The American wish that Pakistan keep its borders open for displaced persons is both high-handed and disturbing. It has so far not gone beyond a suggestion to Nation Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf in his recent meeting at the State Department, but it seems to ignore Pakistan’s previous experience with Afghan refugees, when over three million refugees were accommodated during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Not only did many simply disappear into the local population, with which it had many affinities, but they brought with them not just the heroin trade but also the casual symbolized by the AK-47 Kalashnikov. It is also high-handed because the USA is not suggesting that Pakistan keep open its borders for any refugees but those intended for resettlement in the USA, and that it keep only for 14 months. Turkey has already rejected a similar suggestion, which seems to be based on a sense of American exceptionalism.
Perhaps the biggest question is what is supposed to happen to refugees who are rejected by the USA for resettling in the USA. It seems that the USA wants both Pakistan and Turkey to act as sites of US holding camps, where the refugees would be initially processed. It is possible to envisage a flood of refugees from Afghanistan, who would intend getting to the USA for primarily economic reasons, not because they are afraid of the Taliban or whatever Afghan regime that might result. Rejected refugees would still then quite possibly wish to make the economic migration to Pakistan. Pakistan has seen one result of this, as the demographic balance between Baloch and Pashtun in Balochistan was disturbed, with consequences that have not yet plated themselves out.
What the USA seems to contemplate is a neat process. However, if Pakistan allows refugees to swarm over its borders in the hope of US fair dealing, it is going to be let in for as much of a disappointment as it experienced in facilitating the US-Taliban agreement, that the USA would manage a political agreement. Though the USA accepted many Afghan refugees during the 1980s, the first post-Taliban President Hamid Karzai among them, the possibility of Indian involvement in the process, does not inspire confidence.
