Afghan refugee crisis: Reckoning of Pakistan’s duplicitous foreign policy

The Afghan refugee crisis in Pakistan has reached a harrowing peak, with the nation’s relentless mass deportation policies stripping countless lives of dignity and security. As of April 2025, Pakistan has forcibly deported over 11,371 Afghan refugees through the Torkham border, with a staggering 3,600 expelled in a single day, adding to the more than 800,000 removed since November 2023 under the Illegal Foreigners Return Program (IFRP).

This ruthless campaign, one of the largest mass deportations in recent history, targets a population that includes individuals who have called Pakistan home for decades—many born on its soil, never setting foot in Afghanistan. Yet, the state’s iron-fisted approach shows little regard for their humanity, treating them as mere security liabilities rather than people with roots, families, and rights.

The statistics paint a heartbreaking picture of vulnerability and despair. Among the deportees are women and children, thrust into a perilous fate with scant resources or protection. Human rights groups report that many of these refugees, including former Afghan government workers, women activists, and journalists, face near-certain persecution or death under Taliban rule upon return.

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Pakistani police raids compound the trauma, detaining individuals mid-workday, tearing them from their lives without warning, and expelling them with little more than the clothes they wear. Families are left shattered, unable to reclaim businesses or belongings, their livelihoods erased in an instant. The government’s promise of a “dignified” eviction process rings hollow as reports emerge of harsh detention conditions—limited food, water, and no legal recourse—particularly for women and children, who endure sleepless nights haunted by fear and uncertainty.

Pakistan’s justification of security concerns, linking undocumented Afghans to terrorism, does little to mask the profound inhumanity of its actions. The deadline of March 31, 2025, for Afghan Citizen Card holders to leave voluntarily has passed, unleashing a wave of raids and expulsions that spare no thought for the vulnerable.

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Even those with Proof of Registration cards, granted a reprieve until June 30, 2025, live under the shadow of impending displacement. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Afghan nationals are ordered to shutter businesses and abandon homes, their contributions to society discarded.

Now a festering wound on the nation’s soil, this crisis traces its roots to a fateful convergence of Cold War machinations and regional power plays ignited by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It was a crucible that forged a generational tragedy, with Pakistan stepping boldly, perhaps blindly, into the role of a frontline state.

The invasion displaced millions, sending an estimated three to five million Afghans streaming across the porous border into Pakistan, a nation that initially opened its arms to them as both a humanitarian gesture and a strategic gambit. What followed was a complex entanglement of foreign funding, jihadist fervour, and unintended consequences that radicalised entire generations and now reverberates as a haunting echo through Pakistan’s present turmoil.

Pakistan didn’t act alone; it was a willing partner in a grand geopolitical chess game orchestrated by the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Soviet occupation turned Afghanistan into a Cold War battleground, and the US, under Operation Cyclone, funnelled billions—over $2 billion in aid—through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to arm and train the Afghan mujahideen.

General Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler from 1978 to 1988, seized this moment to bolster his regime’s legitimacy and secure strategic depth against India, channelling the aid and overseeing a sprawling network of training camps and refugee settlements.

Pakistan became the staging ground for a holy war, hosting mujahideen leaders like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose groups later morphed into factions of the Taliban and other militant outfits. The ISI, with US and Saudi backing, didn’t just support these fighters—they shaped them, equipping them with Stinger missiles and radical zeal, oblivious to the long-term cost.

The refugee crisis was the inevitable fallout. By the late 1980s, Pakistan housed over three million Afghan refugees, many crammed into squalid camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The Taliban itself emerged from this crucible in the mid-1990s, nurtured by Pakistan’s ISI and religious networks, a Frankenstein’s monster born of Cold War expediency.

Pakistan’s leaders, drunk on the power of proxy warfare and flush with foreign cash, failed to foresee how this radicalisation would seep into their own society, breeding a generation of fighters who knew only war and ideology. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 didn’t end the chaos; it merely shifted it, leaving Afghanistan fractured and Pakistan saddled with a refugee population it could neither fully integrate nor expel.

Fast forward to today, and the monsters Pakistan helped create have come home to roost. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), formed in 2007 by Baitullah Mehsud, embodies this blowback. Drawing inspiration and operational ties from the Afghan Taliban—whom Pakistan covertly supported even during the U.S.-led war post-2001—the TTP turned its guns on the Pakistani state.

