ANALYSIS
The UN says it isn’t safe to return to Afghanistan. Pakistan keeps sending people back — even now that the two countries have declared war.
September 9, 2026 — Pakistan / Afghanistan
In Saxony-Anhalt, the far right just won a landslide in regional elections — 44% of the vote on 6 September, double its 2021 score — promising a “deportation task force.” In Rome, the government is proposing to the European Union that it replicate elsewhere the model of Albania's migrant centres; among the candidate countries is Uganda. These are stories readers of this site have probably already come across. Eleven thousand kilometres away, the same logic — moving the problem instead of solving it — already has a face: Zainab's.
Zainab is 47, a widow, and a former teacher. On 4 March 2026 she was deported from Pakistan to Afghanistan along with her son — arrested despite holding valid documents. She left behind the savings she had been setting aside to treat his kidney condition in Quetta. At the border, she recalls, gunfire and explosions could be heard.
Freshta, a mother of six, was separated from two of her children — aged 8 and 10 — during an arrest in January 2026. “I ran after my children, but they wouldn't let me,” she recalls. She now lives in a tent 12 kilometres from the Torkham border, with no direct contact with the children: she has been told they may have been detained. Omar was born and raised in Pakistan; deported seven months ago with his five children, he discovered that in Afghanistan they cannot continue school past sixth grade. Rabia, 27, worked as a seamstress: deported five months ago, she cannot afford formula milk for her newborn son.
These are four of the hundreds of thousands of people Pakistan sent back to Afghanistan in 2026 alone: 146,000, at a pace that has been rising since April — part of a flow that exceeds 5.4 million people expelled by Pakistan and Iran since October 2023, when Islamabad announced mass expulsions citing a link between Afghan refugees and suicide bombings. Human Rights Watch documents, in just the most recent phase, arrests without warrants, confiscation of phones and cash, bribe demands for release, children deported without their parents, and at least 9 Afghan journalists forcibly returned since the start of the year. In November 2025, more than 1,000 people were detained in a single operation at the Surkhab camp in Balochistan.
On 27 February 2026 Pakistan's defence minister declared open war on the Taliban, accusing them of sheltering the TTP and al-Qaeda, after a suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Islamabad and Pakistani airstrikes on Afghan territory. This is where the story changes register without anyone announcing it: the justification on which everything began in 2023 — refugees as a security threat — has not been renewed. The official enemy of 2026 is an armed organisation, no longer a population. Yet the deportations continue regardless, at the same pace, now inside a declared war between the two states rather than alongside it.
The law
Since September 2025 UNHCR has updated its protection assessment for Afghanistan (Guidance Note on Afghanistan — Update II, replacing the 2023 version): it maintains a recommendation against return and identifies groups at specific risk of persecution on return — among ethnic minorities, Baluch, Hazara, Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek, and among religious groups, Ahmadi, Baha'i, Christians, Hindus, Ismailis, Salafis, Shia, Sikhs, Sufis.
The symmetry test
The same principle already set out on this site regarding Turkey and Germany's return policy toward Syria applies here, unchanged: the criterion does not change when the actors are swapped, only the form of the violation changes. In Berlin it is a government objective stated in public — returning 80% of Syrians within three years. In Islamabad it is an administrative default that continues under a justification that has since changed. In neither case does the deported person have a say in the decision, and in neither case is the safety assessment made by the competent UN agency treated as binding by those doing the returning. The same question could be asked of Rome and Brussels as much as of Islamabad — we will write about that separately. This does not equate the severity of the two contexts — the declared war between Pakistan and Afghanistan has no equivalent in the Syrian case — but the legal substance of the violation is the same.
Sources: Human Rights Watch (21 April 2026) · OHCHR (August 2025) · OHCHR (March 2026) · UNHCR, Guidance Note on Afghanistan — Update II (September 2025) · Zan Times (6 April 2026) · KabulNow (July 2026) · CSIS · Amnesty International (December 2025) · Axios (6 September 2026) · Euronews (3 August 2026)