As Pakistan continues to mourn and grieve over the horrific attack last week in the city of Peshawar, there has naturally been a strong desire on the public’s part to figure out how to eliminate the disease of murderous radicalism. However, the ubiquitous calls for revenge and ‘their blood’ do little to shed light on sensibly understanding and tackling the problem. The frenzied rush to ‘do something,’ or that ‘we must respond,’ very often tends to lead to both counterproductive and grossly immoral actions on the part of nations. In this context, Pakistani society has seen the reemergence of, sadly, a tired, favorite punching bag of the nation: Afghan refugees.

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One would think that after suffering both decades of vicious internecine warfare in their own country, and assuming the ‘wretched of the earth’ refugee status in another – Afghan refugees would be the quintessential candidate of an oppressed people in need of sympathy, solidarity, and support. The irony is that the opposite happens in Pakistan, particularly when some terrorist incident takes place which can immediately (albeit nonsensically) be laid at the footsteps of the entire Northwest of the country – as well as on Afghanistan. The country undergoes a collective psychosis wherein Pakistanis are asked to suspend any critical thinking – or thinking period – and simply accept a narrative of ‘who’s to blame’ that’s handed to the public on a platter.

A question rarely asked is what the heck are so many millions of Afghans doing in Pakistan in the first place, and how many of them are now second and third generation ones residing here and still not so keen on returning to their home country. The history should be familiar to every Pakistani by now: Afghan refugees came to Pakistan because of a vicious, bloody war that began in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and which has plagued the country ever since. And outside powers, including Russia, Pakistan, Sauda Arabia, the US, and the entire Western establishment, played no small part in fueling that war then. A simple conflict inside Afghanistan for genuine Afghan self-determination was converted into a global proxy war between the two superpowers, with the rise of militant Islam being one of the major consequences. But the other significant one was the natural flight of poor Afghans from their country into neighboring Pakistan. The desire to escape bombs, Soviet troops, and reactionary elements within the ‘mujahideen’ does not seem unreasonable, and since Pakistan saw no compunction in interfering and sending ‘its boys’ (who were heavily armed) into Afghanistan – the movement of people in reverse (Afghans to Pakistan) should not, in principle, have been a problem for Pakistanis either. To put it rather bluntly: boys and weapons (and related training and funds) were sent from Pakistani to Afghanistan, and the chickens simply came home to roost. The innocent millions trying to seek refuge in Pakistan were simply ‘collateral damage’ of these power plays.

Therefore, before Pakistanis see themselves as so benevolent, demonstrating their magnanimity toward poor – but ‘bothersome’ – Afghan refugees, it would be useful to pause and reflect on this: do Pakistanis really think that millions of people all of a sudden one day enthusiastically decide to migrate across the border, leaving their entire lives behind them? No, it is almost always the result of a forced displacement, of conditions becoming so unbearable that there is no other choice left. The Pakistani state was deeply complicit in producing those conditions in Afghanistan, in the same way that the US was directly responsible for creating horrible socio-political conditions in Central America in the 1980s that led to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to Uncle Sam – only to be told now they are an ‘undeserving menace’ to society and need to be deported and/or criminalized, or even worse if the Tea Party had its say. The rhetoric sounds eerily familiar, and has parallels in Pakistan when it comes to the Afghans.

Afghan Refugees and the Displacement of Blame

(via stay-human)