People from Afghanistan waiting at a crossing point at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border Photo by: Yahoo.com
As the United States completed the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan in late August — leaving the Taliban to celebrate their takeover of the country — concerns deepened regarding a potential surge of Afghan refugees and asylum-seekers looking for alternative routes to escape the new government and a worsening humanitarian crisis.
The difficulty, experts said, is understanding exactly how to prepare for an increase in asylum-seekers amid precarious geopolitics and uncertainty about how exactly the Taliban will behave. “The people leaving Afghanistan have been very quick over the past weeks, but that’s not how it’s going to continue,” said Erol Yayboke, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s going to be much more in the shadows, irregular, out of sight, just because there’s not really anywhere that folks can easily go.”
With the airlifts out of Kabul over, the global north has yet to articulate a clear plan for how it will assist people who are fleeing the regime, short of admonishing any expansion of illicit people-smuggling networks and pledging additional support for Afghanistan’s neighbors.
But countries in the region, particularly neighboring Pakistan, are closing their borders to people fleeing Afghanistan. And while some neighbors, such as Tajikistan, have expressed a willingness to receive refugees, Afghans themselves are reluctant to end up in a situation that they see as offering few opportunities.
A handful of high-income countries have increased their quotas for Afghan refugees, but international organizations are calling for broader commitments. Though they recognize the numbers will fall short of the need, experts say it is important for the global north to demonstrate solidarity with countries that now face the heaviest flows.
A volatile situation
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, little is certain in Afghanistan, including how many people are attempting to leave and where they will go.
As the Taliban staged their takeover, thousands of people fled from rural to urban areas, with many attempting to reach Kabul and escape Afghanistan ahead of members of the international community’s departure, Charlotte Slente, secretary general at the Danish Refugee Council, said. An estimated 3.5 million people are now displaced within the country, according to the UN Refugee Agency, including the half million reported since the beginning of 2021.
“It’s still a situation that’s volatile with a lot of uncertainty about how the Taliban will act as a regime,” she said. “There’s a situation of fear with a lot of wait and see what will happen. Will the newly internally displaced go back to where they came from? Try to cross borders?” She predicts it will be a mix of both, but that will ultimately depend on the humanitarian situation in a country where more than 18 million people are already in need of assistance, and also on how the Taliban behaves now that they have seized power. It’s not just about the Taliban’s next moves though.
“As the Taliban realizes it is harder to govern Afghanistan than it was in the 1990s, there could be vast, ungoverned spaces in the country,” Yayboke said. “You could see some sort of increased non-Taliban, nefarious actors operating in Afghanistan.”
Global powers, such as the U.S. and Europe, are also contributing to the uncertainty with their decision to end development assistance to Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover, said Aminulhaq Mayel, the former chairperson of the Board of the Afghanistan Civil Society Forum.
Thousands of people are now out of jobs that were supported by the development programs and people are concerned about the deterioration of basic services, such as the health and education systems. “Everybody in Afghanistan, whoever has the opportunity, they are trying to leave,” he said from Kabul. “It doesn’t mean the lives of all people are in danger. The major fear is people are disappointed about the future.”
Where will people go?
From the ground, Mayel said it is clear people are already starting to flee and the UN Refugee Agency’s worst-case scenario has the agency planning for 500,000 Afghans reaching neighboring countries before the end of the year. It is still an open question where they will go.
Pakistan, which currently hosts 1.4 million documented Afghans and hundreds of thousands more who are unregistered, announced it will not accept any more asylum-seekers from the country. Pakistan’s army is now hurriedly completing a fence to seal off the country’s border with Afghanistan, though some points appear to still be open. Yayboke said the Pakistani government is almost certainly under pressure from the international community to reverse course.
Meanwhile, Iran, which already hosts 780,000 Afghan refugees and is home to an estimated 2.3 million more Afghan citizens seeking asylum, announced plans to erect camps for new arrivals along the country’s border with Afghanistan. But the country is facing an economic crisis presaged by ongoing U.S. sanctions, which may limit the government’s tolerance for asylum-seekers. India has introduced a new emergency visa to fast-track Afghans seeking refuge, but the move has sparked controversy domestically over concerns the government would prioritize Hindus and Sikhs in the application process.
