And this border
Strangely, Pakistan seems to boast a more liberal refugee policy than just about any other country in the world – especially if the refugees are Afghan, Uzbek, Arab, or just about any description or denomination that came for the so called Soviet jihad all those years ago. While most countries abide by the UN’s rehabilitate-and-repatriate charter for foreign refugees, Pakistan has had a policy of outright absorption over the last three decades – allowing Afghans to breathe, breed, own land and hold Pakistani ID cards/passports, etc.
Of course this has owed less to our penchant for human rights and more to the quasi-religious undertones of the Zia presidency and later governments; that conveniently provided a religious cover to the ‘strategic depth’ travesty and all its spillover. But now that the government, and more importantly the military, has finally changed course, seemingly, not to mention our own civil war and all its compulsions, surely it is time to wind up this refugee business once and for all.
As things stand, the Afghan government requests a six-month extension every time the previous extension (for repatriating illegal Afghans in Pakistan) expires. And after some back-and-forth, the prime minister agrees; every time. Clearly the matter has not been debated enough for the government, and the military of course, to settle on a clear-cut policy. Neither has the border problem; once again Chaman and Torkham are shut, indefinitely. While what such ad hoc measures do for terrorism and security is debatable, there’s no two opinions about the hardships they cause the common people; only playing into the hands of the enemy on both sides.
Everybody realises well enough that the key to unraveling the AfPak problem lies in Pak-Afghan cooperation, yet nobody knows quite how to achieve it, especially the two governments themselves. Little surprise, then, that the refugee and border problems linger, just like the war itself, and that common ground to build on is still nowhere in sight.
