THE AMERICAN COMMENTARIAT HAS discovered outrage about Afghan deportations as if the story began this year, as if the border at Torkham were invented last night, and as if the burden of a half century could be measured by a single weekend feature. It could not be further from the truth. For five decades Pakistan has carried a responsibility that richer states romanticised from afar. Entire neighbourhoods in Peshawar and Quetta grew around successive Afghan inflows. Pakistani classrooms taught Afghan children in languages that were not their own. Clinics admitted patients without interrogating passports that seldom existed. Urban markets adjusted to new traders, new customs, and new pressures on land and prices. This is what hospitality looks like when it is lived rather than merely performed. It is social friction borne without applause. It is budgets stretched until the seams show. It is a thousand daily decisions by teachers, nurses, policemen and municipal clerks that never make it into op-eds.
The fashionable narrative now casts Pakistan as an overnight villain. That is convenient for those who prefer sermons to arithmetic. Hosting millions for decades is not costless. It is security operations against groups that exploited porous borders. It is policing organised crime that thrives in zones of displacement. It is negotiating the politics of identity in frontier districts where history and kinship do not map cleanly onto modern documents. It is inflation and housing scarcity that hit the poorest Pakistanis first. It is also the relentless administrative grind of cards, registrations, appeals and renewals, much of it financed by a treasury that has often stood alone. None of this is romantic. All of it is real.
The fashionable narrative now casts Pakistan as an overnight villain.
To insist on these realities is not to deny that individual abuses occur. They do, as they do in every mass migration context in the world. The moral task is to correct them, punish them and prevent them, while refusing the lazy leap from anecdote to indictment. Pakistan’s record is not spotless. No long emergency is. But the aggregate is unmistakable. For most of the modern Afghan tragedy, Pakistan has been the nearest refuge and the longest standing host. Western capitals flew in on military schedules and left on political ones. Pakistan remained when the planes left. That longevity deserves a hearing when rules tighten after years of deferral.
There is a structural truth that elite commentary sidesteps. When distant governments slow or suspend onward resettlement schemes, queues do not disappear. They grow. When embassies stop stamping visas, the pressure migrates to the nearest border post. When interviews are deferred and pledges drift into ambiguity, the waiting rooms are not in Washington or Brussels. They are in Karachi and Rawalpindi. It is a moral escapism to scold a front line state for managing the overflow that richer states created through hesitation and political theatre. The neighbour is left to absorb the human consequences of policies it did not write.
The same editorials that speak in solemn tones about international law treat sovereignty as a punchline when it is exercised in Islamabad. Every sovereign state holds the right and duty to regulate its borders, to differentiate between those entitled to protection and those without claim, to remove those who are undocumented after clear notice and due process, and to protect categories at particular risk. That matrix is not ideology. It is governance. It requires money, staff, data sharing and coordination across agencies and with international bodies. When it is done well, it draws little notice. When it falters, it is condemned by those who never funded the work in the first place.
When it is done well, it draws little notice. When it falters, it is condemned by those who never funded the work in the first place.
A credible editorial would also be frank about the realities inside Afghanistan. There are Afghans who remain at risk because of gender, profession, politics or past association. No neighbour can conjure an internal rights revolution across a frontier. Pakistan can screen, triage and coordinate. It can facilitate returns where safe and resist refoulement where unsafe. It can demand documentation from de facto authorities and insist on verifiable assurances. It cannot guarantee outcomes inside another sovereign territory that refuses to guarantee those outcomes itself. The pretense that Islamabad controls fates in Kabul is a rhetorical convenience that collapses on contact with facts.
“Outrage is easy. Hosting is hard.” Hosting is also cumulative. Decades of generosity produce their own fatigue. Communities that have carried the burden watch promises made elsewhere dissolve into delays. Host populations see aid programmes tighten for them and expand for others. Politicians exploit grievance. Security services absorb the blowback of militant networks that exploit displacement. Inflation turns neighbours against one another. Anyone who has studied protracted refugee situations understands the risks. Yet these are the same risks that distant commentators wish to wish away with deskbound indignation.
There is a bureaucratic story that the headlines never tell.
