1980,
تیرے اعدا نے کیا ایک فلسطیں برباد
میرے زخموں نے کیے کتنے فلسطیں آباد
“Teray aa’da ne kiya aik Falastin barbaad
Meray zakhmon ne kiye kitnay falastin aabaad”
“Your enemies destroyed one Palestine. My wounds have given birth to a thousand Palestines.”
Yet when it comes to addressing how the Pakistani state and its elites treat oppressed nations and ethnicities within Pakistan – from Afghan refugees to the Baloch, Pashtuns, Sindhis, Seraikis, lower-castes, and Christians – or the genocide against East Pakistanis in 1971, silence is often the order of the day.
Why does mainstream Pakistan not weep for the mothers of Waziristan? Or the Afghans forced across borders? Or the children waiting in vain for missing parents in Balochistan? If some of these silences are imposed by the state, as in the case of Afghans, society itself is too often forgetful. With the exception of a relatively small number of courageous individuals and organizations, we have done too little to prevent the current tragedy from taking place.
If we are truly committed to truth and justice, we must listen to, stand with, and advocate for Afghans, as the ARC say, not in the language of charity or humanitarianism but in a language of rights.
“Our obligations to Afghans are not solely because they have “contributed to the economy”. Nor should they have to perform the role of being “perfect victims” to elicit empathy... “Love us when we’re naked, suicidal, contributing nothing,” ”
Our obligations to Afghans are not solely because they have “contributed to the economy”. Nor should they have to perform the role of being “perfect victims” to elicit empathy, as is so often expected of refugees or of those who survive violence. One’s humanity should not be contingent upon whether they are useful or not. Worthy or not. “Love us when we’re naked, suicidal, contributing nothing,” the British-Pakistani poet Suhaiyma Manzoor-Khan wrote in the British migration context.
We must recognize that the Afghan question in Pakistan is a political one that requires a political solution. We must recognize that our struggles for freedom depend on speaking up for the most vulnerable members of our society. We must work together to speak against those, such as establishment lackeys, who ignorantly celebrate the expulsion of Afghans. We must also work to convince those who should know better.
In a number of my conversations with “progressive” Pakistani circles, the fate of Afghans in Pakistan has been met with responses like, “Are they [Afghans] not the concern of the UN?” But is it not absurd to rely on the UN for justice and liberation? Even as international laws and institutions offer important safeguards and rights, liberal institutionalism is not the same as a peoples-centric internationalism. And surely democratic movements – and inclinations – that are for the people must also advocate for society’s most vulnerable members, often times non-citizens.
In Europe and North America, right-wing, fascist, conservative, and centrist political parties use tropes about supporting the “white working class” at the expense of legally and socio-economically vulnerable racialized members of society – groups that are actually part of the working class, even if they are less visible because of their consignment to marginalized informal economies. Reductive and exclusionary anti-immigrant discourses are thus deployed to promote racial and class supremacy. A similar trend is evident in Pakistan as we hear, “Pakistanis have our/their own problems.”
As the 2023 deportations started, in Sindh, even among the liberal and socialist political Left, many cited their own grievances with the state and its elites as justifying their delight at Afghans being pushed across the border. They claim Sindh has faced the biggest impacts of Afghan displacement. They’re wrong. The provinces that border Afghanistan – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, themselves neglected by the center – have always taken in most Afghans. Sindh, they say, has been repeatedly ravaged by disasters, poverty, and a lack of investment in their province. On that, they are absolutely right. The suffering of the Sindhi people at the hands of the Pakistani state should not be questioned. Nonetheless, I feel certain when I say that the pain of Sindhis cannot reasonably be blamed on Afghan refugees.
Ethno-nationalists celebrating the Afghan expulsion would do well to consider the following words from Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: “the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist” and that “the colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people”.
Afghans are our own people. It is not too late to understand this basic truth.
Afghans must not be used as a punching bag to remain avoidant of the true powers that need confronting.
Tragically, for those already deported – hundreds of thousands – there may be no future in Pakistan. But history also tells us that there is no easy way for the state to expel all or even most Pakistani Afghans. We must make it impossible for those who would try. History also tells us many of those who have been removed will return – cycles of deportation and remigration have shaped the lives of Afghans in Pakistan since the 1980s. History also shows us our lives have long been connected across what are now normalized as international borders.
For those who may one day return, and those who remain in a climate of insecurity and fear, we must do all we can to ensure the protection of their rights and pathways to integration and freedom from discrimination. We must confront the truth of Pakistan’s role in creating instability in Afghanistan and act accordingly. We must, above all, acknowledge that Pakistan is home for millions of Afghans. We must do so in the hope that a new future and world is possible. Refugee Cities is a call for us to make that world.
Sanaa Alimia is an Associate Professor of Politics at the Aga Khan University.