Following an uptick in terrorist violence along its western border, Pakistan’s caretaker government issued an ultimatum to approximately 1.7 million Afghans living in the country illegally: leave before Nov. 1 or face deportation. 

Last week, authorities made good on their promise, kicking off one of the largest deportation drives of the century with raids on Afghan communities across the country.

Many in these communities left Afghanistan during the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s. Others fled after the Taliban took back power two years ago. Aid groups say the Taliban are not equipped for the wave of returnees, who are being funneled into slapdash relocation camps near the Torkham and Chaman border crossings. Families are sleeping out in the open, with limited water and no bathroom facilities. 

Rights activists and civil society have decried the deportations, challenging whether Pakistan’s caretaker government has the authority to expel hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals and whether this actually makes their country safer. Mohsin Dawar, a politician whose constituency shares a border with Afghanistan, describes the policy as cruel and dangerous. 

“For 45 years these people have resided in Pakistan,” he says. “To send them back abruptly without talking to them and without holding any consultations with international refugee organizations … will create chaos.”

In the town of Landi Kotal – less than ten miles from the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan – a sports ground has been converted into an open-air detention center.

Here, Afghan citizens who have been living in Pakistan for years, if not decades, are being processed for deportation, but the conditions they are being kept in remain a mystery. Once a scenic area for cricket and football tournaments, the Gulab Ground has been cordoned off by the Pakistan Army whose soldiers have turned away journalists. 

Last month, Pakistan’s caretaker government issued an ultimatum to the approximately 1.7 million Afghans living in Pakistan illegally: leave before Nov. 1 or face deportation. Once the deadline elapsed last week, authorities made good on their promise and began conducting raids on Afghan communities across Pakistan in one of the largest deportation drives of the 21st century.  

The ultimatum follows an uptick in terrorist violence along the border, and a breakdown of ties between Pakistani leaders and the neighboring Taliban. But as the deportations continue, questions are swirling in Pakistani society: Does the caretaker government have the authority to kick out hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals? Will this actually make Pakistan safer? Where has the country’s compassion gone?

“This is a major policy decision that should have been left to an elected government,” says Maleeha Lodhi, who served as Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2015 to 2019. “Having been a generous host to Afghan refugees for four decades the country should have adopted a similarly humane approach towards poor, innocent people who now face an uncertain and grim future in Afghanistan.”

Crisis unfolding at the border

Among the Afghans apprehended by Pakistani police is Naimatullah, who did not want to give his surname. Sitting on a charpoy near the Torkham border, surrounded by all his worldly possessions, he recounts how he was taken to the border with a police escort. “The police came and dragged us out of our houses,” he says, adding that as “poor people” from Afghanistan – a country that has been riven with conflict for the last 50 years – having their lives uprooted wasn’t such a shock. “We have been living as vagabonds for a really long time,” he says. 

During the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s, more than 6 million refugees from Afghanistan fled to Iran and Pakistan to escape the violence at home. In the two years since the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021, a further 2 million Afghans are estimated to have left their homeland.