The Impossible Choices for Pakistan’s Afghan Refugees

Refugees fleeing the Taliban turn to their neighbor but find little hope.

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Tucked away in a bustling neighborhood on the outskirts of Islamabad, a displaced family of seven lives together in a windowless room. The father and mother, teenage son, and four daughters have resided in Pakistan since June, after Taliban fighters ousted them from their ancestral homeland in neighboring Afghanistan. Now, they share four white walls and a broken fan.

“I think it’s impossible for a big family like ours to live here without any sponsor,” the eldest daughter told The Dispatch. “We just eat twice a day. We don’t have any lunch.” 

By any definition, the family qualifies as an at-risk group in the Taliban’s Afghanistan: the father for his literacy and former employment by a foreign organization, the parents and children for their Hazara heritage. As Afghanistan’s second-largest ethnic minority and Shiite Muslims, Hazaras have historically faced targeted displacement and killings at the hands of the Taliban and other Islamic extremists who deem them apostates, including the Islamic State. 

On one occasion, the daughter said, her father was held and tortured by Taliban captors for several days. On another, he and his young son were beaten by the Taliban after trying to prevent the forced eviction of a local Hazara community.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Bill Nelson

    I fear for these people. All they have left is the ability to sell themselves piece by piece to the tormentor. The west will have some satisfaction in watching the Taliban tear themselves apart, but even then they will abuse their subjects ever more.

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    CynthiaW

    “Pakistan will someday have to recognize that the Taliban are not a force for good, and that people escaping it are bona fide refugees under international law,” Husain Haqqani [said].

    People often say things like this as if they are self-evidently true, when in fact, it's simply wish-casting. There's nothing to prevent Pakistan's "recognizing" the opposite indefinitely.

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    Cthocas

    Years ago, I studied Pashto under Afghan immigrants who fled to Pakistan from either the Russian invasion or the 90s Taliban regime.

    "Pakistan is a cancer" is probably the most charitable any had to say about the place.

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    Patrick

    “way station” or “weigh station” ? Hmmm, not sure.

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    1. Avatar photo
      CynthiaW

      "Way station" means a place where one stops, temporarily, "on the way" to a final destination.

      "Weight station" is a facility where goods being shipped are weighed for safety, taxation, or other purposes.

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    Rjosephpaquette

    Any governments is instituted, deriving their powers from the consent (or at least acquiescence) of the governed. You don't need a gun to resist tyranny (see Ghandi and MLK for direction); you simply need the will of the people. Afghans have made a choice. I think it was a bad one. But it's up to them.

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    Steven Gooch

    I often wonder when I see massive numbers of refugees like this, why they didn't form an organized opposition and resist instead of fleeing.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Paul Reichardt

      Civil wars are perhaps the largest contributor to world refugee flows.

      Organized resistance of, say, one faction—that is not likely to be any better than the government they aim to replace—and its consequences in many cases are precisely what they are fleeing.

      I’d imagine the appeal of being the “heroic rebel” has little resonance with mothers and children in those circumstances— not to mention the fathers worried about keeping them fed, housed, and safe.

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      David Chen

      For the same reason 2A people are missing the boat when they spend all their time obsession over gun rights instead of privacy and encryption. 300M armed Americans scattered and disorganized can be picked off one by one until a chilling effect shuts the rest up. But if they are able to organize, rally, and rally more people to their cause: the state would have a real hard time stopping that.

      Or look at a mass shooting. In theory if everyone were able to hive-mind and rush the attacker, they should win from just having the numbers. In practice, our instinct is to run away from the danger and try to be faster than the next guy.

      It is simply incredibly hard to mobilize strangers to unite and fight a life or death struggle, when some think they can avoid the slaughter by complying or running from it.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Steven Gooch

        In a mass shooting incident, immediate survival is paramount. When it is not, you would think they could see the alternative between fighting and having some sort of determination over their lives and their families, or potentially generations of destitution and struggle. It is hard to organize strangers. But by the sheer law of numbers, you would think there would be at least a few with leadership ability to galvanize the others. Believe someone once said something about give me liberty...

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        1. Avatar photo
          CVS

          You act like people can just waltz in to some hut in Afghanistan and get weapons, supplies, transportation, etc.

          That's not how it works.

          Bluntly: Afghanistan *had* organized opposition to the Taliban. They were all our allies. We undercut them by negotiating directly with the Taliban for no good reason, essentially telling the population that the Taliban was going to rule shortly. Our allies were trained to fight, *and were fighting very effectively* provided we gave them intel and air cover, which they couldn't do for themselves.

          We yanked it away.

          Meanwhile, Pakistan had been funding and making sure the Taliban was armed for 20 years.

          And most of our betrayed friends, understandably, chose to cut a deal or run rather than face a force that was funded, organized, and armed by a much more powerful country, now that they had lost their biggest asset, our assistance.

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          David Chen

          The sheer law of numbers is exactly why it is hard to organize. Diffusion of responsibility. It is just easier to hope that it is someone else's problem. And the Taliban did not go in promising to kill everyone once they win, they promised to only kill those who didn't surrender that day. Is it dumb to trust the Taliban to keep any promise? Of course. But our own dumb government did just that when they made a deal with them, and where was the GOP outcry over how dumb that was?

          If you are a villager and heard that the USA bugged out and the Afghan army basically surrendered overnight, what are you suppose to think about challenging the Taliban? It isn't like anyone there has an eagle eye view of the chessboard and all the pieces.

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  7. Avatar photo
    CW

    Afghanistan is also facing deep food insecurity and the slow crackup off it's infrastructure, as many of the educated refugees like this family will be the technocrats who kept the system running under GIRoA. The previous regime - and populace - survived off of amounts of foreign aid that won't be available to a VEO, and the Talibans' response to famine is that "it is Allah's job to feed the people, and our job to implement shariah".

    Meanwhile, global food markets will continue to suffer second and third order effects from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Remaining stores of food available for aid are going to start getting bid up by or for African countries, meaning external support for Afghanistan risks withering further. Pakistan and other neighboring countries will likely move to stop the flood of starving, easily radicalized, Afghans into their border regions, trapping them in Afghanistan.

    Things in Afghanistan are going to get a whole lot worse before they get even worse than that.

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    Travis M

    I wish I was surprised at the way Pakistan is treating this. In my opinion, their government has blood on their hands for the way they aided the Taliban during our operations there.

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