A Bitter Failure on World Refugee Day

Yesterday was World Refugee Day. Yesterday, 2719 Afghan refugees were forcibly returned to Afghanistan.

Since 2023, approximately 5.6 million Afghan refugees have been repatriated, mostly from Pakistan and Iran. The scale of this population transfer exceeds that of the Indian removals in the US and the Nakba in Palestine combined times three.

What awaits their return is bleak. The economy is in shambles. There is a low-intensity war ongoing with Pakistan. The Taliban have imposed strict morality laws. Women cannot walk outside without a male guardian. Girls cannot attend school above the primary level. Internet access is limited. Over half of the population is in need of immediate humanitarian assistance. A story went viral some time ago about a man who sold his child so his other children could eat. Last week, bullets met a protest in Herat.

Today, indifference seems to be the world's most popular response. Foreign aid, which once kept the country afloat, has entirely dried up. Nearly all NGOs have ceased their operations in Afghanistan. Now, even the countries which once welcomed refugees have seemingly given up.

Make no mistake about the nature of the world's apathy. It is as political as our invasions, our special military operations, our multi-national business deals, our structural adjustment programs.

The cruelty of the Taliban is heart-wrenching, but it is also only the latest iteration of injustice beset among the people of Afghanistan. Our political imaginations have failed, time and time again, to recognize the multiplicity of violence at this so-called vortex of conflict. Unable to comprehend what we have birthed, we reach for narratives of state vs anti-state, war vs terrorism, civility vs tribalism.

Afghanistan is not a place where civilizations clash but where they are thrust together into one, horrifying picture. I am reminded of Arundhati Roy's words on the eve of the US invasion of Afghanistan.

"Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while… Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of Good and Evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed—one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe."

What comes after failure?