By Daniel Nardini
I have to ask what kind of inhumanity a person or a government must have in order to be so callous as to throw refugees back to a place where they might be murdered. U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered that some of the Afghan refugees who fled Afghanistan in 2021 when the Taliban took over the country to be deported to Pakistan. Because the United States has no diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, those Afghan refugees to be deported will be deported to Pakistan. But there is a catch—the Pakistani government has made it very clear that Afghan refugees will be deported from Pakistan to Afghanistan over the border. Even though the Taliban government has stated that all those Afghans who aided the U.S. military during the Afghanistan War (2001 to 2021) will receive a pardon from the Taliban because of the Taliban’s amnesty, the United Nations has reported that many Afghan refugees who returned were murdered.
There are a whole list of problems to throwing out these hapless Afghan refugees from the United States. First, the receiving country, Pakistan, has classified the Afghans as “enemy aliens” because Afghanistan and Pakistan recently fought a war with each other. There is a lot of bad blood between the two countries now. So there is real bad blood between the Aghans and Pakistanis with the Afghan refugees caught right in the middle. Second, how credible is the Taliban with their assurances that they will not murder the refugees? These refugees fled because they worked with the defunct Afghan national government and the U.S. military. For the Taliban, these were collaborators, and there are many in Afghanistan who would be more than happy to kill these refugees. Even if some of these refugees might have been criminals, is throwing them back to the region a good fix? Any criminal Afghans would rather rot in a U.S. prison than be delivered into the hands of the Taliban.
But it is not just individual Afghans who might be deported but whole families. So, if any Afghan is thrown out of the united States to Pakistan, they will still most probably end up in Afghanistan anyway. Even under the worst circumstances in the United States after the Vietnam War, Vietnamese refugees were not sent back to a Communist Vietnam. And we have to remember that these Afghan refugees had helped the United States. Now we are not only abandoning them but are ready to send them to their deaths? I hope that this forced expulsion is stopped by the new U.S. Congress come 2027.
Heaven Help the Afghan Refugees
By Daniel Nardini
There are a whole list of problems to throwing out these hapless Afghan refugees from the United States. First, the receiving country, Pakistan, has classified the Afghans as “enemy aliens” because Afghanistan and Pakistan recently fought a war with each other. There is a lot of bad blood between the two countries now. So there is real bad blood between the Aghans and Pakistanis with the Afghan refugees caught right in the middle. Second, how credible is the Taliban with their assurances that they will not murder the refugees? These refugees fled because they worked with the defunct Afghan national government and the U.S. military. For the Taliban, these were collaborators, and there are many in Afghanistan who would be more than happy to kill these refugees. Even if some of these refugees might have been criminals, is throwing them back to the region a good fix? Any criminal Afghans would rather rot in a U.S. prison than be delivered into the hands of the Taliban.
But it is not just individual Afghans who might be deported but whole families. So, if any Afghan is thrown out of the united States to Pakistan, they will still most probably end up in Afghanistan anyway. Even under the worst circumstances in the United States after the Vietnam War, Vietnamese refugees were not sent back to a Communist Vietnam. And we have to remember that these Afghan refugees had helped the United States. Now we are not only abandoning them but are ready to send them to their deaths? I hope that this forced expulsion is stopped by the new U.S. Congress come 2027.