The Pakistani government has decided to send undocumented Afghan citizens back to their homeland. Initially, 1.4 million Afghan refugees were also included in the deportation plan, but they have got an extension till the end of this year. The one-month ultimatum has ended, and the state machinery is active to implement the envisaged plan. The Taliban government, on the other hand, is quite reluctant to host hundreds of thousands of Afghans in an already destabilised and economically impoverished state. The development has rather strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, traditionally bound by ethnic, linguistic and religious affinities as well as shared economic activities and cultural practices.
The current situation is linked to the historical perceptions and past events. Pakistan has been in the quest for a “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. As Christine Fair puts it, the Pakistan military’s strategic posture was influenced by the British colonial approach to defending the Indian subcontinent from perceived threats emanating from Afghanistan. Despite inheriting the entire threat frontier, Pakistan possessed only a fraction of the resources available to the British Raj. The military’s pursuit of strategic depth has impacted its management of Afghanistan. The limitations of this concept are more evident in the recent friction between the two nations.
The relations between the two nations started getting tense soon after the arrival of the Taliban government. Ironically, there was a great deal of jubilation in Pakistan when the Americans left Afghanistan, and the Taliban regime ousted the Ashraf Ghani government soon after. General Faiz Hameed, the then Inter-Services Intelligence chief, went to Kabul and expressed his hope that “‘everything will be okay’ in Afghanistan”. Then Prime Minister Imran Khan also even went on to praise the Taliban for “breaking the shackles of slavery”. However, this elation was short-lived, as the Taliban government’s actions diverged from Pakistan’s expectations, particularly the treatment of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). When two subsequent attacks on Police Offices in Peshawar and Karachi were carried out by TTP earlier this year, ties between the two governments were severely dented.
The development has rather strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, traditionally bound by ethnic, linguistic and religious affinities as well as shared economic activities and cultural practices.
Besides, there are two primary causes of the ongoing tension. The first is that the Taliban government did not refrain from having an aggressive posture at the border against Pakistan. Islamabad, however, was anticipating a relatively softer approach from the Taliban than their predecessors, the Karzai and the Ghani governments. Another major cause is the increase in terrorist activities inside Pakistani territory carried out by the TTP. Pakistan has been consistently urging the Taliban regime to act against militant hideouts inside their territory. However, the Taliban response has not been up to the expectations of the Pakistani government and security establishment.
Still, this is just one side of the story. The Taliban government also has a few grievances with the Pakistani stakeholders. It believes that the Pakistani government first asked it to arrange a dialogue process with TTP and then did not continue with the process following the initial inconclusive negotiations. Experts have pointed out that Pakistani stakeholders were largely divided on the potential resumption of the dialogue process with the Taliban. The subsequent resumption of attacks by the group killed the possibility of a resumption of talks.
Amidst the complex landscape of Pak-Afghan relations, the important question is whether Afghan refugees or undocumented Afghan residents of Pakistan are responsible for the acts of TTP or the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. A rational perspective would argue against such attribution. These Afghans have come to Pakistan at different times, and they should not be viewed as simply Afghans but as victims of different political epochs in Afghanistan. They are diversified by their time of arrival, registration status, in-camp or out-camp refugee status, and employment status. Few settled here long before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, although a major influx came after the year 1979. Many flew in the 1990s Afghan civil war between Mujahedeen and Pashtun nationalists. Some of them are Taliban sympathisers who came here after the American invasion. Notably, a huge number of Afghan refugees came here in recent years after the ouster of the Ghani government, fleeing because of the fear of being victimised by the Taliban government.
In international politics, states cannot change their neighbours. Pakistanis have lived with Afghans for centuries. History is evident that if one of them gets destabilised, the other one also gets affected. Hostilities may spark a new wave of terrorism in the region as aggrieved Afghan youth lacking employment opportunities in Afghanistan might be an easy target for Islamic State (IS), TTP, Al-Qaeda, and other terror groups operating in the area. Therefore, sanity must prevail, and this tussle should not transcend into a full-blown kinetic collision. If steered wisely, the relationship can foster already interwoven trade, commerce, and security linkages, cultivating a more prosperous future for both nations.