The 2014 Peshawar school massacre, where 149 people, including 132 children, were slaughtered, marked a grim turning point, exposing how Pakistan’s past policies had festered into a domestic terror nightmare. Blaming Afghan soil for TTP sanctuaries, Pakistan cracked down, deporting over 365,000 refugees in 2016 and escalating to a staggering 800,000 since November 2023 under the Illegal Foreigners Return Program. Yet, this mass expulsion—tearing families apart, sending women and children into Taliban-controlled chaos—only deepens the crisis, fuelling resentment and radicalisation anew.

Pakistan’s handling of the Afghan refugee crisis lays bare a hypocrisy that runs deep within its national ethos, cloaked as it often is in the sanctimonious garb of championing the Muslim Ummah. On the global stage, Pakistan leaves no stone unturned to project itself as the gallant defender of Islamic solidarity, a beacon for oppressed Muslims worldwide.

Islamabad rakes up the Kashmir issue with relentless fervour, painting India as the perennial villain in a decades-long saga of alleged human rights abuses, wielding this narrative as a cudgel to undermine its eastern neighbour at every international forum from the United Nations to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. With theatrical zeal, Pakistani leaders decry the plight of Kashmiri Muslims, summoning the spectre of a beleaguered Ummah to rally support and score geopolitical points, all while conveniently sidestepping their own complicity in fostering unrest.

This saviour complex extends to Palestine, where Pakistan positions itself as a vocal advocate, railing against the Israeli state with fiery rhetoric that resonates across the Muslim world. Prime minister after prime minister has pledged solidarity, framing Pakistan as a moral compass for Islamic causes, a nation willing to bear the torch for justice.

Yet, this grandstanding crumbles under scrutiny when the lens shifts to the Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. Here, Pakistan’s deafening silence speaks volumes—nary a whisper of condemnation for the internment camps, forced labour, or cultural erasure faced by millions of Uyghurs. Why? Because China, Pakistan’s all-weather ally and economic lifeline via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, holds the purse strings.

Principles, it seems, bend before pragmatism. And closer to home, the brutal crackdown on Afghan refugees—over 800,000 forcibly deported since November 2023, including vulnerable women and children—exposes the hollowness of this Ummah-centric posturing. These Muslims, fleeing Taliban terror, are met not with compassion but with raids, detention, and expulsion, their dignity trampled under the pretext of national security.

Pakistan’s claim that it cannot tolerate terror activities on its soil rings laughably hollow against the backdrop of its own history. For decades, it has relentlessly pursued a terror campaign against India, not confined to Kashmir but sprawling across the subcontinent. The 2008 Mumbai attacks, orchestrated by Lashkar-e-Taiba—a group nurtured by Pakistan’s ISI—left 166 dead, a chilling testament to this strategy of proxy warfare. The 2001 Parliament attack in New Delhi, linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed, another ISI-backed outfit, aimed to decapitate India’s leadership.

Even beyond, blasts in Hyderabad (2013), Pune (2010), and the recent surge in Khalistani activities bear the fingerprints of Pakistan-sponsored militancy. The ISI’s support for these groups—training, funding, and sheltering them in safe havens like Muridke and Bahawalpur—has been an open secret, documented by Indian intelligence and acknowledged, albeit reluctantly, by Western allies. Yet, Pakistan cries foul when its own cities bleed from TTP violence, a monster of its own making, while pointing fingers at Afghan soil to deflect blame.

The Afghan refugee crisis, then, is not just a humanitarian tragedy—it’s a mirror reflecting Pakistan’s duplicity. It preaches unity for the Ummah but abandons Afghan Muslims to Taliban peril. Pakistan condemns India over Kashmir, even as it wages a proxy war to destabilise the valley, while turning a blind eye to China’s Uyghur atrocities.

Pakistan decries terrorism when it strikes within its borders but exports it with impunity across its eastern frontier. This is a nation caught in its own web, its past sins of jihadist patronage and Cold War opportunism now spiralling into a present of chaos and contradiction. The echoes from the Soviet era, amplified by decades of cynical policy, have returned not just as a haunting but as a reckoning. Pakistan’s Afghan refugees, stripped of rights and cast out, are the living casualties of this hypocrisy—a stark reminder that the state’s moral grandstanding is but a façade, crumbling under the weight of its own monstrous legacy.

The writer takes special interest in history, culture and geopolitics. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.