As of April 2025, Pakistan shows no sign of halting its forced deportation campaign against Afghan nationals—revealing the culmination of a decades-long strategy that exploited Afghan refugees for geopolitical and financial gain.
The Myth of Generous Hospitality
Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan has housed millions of Afghan refugees. In doing so, it has emphasised heavily its ethnolinguistic, cultural and religious commonalities with Afghanistan, and cultivating at home and across the world an image of magnanimous hospitality even at great cost to itself.
Beneath the thin veneer of self-proclaimed generosity, however, a more cynical picture comes to light. In particular, the presence of Afghan refugees has not been without benefit, particularly for the country’s powerful military establishment. Not only have vast sums of international aid ostensibly for the aforementioned refugees flowed into Pakistan, but the country has used their presence to secure key geopolitical leverage in addition to its carefully polished image of gracious hospitality. The refugees’ geopolitical utility notwithstanding, the supposedly generous provision of safe haven is belied by the especially recent reality: one in which Afghan refugees have been systematically instrumentalised, politically marginalised, and, most recently, expelled en masse under the pretext of national security.
As of April 2025, Pakistan shows no signs of relenting on its campaign of forced deportations against Afghan nationals. The campaign, despite widespread condemnation at home and international outcry, includes registered refugees, asylum seekers, and long-term residents, raising urgent questions about the nature of its four-decade relationship with one of the world’s most protracted refugee populations.
Billions in Aid, and Who Benefitted
Over the last forty-five years, Pakistan has received billions of dollars in international assistance to host Afghan refugees. According to research compiled from UNHCR reports, donor archives, and NGO data, the total aid directed toward Afghan refugee support in Pakistan exceeds $5 billion. The United States, particularly during the Cold War, was the principal donor. In the 1980s alone, it channelled hundreds of millions in both humanitarian and covert aid to Pakistan, much of which was ostensibly earmarked for refugee support but frequently intertwined with military assistance to anti-Soviet mujahideen. As far as Islamabad was concerned, not all mujahideen were equal and, leveraging its effective control of the pursestrings of international aid, funds were allocated amongst the various mujahideen tanzeems to conform with Islamabad’s broader goal of augmenting its influence and securing its interests in the inevitably post-Marxist Afghanistan. Things did not turn out as planned, as Pakistan gained little respite from the end of the Soviet occupation, followed by the collapse of the Najib regime, or the later outbreak of an intra-mujahideen civil war and the rise of the Taliban. By 2004, the UNHCR, for its part, had spent over $1.1 billion in Pakistan. Subsequent years saw continued contributions through the Solutions Strategy for Afghan Refugees (SSAR), the Refugee Affected and Hosting Areas (RAHA) programme, and bilateral and multilateral donor support from the European Union, Japan, Germany, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and others.
Dysfunctional Institutions and Ghost Camps
These funds were disbursed through two primary channels: multilateral agencies such as UNHCR and WFP, which administered refugee camps, distributed food, and provided essential services; and direct budgetary or in-kind assistance to the Government of Pakistan, particularly via the Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees (CAR) and provincial authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (former North West Frontier Province) and Balochistan. Whilst UN-managed funds were subject to international oversight and audit, those handled by state institutions had the long shadow of the Pakistani state’s dysfunctionality cast over them. These funds suffered from chronic opacity, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and, in many documented cases, corruption. Investigations have revealed the existence of “ghost camps” — fictitious refugee settlements established to inflate numbers and siphon aid. Aid officials and researchers have long pointed to the lack of independent auditing mechanisms within CAR and the blurred lines between refugee aid and broader development or security expenditures.
Legal Precarity and Strategic Marginalisation
Despite this considerable influx of foreign support, the lived experience of Afghan refugees in Pakistan has been marked by legal precarity, socio-economic marginalisation, and political disenfranchisement. Throughout the 1980s, Afghan refugees were initially welcomed as part of Pakistan’s anti-communist strategy. Their presence was politically convenient and ideologically expedient. This was particularly so in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, where most refugees settled and in which their presence was an effective bulwark against pro-Soviet sentiments widesrpead amongst locally influential leftist Pashtun and Baloch nationalists, also opposed to President Zia ul-Haq’s Islamisation campaign. Refugee camps became recruiting grounds for mujahideen factions, many of whom were trained and armed with the covert backing of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its foreign sponsors. While camps proliferated and services expanded with donor money, refugees were deliberately kept outside Pakistan’s legal and political frameworks. Pathways to citizenship, land ownership, or formal integration into the Pakistani economy were seldom offered, despite the visible lack of tension between the overwhelmingly Islamic faith of Afghan refugees and Pakistan’s oft-proclaimed raison d’etre as a bastion of Muslims.
