Afghans in Pakistan

Based on Wikipedia: Afghans in Pakistan

In December 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. Within weeks, the trickle of families crossing into Pakistan became a flood. By the time the Soviets withdrew a decade later, nearly four and a half million Afghans had escaped to Pakistan—making it the largest refugee population on Earth at the time. Many of those refugees are still there, more than forty years later. So are their children. And their grandchildren.

This is the story of one of history's longest-running refugee crises, one that has outlasted the Cold War, survived the rise and fall of the Taliban, and continues to shape the lives of millions of people caught between two countries that have never quite known what to do with them.

Before There Were Borders

To understand Afghan refugees in Pakistan, you first have to understand that the border between these two countries is, in some ways, an accident of history.

Afghans have been moving back and forth across what is now the Afghan-Pakistani border since at least the 10th century, during the time of the Ghaznavids—a powerful dynasty that ruled a vast empire stretching from eastern Iran to the Punjab. For most of history, this wasn't "migration" in the modern sense. It was simply people moving within their own cultural sphere.

The Afghanistan we know today didn't exist until the mid-19th century. Before that, the region was ruled by the Durrani Empire, which at its height controlled not just modern Afghanistan but also large swaths of what is now Pakistan, including Peshawar, Kashmir, and Sindh. The empire's capital moved between Kandahar, Kabul, and Peshawar depending on the ruler's preference.

Friedrich Engels—yes, that Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's collaborator—captured this in an 1857 essay. He described Afghanistan as including "the Persian provinces of Khorassan and Kohistan, together with Herat, Beluchistan, Cashmere, and Sinde, and a considerable part of the Punjab." In other words, the region we now think of as split between two nations was once a single political and cultural space.

Then came the British.

After the Second Anglo-Afghan War in the late 1870s, a British diplomat named Mortimer Durand sat down with the Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan to draw a line on a map. The Durand Line, as it came to be known, wasn't meant to be a border in the modern sense. It was a demarcation of "spheres of influence"—essentially, the British were telling the Afghans: everything on your side is your problem, everything on our side is ours.

The problem was that this arbitrary line cut directly through the homeland of the Pashtun people, one of the largest ethnic groups in the region. Suddenly, Pashtun tribes that had been united for centuries found themselves divided between British India and Afghanistan. When Pakistan was created in 1947, it inherited this artificial boundary—and the problems that came with it.

Afghanistan, for its part, never fully accepted the Durand Line. The country has periodically claimed that the agreement expired or was illegitimate. This dispute has poisoned Afghan-Pakistani relations for decades and made the movement of people across the border an inherently political act.

The Soviet Invasion and the First Great Exodus

On December 24, 1979, Soviet forces crossed into Afghanistan to prop up a failing communist government. What followed was a decade of brutal warfare that would reshape the region forever.

The violence was extraordinary. Soviet forces didn't just fight guerrilla fighters—they systematically targeted the civilian population. Villages were bombed. Agricultural infrastructure was destroyed. Public gatherings were attacked. Mass arrests and executions became routine. For ordinary Afghans, the calculation was simple: stay and risk death, or flee.

Millions chose to flee.

By the end of the 1980s, nearly three million Afghan refugees had escaped to Pakistan, with another two million in Iran. Some estimates suggest the actual number in Pakistan was closer to four and a half million, since many never registered with authorities. To put this in perspective, Afghanistan's total population in 1979 was only about 15 million. The country lost roughly a third of its people to exile.

Pakistan, to its credit, opened its doors. The government invoked Islamic principles of hospitality and solidarity to justify accepting the refugees. With substantial funding from the United States—which was eager to support any resistance to Soviet expansion—Pakistan established hundreds of refugee camps along the border.

By late 1988, roughly 3.3 million Afghan refugees were housed in 340 camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pakistani province that borders Afghanistan. The city of Peshawar alone had about 100,000 refugees living within its limits, with another two million scattered throughout the province. The Jalozai camp, on the outskirts of Peshawar, became one of the largest refugee settlements in the world.

Five Types of Refugees

Not all refugees are alike, and the Afghans who fled to Pakistan came from vastly different circumstances.

Researchers identified at least five distinct groups. First were the wealthy and politically connected—families with assets outside Afghanistan who could essentially transplant their lives to Pakistan. They brought money, connections, and the ability to start over in relative comfort.

Second were the moderately resourceful—people who managed to bring trucks, cars, or some savings with them. Many of these refugees successfully integrated into Pakistani society and built new lives in commerce and trade.

Third were the educated professionals: doctors, engineers, teachers. They had skills that translated across borders, though finding equivalent work in a new country was never guaranteed.