There is a bureaucratic story that the headlines never tell. Registration exercises that need to be repeated because people move, marry, age and die. Appeals panels that must distinguish between economic migration and protection claims in the absence of perfect records. Identity systems that creak under the weight of parallel documentation regimes created hastily after sudden inflows. Border points that were not designed for modern traffic volumes. Provincial administrations that negotiate not only with federal ministries and international agencies, but with tribal elders and city councils and landlords whose compliance determines whether policy meets reality. These are not abstractions. They are the cogs and levers of an imperfect machine that still works well enough to keep millions alive.
The right critique is procedural, not performative. Demand that removals be phased and announced with intelligible timelines. Demand that vulnerable categories be screened by mixed panels with clear criteria. Demand transparent grievance mechanisms with interpreters, legal aid and the ability to reopen cases where credible new risks are shown. Demand that officers who extort or assault be punished in public to reset expectations on both sides of the baton. These are concrete demands. They respect sovereignty while insisting on the dignity of those affected. They improve outcomes without collapsing into fantasy.
The wrong critique is the one we are reading. It casts Pakistan as capricious at the very moment that distant capitals chose to slow their own responsibilities. It mistakes tragic individual stories for a comprehensive diagnosis. It presents the suspension of onward pathways as an incidental footnote rather than the hinge on which the present crisis turned. It summons the language of compassion without the budgetary honesty that compassion requires. Above all, it treats a neighbour that has borne the weight for half a century as the most convenient target for shame.
Through each season of Afghan history, Pakistan remained the nearest place of safety, then the nearest place of waiting, and sometimes the nearest place of disappointment.
It is worth recalling the long arc. The first waves came with tanks. Others followed with the rise of militias and the collapse of ministries. More arrived when a republican project failed to root itself in the soil. The latest came after the final withdrawal. Through each season of Afghan history, Pakistan remained the nearest place of safety, then the nearest place of waiting, and sometimes the nearest place of disappointment. That continuity is not a sin. It is service. It is not flawless. It is far better than the counterfactual world in which the border would have been sealed and the deserts would have kept their dead.
There is also a fairness question that no American or European editorial board has answered. How long, exactly, must a neighbour carry the remainder of Western choices. If the answer is forever, then say so, and say it with the funding that forever entails. If the answer is until promises are honoured, then honour them. If the answer is until conditions in Afghanistan change, then admit that the lever for those conditions lies not in Islamabad but in Kabul, and perhaps in capitals that still exert leverage but prefer not to spend it. Anything else is moral outsourcing disguised as humanitarian concern.
Context is not a loophole. It is the truth. The truth is that Pakistan’s current policy sits at the exhausted end of a very long generosity. It is a recalibration, not a renunciation. It is an insistence that law and process finally keep pace with sentiment. It is a message to wealthier states that the cheques of rhetoric need to be cashed with planes, visas and funded case officers. It is a message to international agencies that registration and documentation are not paperwork, they are lifelines, and that delays are not neutral. They are decisions that push people into the grey.
There is a path out, but it runs through competence rather than catharsis. Countries that issued letters of protection must convert letters into passages. The agencies that manage refugee systems must surge staff where the queues exist rather than where the conferences are held. Pakistan must publish clear exemptions, invest in public discipline for abuses, and accept external observers where appropriate. Kabul must understand that genuine amnesty is measured by practice, not proclamations, and that the surest way to reduce outflows is to lower the risk profile of ordinary life for ordinary people. None of this is glamorous. All of it is achievable.
Mercy is not weakness. Policy is not theatre. Pakistan’s hospitality does not owe anyone an apology. It deserves acknowledgement and the practical solidarity of shared responsibility. If American and European readers are moved by the testimonies they have read, they should direct their urgency toward the governments that possess the capacity to resolve cases, the budgets to absorb arrivals and the leverage to influence conditions on the ground. The neighbour has carried the load generously and for longer than anyone had a right to expect. The time for distant capitals to keep their promises is not tomorrow. It is now.
The final accounting is simple. Pakistan did the hardest work for the longest time. That work kept millions alive and gave whole generations a chance to grow up outside the worst theatres of war. To twist that record into a caricature of cruelty is to libel decency in the service of a tidy storyline. The real story is untidy and human. It is the story of a state that sheltered when others sermonised, that tightened procedures only after promises elsewhere faltered, and that now asks the world to replace pity with performance. That is not a repudiation of compassion. It is, at long last, a demand that compassion be made real.
