I'm Isabella Royo, Intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive

for December 21, 2025. In recent months, the government of Pakistan has responded to violent

tensions with the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan

by escalating its campaign of mass deporting millions of Afghan refugees, a category that includes many adults of Afghan descent born and raised in Pakistan.

As of December 2, this year, roughly 1 million of the 3 million Afghans in Pakistan have been repatriated to Afghanistan,

subjecting them to the humanitarian crisis unfolding under Taliban rule. These more recent efforts

are part of a broader campaign against Afghans and Pakistan that began in 2003. For today's

archive, I chose an episode from November 20, 20, 2003, in which Medeha Afzal and Scott Anderson discussed the origins

of the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan, the reasons for Pakistan's wave of deportations

of Afghan refugees, how this latest action intersects with concerns over terrorism, the

Taliban's reaction, and more. Currently, Pakistan has a caretaker government in charge and run up to elections in a few months.

And this caretaker government is really, you know, sort of a military-backed caretaker government.

So this action, this deportation drive, should really be understood as something that the military is pushing.

Not to say that, you know, an elected government would not have necessarily done this because it would

have limited, I think, political repercussions in Pakistan. Given that, you know, Afghans are not

Pakistani citizens. They can, these refugees wouldn't be able to have an impact on the election,

right? And Pakistanis may not necessarily feel

very strongly about this because some of them will buy into the government's narratives of

refugees being a burden or being linked to terrorism. I'm Scott R. Anderson, and this is the

Lawfare podcast for November 20, 23.

Over the past few weeks, the country of Pakistan has pursued an aggressive wave of deportations

targeting thousands of Afghan refugees, some of whom have been in Pakistan for generations.

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