Memory Without a Passport
Pakistan is rewriting a 40-year legacy of refuge with barbed wire and broken promises. Since the 2023 launch of the Illegal Foreigners Return Program (IFRP), over 860,000 Afghan refugees—many born and raised in Pakistan—have been forcibly repatriated. These are not mere migrants but living testaments to a history Pakistan seeks to erase. Detained without charge, deported without recourse, they face systemic dehumanization masked as sovereignty. Women activists, children born in exile, journalists, and former officials are reduced to liabilities in a state’s cold calculus, their histories and futures dismissed.
Hannah Arendt’s warning in The Origins of Totalitarianism resonates: stateless persons, stripped of home, lose the “right to have rights.” Afghan refugees embody this plight, suspended in legal limbo, akin to Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer—lives stripped of political value, subject to expulsion without accountability. The state labels this “voluntary return,” yet the alternative—incarceration in overcrowded, unsanitary detention centres—renders the term hollow. Women sleep under floodlights, children cry for belonging, and families are torn from lives built over decades. This is not policy but forced forgetting. Yet memory endures—in the soil, in songs, in classrooms now empty of Afghan children who once called Pakistan home.
Belonging becomes a battleground. “Home” is politicized, weaponized, and destabilized. These refugees are not just expelled; their presence is criminalized, their memories erased, their futures abandoned to borders and bureaucracy. Exile here is not relocation—it is annihilation of identity.
The Monsters We Made
To grasp this crisis, we must confront Pakistan’s complicity. In 1979, Pakistan didn’t merely shelter Afghan refugees; it instrumentalized them. Refugee camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, funded by U.S. dollars through Operation Cyclone and shaped by Saudi ideological investments, were not sanctuaries but recruitment hubs for the mujahideen. The Taliban, incubated in Pakistan-supported madrassas, was no external phenomenon but a creation of geopolitical strategy. Frantz Fanon’s insight into colonial violence applies: the tools of the oppressor turn inward. Pakistan, a proxy in imperial games, weaponized displacement, and now scapegoats those it once enlisted.
This crisis is not an inherited burden but a reckoning with Pakistan’s own making. The Taliban’s 2021 resurgence and the rise of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) echo past strategic missteps. Rather than confront this legacy, Pakistan expels its witnesses. Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics illuminates this: the state regulates life through control of bodies, categorizing, detaining, and discarding refugees as threats. The 2014 Peshawar school massacre is invoked to justify collective punishment, yet Pakistan’s own exported militants—like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed—reveal selective outrage. The refugee is not the threat; the state’s refusal to face its mirror is.
A State Without a Soul
Pakistan champions the Muslim Ummah, vocal on Kashmir and Palestine, yet silent on Xinjiang’s Uyghur genocide. This selective morality now targets Afghan refugees—fellow Muslims, victims of imperial trauma—not for being foreign but for being politically inconvenient. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract posits state legitimacy in protecting its people’s rights. When Pakistan narrowly defines “its people,” excluding entire communities, the contract unravels. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Afghan homes are demolished, businesses shuttered, schools closed. Children who sang Pakistan’s anthem are deemed “illegal.” Mothers fleeing Taliban terror are marched back toward it. Fathers, once teachers or labourers, are detained like contraband. These acts betray not just international law—including the 1951 Refugee Convention and non-refoulement—but Pakistan’s foundational identity as a sanctuary born of displacement.
Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, rooted in the “face of the other,” demands humanity while encountering others. Pakistan, turning away from Afghan refugees, rejects this obligation. Visibility becomes a trap: to be seen is to be targeted; to be unseen is to vanish. An Afghan mother crossing into Nangarhar with her children said, “They waited until we built lives, then told us to vanish.” A former schoolteacher spat, “They called us brothers when they needed us; now we are dirt.” Their words are a verdict on a state forsaking its moral core.
Conclusion
Pakistan’s deportation of Afghan refugees is not mere policy but a calculated erasure of a shared past. These refugees are witnesses to decades of betrayal, their expulsion a refusal to confront strategic myopia disguised as sovereignty. John Rawls’s vision of justice demands protecting the vulnerable, yet Pakistan’s institutions target them, eroding the state’s legitimacy. Edward Said saw refugees as symbols of our age—indictments of borders and nationalism. In forsaking Afghan refugees, Pakistan betrays its own story, born of partition and refuge. The violence of exile holds up a mirror: a nation sacrificing its soul for security risks losing what makes it a nation.
Dr. Syed Eesar Mehdi is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi. The views expressed are his own. He can be reached at eesar.mehdi@gmail.com.
