Our good friends the Pakistanis are, again, not acting like good friends.
McClatchy reports:
"Pakistani authorities have resumed sending tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, many of whom have lived for decades in camps near the Afghanistan - Pakistan border, back to Afghanistan . . .
An estimated 2,000 Afghan refugees passed through the border checkpoint at Torkham on Sunday. They came in giant, open-top trucks, heavily laden with everything from doors, window frames and beds to piles of wooden beams and planks that will be used to construct homes in Afghanistan . . .
A Pakistani official at the camp, who declined to be identified because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters, said that 1,043 families had left the camp as of Saturday. Some 10,000 families remain . . .
Pakistan plans to send all Afghan refugees back by the end of 2009. But the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Pakistan has warned that so speedy a resettlement program risks creating a humanitarian crisis, given the conflict in Afghanistan."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080421/wl_mcclatchy/2916396The fly in the ointment here is that, apparently, the Afghan government demanded this to happen. They just didn't know the Pakistanis planned on sending all these refugees back to them.
NEWSWEEK reported last November:
"The Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar . . . have become vast jihadist sanctuaries. The Jalozai and Shamshatu camps, each housing some 100,000 Afghan refugees, date back to the war against the Soviets. Complaints from the Afghan government have forced Islamabad and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to begin the long process of emptying Jalozai, a job that's supposed to be completed by next spring . . . "
http://www.newsweek.com/id/57485/page/4The Pakistanis aren't about to take all these people in as Pakistani citizens, eventhough most have been there for 20 years or so.
McClatchy again:
"You never know who comes and who goes in these camps,' said Mehmood Shah , a former top provincial interior ministry official. 'The government of Pakistan has decided that the Afghan mujaheddin must finally go back.'"
Oh, I think he has an idea;
NEWSWEEK:
"The Shamshatu camp, just south of Peshawar, is the personal fiefdom of the notorious Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. His guerrillas, the Hizb-i-Islami ("Party of Islam"), operate mainly in Afghanistan's Kunar province, but Shamshatu is their power base, in effect an autonomous enclave within Pakistan. Like Jalozai, the place resembles a sprawling, labyrinthine Afghan village of mud-brick houses surrounded by high mud walls, and it's ruled by strict, Taliban-style Islamic law. Music is forbidden—even musical ringtones on cell phones. So is tobacco. Women are banned from venturing outside except in the company of a male relative. (There are girls' schools, though: unlike his Taliban allies, Hekmatyar believes in women's education.)"
The Pakistanis are thinking they're going to get rid of their jihadias by sending them back to Afghanistan, where the ISAF is struggling already to contain a resurgent Taliban.
Here's the kicker, though:
"Shah said that the U.S. officials he'd discussed the issue with were uncertain whether closing the camps was a good idea.
'The U.S. was 50/50 on this issue,' Shah said."
Yeah, because who knows what would happen in Afghanistan if severval hundred thousand refugees suddenly showed up in Taliban hotbed territory with nothing but the clothes and windowpanes on their backs?
With elections coming up this year, you've got to figure this type of humanitarian disaster and Taliban recruiting boon would be a real plus for democracy in Afghanistan.
Shrug . . . That's the next administration's headache.
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