Abstract
When Afghans started fleeing abroad in the aftermath of the Saur Revolution of April 1978, Afghanistan’s immediate neighbour Pakistan became one of the main destinations. Since the 1980s, millions of Afghans have sought refuge in Pakistan due to factors ranging from geographical proximity to ethnic ties, religious affiliations, and pre-established trans-regional networks. This contribution attempts to provide insights into one of the most significant aspects of Afghanistan–Pakistan relations: cross-border population movement. Acknowledging that regional movement and return have ebbed and flowed for generations, this study will begin by looking at the context of Afghan migration and identify four major waves of population movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan since the Soviet intervention, in 1979. Subsequently, an attempt will be made to look at the continuities and changes in Pakistan’s policy response to the Afghan refugees over the years and to identify the major factors that might have influenced the policy shifts of the host government. To conclude, it will be assessed if the Afghan refugees have been an asset or a liability for Pakistan.
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Notes
- 1.
‘The term qawm can refer to an ethnic group, a clan or a tribe (defined by a common patrilineal descent), a professional group (artisans, Mullahs), a caste (Syyad) or a religious minority (Ismaili), or even people from the same village, neighbourhood, or valley’. Oliver Roy, ‘Ethnies et appurtenances politiques en Afghanistan’, in J.P Digard (ed.), Colloques Internationaux: le fait ethnique en Itan et en Afghanistan (Paris 1988, p. 202). In general, however, the qawm is composed of family members, friends, and neighbours who share an attachment to a common watan (a geographical location that they recognize as their place of origin), whose families have known each other for generations and are bound by relations of mutual trust and obligations.
- 2.
The Durand Line demarcated Afghanistan and British India, in 1893, dividing the Pashtun tribes.
- 3.
Many of the high-profile leaders of these parties (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Ahmed Shah Masoud) had fled to Peshawar, in Pakistan, in 1975, when the then president of Afghanistan, Sardar Mohammed Daoud, moved against the Islamic radicals, whom he saw as a direct threat to his power.
- 4.
In an interview published in Le Nouvel Observateur (January 15–21, 1998), Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Chief at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, said that the United States began giving secret aid to the Mujahideen in July 1978 and that this was expected to increase the likelihood of a Soviet invasion. ‘The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war insupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the break-up of the Soviet empire’. When asked by the interviewer whether he regretted having given arms to future terrorists, Brzezinski replied: ‘What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? A few crazed Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?’ (Quoted in T. Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Verso, London and New York: 2002, pp. 207–8).
- 5.
Hijra is an Arabic word meaning ‘flight’ or ‘migration’.
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Ghosh, A. (2019). Afghan Migration and Pakistan’s Policy Response: Dynamics of Continuity and Change. In: Grimm, H.M. (eds) Public Policy Research in the Global South. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06061-9_12
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