Pakistan finds a new scapegoat Analysis by Foreign Affairs

The Foreign Affairs magazine has published an article about how Islamabad’s expulsions of Afghans could backfire—and help the Taliban. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The Pakistani state is notoriously lackadaisical in its habits of governance, but it has acted with surprising vigor in recent months. In October, the country’s military-backed caretaker government announced that all “illegal foreigners”—a thinly disguised reference to millions of Afghan refugees who reside in Pakistan—were to leave the country by November 1 or face arrest and expulsion. In theory, not every Afghan refugee will be affected, at least for now: one million Afghans have renewable permits that allow them to stay in the country, while an estimated 800,000 hold so-called Afghan Citizen Cards that grant them the temporary right to stay but not the full protections due to refugees under international law. Yet an estimated 1.7 million Afghans lack the documentation needed even for temporary residence. This group, which includes over half a million people who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban recaptured power in August 2021, is now in the cross hairs of Pakistani authorities.

Since the passing of the November deadline, local authorities and police have initiated an unprecedented countrywide crackdown. They have harassed, illegally detained, and abused Afghans, including those with legal documents and proof of registration, and they have seized and destroyed property. This relentless campaign has forced thousands of Afghan refugees to go underground. Hounded and fearing for their safety, an estimated 450,000 Afghans have already returned to Afghanistan and the uncertain fates that await them in the country they wanted to escape.

This clampdown has very little to do with illegal migration or the strains of hosting a large body of refugees. Instead, it reflects a growing dispute between Islamabad and the regime in Kabul. Since 2021, Pakistan has endured a surge of attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, also known as the Pakistani Taliban or the TTP. This Islamist militant group, distinct from but connected to the Afghan Taliban, has for over 15 years been striking Pakistani targets, using safe havens inside Afghanistan, especially since 2021. Pakistan has tried in vain to get the Afghan Taliban, its erstwhile allies, to rein in the TTP. But the Taliban have not fully cooperated, wanting Pakistan to negotiate with the TTP and heed the group’s demands.

In truth, the terrorism threat Pakistan faces is one of its own making—a result of its ill-considered decision to support the Afghan Taliban even as its own forces were embroiled in battles with the Taliban’s Pakistani variant. Frustrated, Islamabad is now evicting Afghans to deepen the humanitarian crisis across the border and put pressure on Kabul. But this policy may rebound on the Pakistani government, succeeding only in causing further chaos—all while turning human beings into a political football to be flung across the border.    

COLD WELCOME

Many Afghans fled to Pakistan (and Iran) when the Soviets invaded their country in 1979. Many others sought refuge in the country when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s. The most recent wave came after the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Although Afghan refugees were welcomed in Pakistan initially, public attitudes toward them have soured over time, particularly in urban centers such as Karachi, the country’s largest metropolis, where their concentration evokes unfounded economic anxiety and fears of cultural replacement. Tense bilateral relations, the widespread belief that Afghans should be eternally grateful for Pakistan’s generosity, and stereotypes that cast refugees as uncivilized criminals, “terrorists,” “smugglers,” and “drug traffickers” spark suspicion, hostility, and discrimination toward them in everyday life. Many of the Afghans who were evicted from Pakistan at the end of 2023 had never been to Afghanistan; they were born and raised in the country that gave their families shelter from the chaos across the border.  

Pakistani officials have defended the expulsions as the routine application of Pakistan’s laws without specifying which of the country’s statutes requires the sudden deportation of over a million refugees and migrants. Senior cabinet members have justified the measures with unsubstantiated allegations that Afghans are involved in terrorism inside Pakistan. To be sure, since the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 2021, the country has seen a dramatic surge in terror attacks by the TTP. Official Pakistani estimates claim a 60 percent rise in such attacks since August 2021, resulting in over 2,200 casualties. But little evidence links those attacks to the refugee communities within the country.

Instead, and unfortunately for them, Afghan refugees are caught between two sparring governments. Pakistan has accused the Taliban regime in Afghanistan of sheltering the TTP, an accusation which the Taliban strongly, albeit implausibly, deny. Vexed by Kabul’s inaction, and unable to stanch the TTP’s attacks, Pakistan has found both a pawn and a scapegoat for its own failures in the supposedly illegal Afghans residing within its borders. It is, therefore, deporting them. “After noncooperation by the Afghan interim government, Pakistan has decided to take matters into its own hands, and Pakistan’s recent actions are neither unexpected nor surprising,” said Anwar ul-Haq Kakar, Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister, in reference to the eviction of refugees in November. Days later, Pakistan’s special representative to Afghanistan, Asif Durrani, took it further by issuing an ultimatum to Kabul in an interview: “Choose Pakistan or the TTP.” 

The Pakistani state has deep-rooted suspicions of ethnic groups living in the areas adjacent to Afghanistan, especially the Pashtuns. Split into two by a colonial-era border known as the Durand Line, Pashtuns are a sizable minority in Pakistan (more than 18 percent of the total population) but form a majority in Afghanistan and have ruled the country for most of its history. After Pakistan won independence in 1947, Afghanistan refused to recognize the border and opposed Pakistan’s entry to the United Nations. This border contestation, mixed with Islamabad’s fears of Kabul backing Pashtun nationalist causes within Pakistan, has long undermined the trust between the two countries. Ironically, even the Afghan Taliban—a group that has historically had strong ties with Pakistan’s military establishment—do not recognize the border. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the loosely administered districts on the Pakistani side of the boundary became a safe haven for the Taliban and al Qaeda. The porous border areas remain a flash point over two decades later.