Yayboke pointed out that north and northeastern Afghanistan, near the country’s borders with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are not “hotbeds of Taliban support,” though the militants are currently in control of those regions. Given that history, people attempting to flee the country might attempt those routes.
The Uzbek and Tajik governments appear to already be mobilizing for that likelihood. Tajikistan, which currently hosts roughly 6,500 Afghan refugees, announced in July that it was prepared to receive 100,000 more. And Uzbekistan, which has maintained strict control over its border with Afghanistan in the past, has reportedly allowed hundreds of Afghans, including former military officers, into the country early on in the crisis.
“It doesn’t mean the lives of all people are in danger. The major fear is people are disappointed about the future.” — Aminulhaq Mayel, former chairperson, board of the Afghanistan Civil Society Forum
Mayel said it was possible Afghans would flee to those countries, but most people would only view them as a stopping point on the way to destinations that offer more economic opportunities. “These countries can be a temporary solution, particularly for those people whose lives are under threat, but then they should be evacuated,” he said. “I’m not sure they can support refugees.” The international community is still casting about for other potential destinations as global leaders race to avoid any increase in human-smuggling operations and — in Europe — of new asylum-seekers.
Need for global solidarity
In the scramble to evacuate at-risk Afghans in the final weeks of an international withdrawal, over 122,000 people were pulled from the country. Hundreds were temporarily housed in low- and middle-income countries, including Albania and Uganda, as they waited to be processed to their final destinations. In some corners, that raised the prospect of a broader south-south response to a potential influx.
Devota Nuwe, the head of programs at Uganda’s Refugee Law Project, called the government’s decision a sign of “global solidarity” in line with the country’s long tradition of opening its borders to people in need.
At the same time, though the Afghans are only expected to be in the country for a short stint, their arrival has raised “genuine concerns about hosting Afghan evacuees” among Ugandans, she said, including fears that Uganda could be targeted for retribution by terrorists.
A longer-term stay would raise further questions — not unsolvable, but complicated — about how they would be integrated into Ugandan communities and what would happen if they were eventually to be repatriated.
Slente said it would be unreasonable to look to the global south to meet the rise in Afghan refugees and asylum-seekers, particularly when the global refugee burden already falls disproportionately on lower-income countries. At the very least, she said, European leaders need to prepare to provide rapid access to a fair asylum process for Afghans who make it to the continent.
“While they will not be the place that will host the most Afghan refugees, they need to show solidarity with the neighboring countries and also be taking part of that responsibility,” she said.
Aside from pledging support to Afghan’s neighbors, European leaders and other members of the global north have been reluctant to make too many commitments though. European leaders, in particular, are trying to balance any obligation against fears of a far-right political backlash.
In the midst of the Taliban’s advance, leaders across Europe did freeze the controversial practice of deporting Afghan asylum-seekers who had seen their asylum requests rejected back to Afghanistan.
The United Kingdom and Canada have announced plans to accept 20,000 Afghan refugees in the coming years. And a group of 98 countries, including the U.S., has committed to continue to take in people fleeing Afghanistan.
At the same time, governments ranging from Austria to Australia have ruled out accepting any significant number of refugees. Turkey and Greece are actively shoring up their borders to prevent Afghans from entering their countries. Greek Minister of Migration Notis Mitarachi declared last month, “We cannot have millions of people leaving Afghanistan and coming to the European Union.”
Mayel recognizes Europe is unlikely to accept large numbers of Afghan asylum-seekers, and the move by global powers and international institutions such as the World Bank to cut off development assistance to the country will only exacerbate the looming humanitarian crisis, he warned, and cause people to want to leave.
The abrupt halt in development aid is meant to prevent the Taliban from siphoning off the money, but Mayel said there is a way to redirect those funds through NGOs that are still active in the country. Maintaining programs that help support the country’s basic services and rebuild from the recent conflict could help reduce the number of people looking to flee.
“Those people whose lives are under threat, there is no way but to take these people out of Afghanistan,” Mayel said. “The majority of the people do not like to leave the country,” he said, but if they are abandoned by international donors, many may begin to feel like any other option — no matter how fraught — is better than staying.
Disclaimer: This news story has been edited by DNW staff as per DNW editorial guidelines and is published from a syndicated feed.
Source: Andrew Green
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