Fourth were rural families who escaped with what they could carry—household goods, livestock, perhaps some sheep or yaks. They had something, but not enough to be self-sufficient. They needed help to survive.

And then there was the fifth group, by far the largest. About 60 percent of Afghan refugees arrived with nothing at all. They were ordinary people—farmers, shopkeepers, laborers—who had fled with only the clothes on their backs. They were entirely dependent on Pakistan and international aid agencies for food, shelter, and basic survival.

This last group would become the most vulnerable to the political shifts that followed.

Welcome Wears Thin

In the early 1980s, Pakistanis largely welcomed the Afghan refugees. Islamic principles of hospitality and solidarity—particularly the concept of "muhajir," or religious migrant—provided a moral framework for acceptance. The refugees were fellow Muslims fleeing godless communism. Helping them was both a religious duty and a Cold War imperative.

But hospitality has limits.

To migrate to Pakistan, Afghan refugees were required to register with one of seven Islamic political parties pre-approved by the Pakistani government. This wasn't bureaucratic convenience—it was deliberate policy. Pakistani officials wanted to prevent the emergence of a unified Afghan political movement on their soil. They had seen what happened with Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and they were determined to avoid a "Palestinization" of Pakistan.

By the mid-1980s, tensions began to surface. A new political movement emerged in Pakistan called the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, or MQM—which translates roughly as the "Refugee National Movement." The MQM represented the descendants of Muslims who had migrated from India to Pakistan during the 1947 partition. These were the original "muhajirs" of Pakistani politics.

Crucially, the MQM did not consider Afghan refugees to be part of their community. Quite the opposite: they viewed Afghans as competitors for resources and political power. The MQM's "Charter of Demands" explicitly called for Afghan refugees to be confined to camps and their property expropriated. Riots erupted. Violence spread.

The MQM also began crafting a narrative that would prove devastatingly effective: Afghans were extremists, fundamentalists, aliens in a secular Islamic state. This rhetoric would echo for decades.

The Kalashnikov Culture

One of the lasting legacies of the Soviet-Afghan War was what Pakistanis came to call "Kalashnikov culture."

The Afghan resistance fighters—the mujahideen—were heavily armed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan itself. American Stinger missiles famously brought down Soviet helicopters. But the signature weapon was the Kalashnikov assault rifle, cheap, reliable, and seemingly everywhere.

When the war ended, the weapons didn't disappear. They flowed into Pakistan, transforming the security landscape. Crime rates spiked. Tribal feuds that might once have been settled with sticks were now settled with automatic weapons. Drug trafficking, already a problem, became massively more profitable—and violent.

Pakistanis began to associate Afghan refugees with this violence. It didn't matter that most refugees were ordinary people who had fled violence rather than perpetrated it. The perception stuck. Afghans were dangerous. Afghans brought weapons and drugs and chaos.

This perception would prove convenient when the political winds shifted again.

After September 11th

The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, changed everything for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

Even before the attacks, the Pakistani government had begun tightening its policies. Food rations to refugee villages had been cut. The enthusiasm of the 1980s was long gone. But 9/11 transformed gradual disengagement into active hostility.

The attackers had trained in Afghanistan under Taliban protection. The subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan made the country the center of global attention—and made anyone associated with Afghanistan an object of suspicion. The "extremist" label that had circulated in Pakistani politics for years suddenly carried existential weight.

Pakistan announced that it would work toward the "voluntary repatriation" of Afghan refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR—the international agency responsible for refugee protection—supported this goal. Voluntary repatriation is, in principle, the preferred solution to any refugee crisis. People should return home when it's safe to do so.

But was it voluntary?

Between March and December 2002, Pakistan "voluntarily repatriated" nearly 1.52 million refugees. Over the following six years, another five million followed. The numbers were staggering.

Yet surveys told a different story. A joint report from the UNHCR and Pakistan found that 82 percent of refugees did not wish to return. They were being sent back to a country still at war, with little infrastructure, few jobs, and ongoing violence. Many had been born in Pakistan and had never seen Afghanistan. For them, repatriation wasn't going home—it was deportation to a foreign land.

The Proof of Registration

In 2005, the Pakistani government attempted to bring order to the chaos by registering all Afghans in the country. By February 2007, about 2.15 million Afghans had received what were called "Proof of Registration" cards—PoR cards for short.

These cards were similar to the Pakistani national identity card, with one crucial difference: they were stamped "Afghan Citizen" on the front. The cards included biometric features—fingerprints and photographs—allowing authorities to track who was in the country legally and who wasn't.