BITTER HARVEST

When the Taliban swept into Kabul in 2021, Pakistani civilian and military leaders celebrated the return to power of their longtime ally. A Taliban government represented a victory for Pakistan’s policy of establishing “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, denying its rival India a foothold in the country. But the jubilation in Islamabad was short-lived. The Taliban triumph in Afghanistan inspired and revitalized the TTP, a militant group that was founded with the promise of overthrowing the supposedly “infidel” state of Pakistan.

Formed in 2007, the group launched a sustained terror campaign in 2009 that left thousands of civilians and security personnel dead. Five years later, an atrocious attack on an army-run school in Peshawar killed over 130 people, mostly children. Outraged, the Pakistani public backed the military’s retaliatory offensive against the TTP, a campaign that succeeded in dismantling its base of operations in Pakistan and driving many of the group’s leaders into Afghanistan. But in 2021, the victorious Afghan Taliban released thousands of TTP fighters, including senior commanders, who had been imprisoned by the former Afghan government. The TTP has since regrouped and now boasts a cadre of 7,000 to 10,000 seasoned fighters.

Under the leadership of Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, the organization now generally refrains from indiscriminately targeting civilians to avoid a wider backlash. It has also forsaken its grandiose aim of overthrowing the Pakistani state and is focused instead on carving out an Islamic emirate along the border with Afghanistan. One of the TTP’s main demands is that Pakistan restore the special autonomous status afforded this area until its absorption into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018, a move that would allow the group to establish a local version of sharia rule.

The group’s resurgence confounded Pakistani military and intelligence officials who had long dismissed the TTP as a proxy of hostile neighbors (mainly Afghanistan and India) and discounted its links to the Afghan Taliban. Although these two groups have separate command and organizational structures, they are bound by Deobandi ideology, shared jihadi aspirations, and history. TTP fighters aided the Afghan Taliban’s insurgency against the forces of the U.S.-led coalition and the former Afghan government. With these ties in mind, the Afghan Taliban have not yielded to sustained pressure from Pakistani authorities, including airstrikes on suspected TTP hideouts in Afghanistan’s Khost and Kunar Provinces in April 2022 that killed 40 civilians and prompted a strong rebuke from Kabul. For their part, Pakistani officials claim that they have shared actionable intelligence with Kabul regarding the TTP’s bases and hideouts inside Afghanistan and expect the Taliban regime to move against the militants.

Although Pakistan has reason to be angry with its Afghan Taliban allies, the country’s terror problem is the direct result of its military’s decision to differentiate between the “good” Afghan Taliban and the “bad” Pakistani Taliban, overlooking their inextricable connections. The policy aimed to secure strategic depth in Pakistan’s western neighbor, but it has demonstrably failed. The TTP ’s access to safe havens in Afghanistan ties the military’s hands, as does Pakistan’s acute economic crisis, the lack of the same public backing that helped legitimize the 2014 offensive against the TTP, and the absence of American political and financial support that Pakistan enjoyed in the years following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

LITTLE LEVERAGE

The confrontation between Afghanistan and Pakistan—and the resulting deportations—will have serious repercussions. The influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees will only exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation. The Afghan economy is reeling under U.S. sanctions and a severe multiyear drought. The health system and other essential services have collapsed, and more than half of all Afghans live below the poverty line amid acute levels of food insecurity. Many deportees could also suffer gross rights violations by the Taliban regime, including arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture. Afghan women and girls face a particularly dire future since the Taliban have banned female education beyond secondary school.

This manufactured crisis has no doubt irked the Afghan Taliban. The group cannot afford to completely alienate Pakistan, which provides the landlocked country’s primary transit route, serves as its largest export market, and has acted as its principal diplomatic emissary to the world. Presumably under Pakistani pressure, the Taliban hosted several rounds of talks between the Pakistani government and the TTP in Kabul during 2021 and 2022, which led to a temporary cease-fire but were ultimately inconclusive. The Taliban regime has also relocated some TTP fighters away from the Pakistani border and arrested those who were involved in an attack on a Pakistani border post in September.

But the Afghan Taliban are no longer an insurgent group dependent on Pakistani safe havens and Islamabad’s goodwill. To reduce Islamabad’s economic influence, Taliban leaders are courting Iran for trade and investment opportunities, including access to the more cost-efficient Iranian port of Chabahar. They have greater leverage now over their former partners, and so they can pivot between appeasement and indignation—even when faced with punishment. Kabul insists that it is not to blame for the TTP’s violence and has accused Islamabad of trying to deflect attention from Pakistan’s incompetent handling of its own internal security problems. Acting Taliban Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid warned that “Pakistan should weigh the consequences of everything it does and sow as much as it can reap.”

Pakistan seems unlikely to reverse its expulsion policy unless the Taliban regime can credibly address its demands, mainly by denying sanctuary to the TTP. But the Afghan Taliban are in no rush to alienate their comrades-in-arms to placate Islamabad. Pakistan callously embroiled Afghan refugees in a diplomatic dispute without any regard to their suffering or safety. The policy may yet have the unintended consequence of drawing the two Taliban allies closer and, even worse, incentivize the Afghan Taliban to actively encourage TTP violence. Pakistan can choke Afghanistan’s transit trade and strike across the border. But such acts will only fuel tensions and most likely fail to convince the Taliban to fully abandon the TTP. There seems to be no resolution in sight to a crisis that has uprooted so many refugees yet again.