Donor Fatigue and Policy Shifts
The 1990s and early 2000s saw a shift in both donor strategy and host state policy. With the fall of the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime and the onset of Afghanistan’s civil war, followed by the rise and fall of the Taliban, the refugee crisis evolved into a protracted one. Donor fatigue set in, and aid levels declined. Repatriation, initially voluntary, became the preferred solution for both donors and host state. From 2002 to 2012, over 3.5 million Afghans returned home under UNHCR-assisted programmes. Their presence also offered a cop-out for Islamabad against credible claims of the Afghan Taliban’s presence in Pakistan. It was exceedingly difficult, if not impossible — Pakistani officials would repeatedly emphasise — to distinguish Taliban operatives from the millions of other Afghan refugees among whom they were believed to be operating, recruiting, and fundraising. Many Afghan refugees, witnessing the descent of Afghanistan into a brutal American occupation and the country’s subjection to an international-scale enterprise of corruption, remained in Pakistan, especially those born in exile or lacking the means to reintegrate into a war torn Afghanistan. For them, Pakistan offered neither citizenship nor durable residency. The Proof of Registration (PoR) card system, introduced in 2006, served only to formalise their temporariness, without granting legal rights beyond basic recognition.
Escalating Harassment and Coercive Returns
As international attention moved elsewhere, Pakistan increasingly adopted a coercive posture. Afghan refugees became convenient scapegoats for security incidents, insurgency, and economic malaise. Reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International throughout the 2010s documented widespread police harassment, arbitrary detention, extortion, and eviction campaigns. In 2016, under domestic and regional pressure, Pakistan orchestrated what was then the largest repatriation campaign in recent history, pushing over 380,000 Afghans to return, often under duress. Although this operation was nominally voluntary and supported by enhanced UNHCR cash grants, humanitarian actors criticised it as coercive and dangerously under-resourced.
Post-2021 Influx and Humanitarian Neglect
In the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, the refugee question once again came to the fore. Pakistan’s initial response was muted, with borders tightly managed and only limited influxes permitted. However, by 2023, an estimated 600,000 new Afghan arrivals had entered the country, many fleeing economic collapse, and reported threats. Unlike earlier waves, these refugees often lacked documentation or access to international protection mechanisms. The UN’s Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRP) for Afghanistan appealed for over $300 million in support for Pakistan’s Afghan caseload in 2023, yet by mid-year, 95% of that appeal remained unfunded. The burden, once again, shifted to the host country. The host country, now decidedly on a xenophobic footing, would in turn shift the cost onto the refugees themselves.
Deportations in 2025: The Breaking Point
As of April 2025, Pakistan has embarked on its most aggressive anti-refugee campaign to date. The interim government has ordered the deportation of all undocumented Afghans, with estimates indicating that over 1.7 million individuals are affected. This includes not only recent arrivals but also long-term residents with expired PoR cards, asylum seekers awaiting third-country resettlement, and individuals born and raised in Pakistan. Reports from border regions and detention camps suggest that deportations are being carried out en masse, often without due process, in violation of non-refoulement obligations under international law.
Security Justifications and Strategic Leverage
The government justifies these actions on the grounds of national security and economic strain. Yet such justifications obfuscate a deeper trend: the structural exploitation of Afghan refugees as disposable subjects. For decades, they were welcomed when politically expedient, maintained when donor money flowed, and discarded when they ceased to be useful. The current campaign reflects not a sudden crisis, but the logical culmination of a policy architecture built on exclusion and instrumentalisation. Few qualms have been held by even Pakistani officials in highlighting this instrumentalisation; former caretaker Prime Minister Anwar ul-Haq Kakar directly attributed deportations to what he claimed was the lack of action against the TTP by Kabul.
International Complicity and the Refugee Policy Reckoning
This history demands a reassessment of the international community’s complicity. Donors who lavished Pakistan with funds while failing to demand transparency and legal reforms share responsibility for the current outcome. The UN and its partners, while often vocal in protest, have too often acquiesced to the host state’s prerogatives in exchange for continued access. The illusion of “voluntary repatriation” has repeatedly been deployed to mask coercive returns. Meanwhile, generations of Afghans born in Pakistan remain stateless, caught between a state that will not claim them, a destroyed country of origin to which they are strangers, and an international system that no longer prioritises their protection.
Conclusion: From Exploitation to Accountability
The question, then, is not whether Pakistan has received enough money to host Afghan refugees. It demonstrably has. The question is how that money was spent, who benefitted, and why the same state that once profited from refugee presence is now expelling them with impunity. As deportations continue in April 2025, these questions can no longer be deferred. They must form the basis of any future engagement with Pakistan on refugee matters, lest the cycle of aid extraction and human disposability repeat itself yet again.
The time has come for donors, humanitarian agencies, and Afghan civil society to insist on accountability, legal reform, and genuine protection. Anything less would render four decades of refugee assistance not a triumph of solidarity, but a monument to duplicity.