Deporting Afghans to Pakistan: Washington Exports Its Unwanted

According to France 24, the Taliban government said on Monday that it was "deeply concerned" by the Trump administration's plan to expel dozens of Afghan migrants to Pakistan, with a view to their later return to Afghanistan. Still according to the New York Times, cited by the broadcaster, some of them reportedly helped American forces before the 2021 withdrawal.

That is the facts, and they are thin. We do not know how many people might be affected beyond those "dozens", on what legal basis, what Pakistan has agreed to, or whether Islamabad was consulted. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First observation: the pattern. Washington does not send these people home directly; it routes them through a third country. Pakistan, a poor neighbour already under strain, would become a waiting room, with all that implies in logistics, surveillance and social pressure. The United States keeps the decision; others pick up the bill. This outsourcing of migration management has become a staple of northern capitals: the centre sets the rule, the periphery absorbs the cost. On a different scale, it is the logic described by dependency analysis: countries placed in the position of supplying what the centre needs, and bearing what it no longer wants.

Second observation: the irony. That Taliban, born of a twenty-year war against American occupation, should now pose as worried about people who worked with that occupation is enough to make one smile grimly. Let us take it seriously without embellishing it. This government has its own reasons: managing returns, preserving an image, not becoming the receptacle for explosive files. We do not have its full statement, and its real motives remain to be established. But its complaint reveals one thing: even an isolated regime, without broad recognition, is caught in a chain of decisions it does not control.

Third point, the most important: the people themselves. Afghans who helped a foreign army find themselves tossed between a broken promise of protection and the threat of return. Those who bet on Washington are discovering that loyalty to the centre is no guarantee. Work done yesterday, useful to the war, becomes today an administrative burden. And public debate, as so often, will pit migrants, neighbouring states and taxpayers against one another, when the useful question is: who decided on the war, then on the withdrawal, and who bears the consequences?

We will wait to see what Washington and Islamabad confirm. But the direction is legible: a power that destabilised a country asks its neighbour to manage the aftermath. Independence, as the anti-colonial tradition used to say in substance, does not change the structure when the balance of power stays the same. Here, it stays entirely intact.