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On a cold December evening in Peshawar, a young Afghan artist is showing me his latest work.
In bold, colourful brush strokes, he has depicted the departure of refugees at Torkham, a major border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A woman pushes the wheelchair of an elderly, turbaned man, who is craning his neck to take a last look at his former home. Ahead of them, on the road to Afghanistan, trundles an orange truck full of their possessions. The point, says 18-year-old Marwan, is to show that “they had a life here”.
His painting is a response to the Pakistani government’s recent crackdown on foreign nationals residing in the country without valid visas or refugee registrations. The move has had a disproportionate impact on the nation’s 1.7mn Afghan population, some of whom crossed the border during the 1980s Soviet-Afghan war; others arrived after the 2021 Taliban takeover.
While Moniza Kakar, a Karachi-based lawyer, laments that Afghans have long been “a political football” in Pakistan, government officials cite recent attacks in the country’s border provinces as one reason for their expulsion, claiming that terrorists are entering under cover as Afghan refugees. One theory is that Islamabad is enacting deportations to put pressure on the Taliban government, which has not been suitably co-operative since coming to power.
Suffering the consequences are the estimated 450,000 Afghans who have been returned home in the past three months. The Pakistani authorities are accused of harassing and illegally detaining some of them, including those with valid documentation. Kakar, who works with Afghans facing deportation, says that in the port city where she resides, refugees have become “a source of income” for some police officers, who confiscate documents and demand money for their return.
The life that awaits those who are expelled is bleak, and some have never set foot in Afghanistan before. Kakar recalls a young girl weeping in her lap before being deported, afraid she would be barred from school on her arrival. “I want to be a doctor — I want to stay here,” she cried.
Those who remain live in the fear that they will be next. Azra Gul, executive director of Pak Women, an Islamabad-based NGO, explains that “there exist [Afghan] families where some members are documented and others are not”. Those who have documents “have mobility”, but those who don’t “are not leaving their houses”. Marwan, the artist, echoes this. “If you don’t have a [valid] identity card, even venturing out on to the streets is difficult,” he says. For male refugees — many of whom earn a pittance as fruit sellers, street cleaners and manual labourers — the financial strain of staying at home is immense.
Mired in economic crisis and political turbulence, many Pakistanis are unconcerned by the thinning of the Afghan refugee population. There have been some protests by civil society groups but the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people appears to be largely passing the nation by. In cities such as Karachi, public animosity towards Afghan refugees has grown in recent years.
Yet there has been a quieter, more local show of support for the refugees’ plight. Peshawar-based journalist Riaz Ghafur insists they are his “friends, students — some have even become family”. The city’s residents, he says, “don’t feel good that people are being expelled in this way”. Across the nation, Pakistanis who have lived alongside Afghans for decades are taking action. After officials clamped down on landlords renting houses to undocumented refugees in Karachi, some Pakistani neighbours put their own names on the letting agreements, Kakar reports. In Peshawar, local communities stepped in to arrange deliveries of food for Afghan families when they were made homeless by the authorities.
However, all the goodwill in the world cannot reverse a government diktat. Ripples of pushback in the form of pro bono legal work and community aid are already fading. Lives built over decades have been demolished in a matter of months.
As one refugee told Kakar on the eve of his deportation: “We arrived in this country empty-handed — now we are leaving empty-handed, and will reach Afghanistan empty-handed.”
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