For registered refugees, the PoR cards provided a measure of security. They could legally work, rent homes, travel within Pakistan, and send their children to school. They weren't citizens, but they had something like official permission to exist.

For unregistered Afghans—and there were hundreds of thousands of them—life became increasingly precarious. Pakistani officials estimated that as many as 400,000 unregistered Afghans might be living in the country, invisible to official statistics but very real in their vulnerability.

The Geography of Exile

Afghan refugees in Pakistan aren't evenly distributed. They're concentrated in specific regions, shaped by ethnic ties, geography, and history.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province directly bordering Afghanistan, hosts the largest population—more than half of all Afghan refugees in Pakistan. This makes sense: the province is predominantly Pashtun, sharing language, culture, and family ties with the majority of Afghan refugees. Peshawar, the provincial capital, became a kind of second home for Afghan culture during the 1980s. The city absorbed many Afghan musicians, artists, and intellectuals, creating a vibrant exile community.

Balochistan, the vast and sparsely populated province to the south, is home to about a quarter of Afghan refugees. Quetta, the provincial capital, has the second-highest concentration of Afghan refugees in the country. Many work in trade and commerce, building economic lives in their adopted city.

Quetta also has a particular significance for the Hazara people, a Persian-speaking ethnic group originally from central Afghanistan. The Hazara are predominantly Shia Muslims in a region dominated by Sunni Islam, and they have faced severe persecution—first in Afghanistan, then in Pakistan. Quetta now has the largest concentration of Hazara people outside Afghanistan, though they live in segregated neighborhoods and face ongoing violence from extremist groups. Many Hazara refugees are trying to resettle further abroad, in Australia, Canada, Finland, or the United Kingdom.

The first wave of Hazara refugees arrived during the Soviet war in the 1980s. More came fleeing Taliban persecution in the 1990s—the Taliban, being predominantly Pashtun and Sunni, specifically targeted the Hazara as heretics. In Pakistan, the Hazara refugees found an existing community: Pakistani Hazaras whose ancestors had arrived in the late 1800s during the reign of the Afghan ruler Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. These earlier arrivals had achieved some influence in Balochistan's government, providing a degree of protection for their newer cousins.

Punjab and Sindh, Pakistan's most populous provinces, have smaller refugee populations—roughly 160,000 and 70,000 respectively. Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and commercial capital, hosts about 50,000 registered refugees. Lahore, the cultural capital of Punjab, has about 16,000.

Islamabad, the federal capital, has about 30,000 registered Afghan residents. Until 2006, many lived in a refugee camp within the Islamabad Capital Territory itself. When the camp was closed, residents were relocated—some to Rawalpindi, the adjacent city, and others to undeveloped land on the edge of Islamabad where the UNHCR helped them establish new settlements.

The 2023 Crackdown

On October 3, 2023, the Pakistani government made an announcement that sent shockwaves through Afghan communities: all undocumented foreigners had one month to leave the country or face deportation.

The deadline was stark. The message was clear. Pakistan was done waiting.

The immediate trigger was security concerns. Pakistan blamed Afghan nationals for a spike in terrorist attacks within its borders. Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban government in Kabul—which had seized power in August 2021 after the American withdrawal—had deteriorated sharply. The Taliban, despite their past support from Pakistani intelligence services, were proving to be difficult neighbors.

But the roots of the crackdown went deeper. Decades of refugee presence had created resentments. Economic pressures were mounting. And the political calculation had shifted: there was no longer any geopolitical benefit to hosting Afghan refugees.

In Islamabad, police began marking the locations of Afghan residents throughout the capital. Surveys of their properties were conducted. The message was unmistakable: we know where you are.

The Taliban government in Kabul called Pakistan's decision "unacceptable" and demanded reconsideration. The United Nations and human rights organizations expressed alarm. But the deportations proceeded.

By January 2025, more than 813,000 individuals had been repatriated to Afghanistan. By September 2025, the number had reached approximately 1.5 million. As of October 2025, about 2.36 million Afghan citizens remained in Pakistan—down from an estimated 3.7 to 4.4 million just two years earlier.

What Returns Look Like

Repatriation sounds clinical. The reality is anything but.

When Afghan refugees return—whether voluntarily or under pressure—they receive a modest assistance package. Each person gets about $400 in travel money, up from $100 in earlier years. The Afghan government has promised to provide land for returning families to build homes. Forty-eight new towns were supposedly being established to receive returnees.

But promises and reality often diverge. Afghanistan in 2025 is a country under Taliban rule, with a collapsed economy, widespread hunger, and severe restrictions on women's education and employment. International aid has largely dried up following the Taliban takeover. Jobs are scarce. Infrastructure is shattered. For refugees who spent decades in Pakistan—who were born there, educated there, built lives and businesses there—"returning" to Afghanistan means starting from scratch in a country that is, for all practical purposes, foreign to them.

The mathematics are especially cruel for women and girls. Under Taliban rule, they cannot attend secondary school or university. They cannot work in most professions. They must cover themselves completely in public and cannot travel without a male guardian. For Afghan women who grew up in Pakistan with access to education and relative freedom, repatriation means losing rights they had taken for granted.

The Ones Who Wait

Not all Afghan refugees in Pakistan are waiting to return to Afghanistan. Some are waiting to leave for somewhere else entirely.

A small number hold what are called Special Immigrant Visas—documents that allow them to immigrate to the United States. These visas were created for Afghans who worked with American forces during the twenty-year war: translators, security guards, drivers, advisors. When the United States withdrew in 2021, many of these individuals were left behind, trapped in Afghanistan or neighboring countries, their visa applications caught in bureaucratic limbo.

Others are seeking resettlement through the UNHCR to countries in North America, Europe, and Oceania. The process is slow and uncertain. Countries accept only a tiny fraction of the world's refugees for resettlement, and competition is fierce. Most will never receive an offer.

In the meantime, they wait. They work when they can find work. They send their children to school if the schools will accept them. They try to maintain some semblance of normal life while knowing that their legal status could be revoked at any moment.

Crossing Without Papers

For most of history, Afghans and Pakistanis crossed their shared border freely. The Durand Line meant little to the Pashtun tribes who lived on both sides, whose families and grazing lands straddled the boundary. People went back and forth as they always had, trading goods, visiting relatives, following seasonal patterns that predated any government.

That era is ending.

Pakistan has introduced a "visa regime for different categories of Afghan nationals." Afghan passport holders can now obtain visas for tourism, family visits, business, medical treatment, education, or sports competition. The visas are free and typically valid for three months. But the paperwork is required—and obtaining an Afghan passport under Taliban rule is neither easy nor cheap.

For undocumented crossings, the risks have grown. Pakistan has built fencing along portions of the border. Security checkpoints have multiplied. The once-porous boundary is becoming, slowly but steadily, a real barrier.

The Human Toll

Numbers can obscure as much as they reveal. Behind every statistic—4.4 million refugees, 1.5 million repatriations, 2.36 million remaining—are individual human beings with names and histories and hopes.

Consider a child born in a Peshawar refugee camp in 1985. That child is now forty years old. They have spent their entire life as a refugee, belonging fully to neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan. They may speak Pashto and Urdu but have never seen Kabul. Their children were born in Pakistan, as were their grandchildren. Yet they remain, officially, "Afghan citizens"—temporary guests in the only home they have ever known.

Or consider a Hazara family that fled Taliban persecution in the 1990s. They settled in Quetta, built a small business, sent their children to school. Now they face violence from extremist groups who have killed hundreds of Hazaras in Pakistan over the past two decades. They cannot return to Afghanistan, where the Taliban rule. They cannot stay safely in Pakistan. Their only hope is resettlement in some distant country that may or may not accept them.

Or consider the professionals—the doctors and engineers and teachers who fled with their education but found their credentials unrecognized, their skills unwanted. Some rebuilt careers in Pakistan. Others spent decades in menial work, their potential wasted. Now, in their fifties and sixties, they face the prospect of starting over yet again.

A Crisis Without End

The Afghan refugee crisis is now forty-five years old. It has outlasted the Soviet Union. It has outlasted the Cold War. It has outlasted American interventions in Afghanistan. There is no reason to think it will end anytime soon.

Afghanistan under Taliban rule is not a place most refugees want to return to. Pakistan, struggling with its own economic and political problems, is increasingly unwilling to host them. The international community has largely moved on to other crises, other headlines, other catastrophes.

In June 2010, Pakistan ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which forbids member states from deporting people to places where they will be tortured. Whether this provides meaningful protection for Afghan refugees is an open question. The convention applies. Enforcement is another matter.

What remains is a population in limbo: not quite refugees, not quite immigrants, not quite citizens of anywhere. They work and raise families and try to build lives, all while knowing that their presence is tolerated rather than welcomed, conditional rather than permanent.

Their children grow up stateless in practice if not in law. Their grandchildren will inherit the same uncertain status. The border their ancestors crossed freely has become a wall, and they are trapped on the wrong side of it.

This is what it means to be a refugee for forty-five years: to live in perpetual temporary status, always waiting for a future that never quite arrives.