On 16 March, Pakistan was suspected of carrying out a deadly airstrike on a drug treatment hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. Over 400 people are estimated to have been killed. Pakistani officials insist the strike did not target civilians, dismissing the accusation as “Afghan Taliban propaganda", but eyewitnesses and media reports tell a far more horrifying story of patients “screaming and running” as fire engulfed wards and entire lives were torn a part.
Families are still searching for their loved ones. As more details emerge of the devastation caused, the United Nations Office for Human Rights has called for reparations . The strike followed Pakistan's declaration that it was in “open war” with Afghanistan at the end of February, accusing the Afghan Taliban of permitting Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to operate freely from Afghan territory and carry out deadly attacks within Pakistan. However, the Pakistani state seems to be at war not only with the Afghan Taliban and the TTP but also with ordinary Afghans. This airstrike is proof of this, as is the mistreatment of its own Afghan refugee population.
Commentators in Pakistan have highlighted the importance of defeating the TTP and stopping the violence it has caused, especially in border regions. Yet the attacks on Afghanistan reveal a deeper issue: a long-standing pattern of the Pakistani state racialising and devaluing Afghan lives, as well as those of Pashtuns.
Nothing new, one might think. From the Soviet-Afghan war to the war on terror, Pakistan has played a crucial role in enabling nearly fifty years of imperial serial war in Afghanistan that has, over time, killed, wounded, and disrupted the lives of millions.
Racism toward Afghans and Pakistan’s Pashtun populations is, in part, a structural inheritance of decolonisation. In the 1947 partition of British India, Pakistan inherited the infrastructure of a colonial security state that would deepen its tentacles via its close alliance with the US. But these racist colonial ghosts also take a distinct “local” form in the post-colonial state. And the issue is only getting worse. In the post-war on terror era, the lives of Afghans have been particularly shaped by deep structures of securitisation and racialisation. This form of “ exceptional Orientalism ” is not merely a Western import, as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in 2005 when he wrote that the West has its concept of the “Good Muslim/Bad Muslim”. In Pakistan, this is mapped onto Afghans and Pashtuns who are, to borrow from anthropologist Anila Daulatzai, Pakistan’s “baddest Muslim”.
A more sinister turn The recent airstrike indicates the potential for an even greater threat: an escalation in how Pakistan handles what it calls its “Afghan question,” both in foreign policy and its treatment of Afghans within its borders.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, millions of Afghans have lived in Pakistan as refugees, with the population ebbing and flowing as in Afghanistan’s era of serial war. Many should, by any reasonable measure, qualify for citizenship, yet have been systematically denied it.
From the mid-2000s to 2021, Pakistan pursued an increasingly coercive campaign against its Afghan population, marked by discrimination, harassment, detention, and forced expulsion. I previously described this process as coercive repatriation , a strategy that involves sustained pressure to force people to leave. Since 2023, this has significantly intensified under the so-called Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan .
As violence against Afghans escalates—both within Pakistan and across the border—it becomes necessary to confront the deeper ideological forces driving it.
In the case of Afghan expulsions, human rights frameworks usually focus on breaches of international refugee law, especially the principle of non-refoulement. However, attention to Pakistan’s Citizenship Laws shows that Afghans in Pakistan should be citizens. This means the scale of expulsions is justified by claiming they are racialised security threats, which indicate an ideological project of exclusion almost akin to an ethnic cleansing ( when defined as a forced expulsion of a national, ethnic, or religious group)._ Databases in my ongoing research suggest the number of Afghans forced to leave Pakistan since the mid-2000s—excluding voluntary return—may run into the millions. Since 2023 alone, over 800,000 people have been forcibly deported. Expulsions are repeatedly justified through racist tropes and counterterror policies and laws.
In trying to understand the “why now” of the breakdown of Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban, talking heads turn to geopolitical explanations. Some note that elements of Pakistan’s establishment initially welcomed the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 and sought to prevent its international isolation. Frustration has since grown, they argue, over the Taliban’s independent posture, including efforts to build ties with India. Others frame the conflict simply as a war on terror. But these explanations are insufficient.
Pakistan’s violence against Afghans is not driven by the rational logic of geopolitics alone. It is also shaped by racial ideology.
Anyone who follows official statements, television talk shows, dramas, and, more recently, openly racist government-sponsored social media posts will recognise the extent to which anti-Afghan sentiment has become widespread and normalised. In February 2026, for example, a social media post , that has since been taken down, sarcastically mocked all Afghans, not just the Taliban government, with statements in Urdu like, “Apart from running the tandoor (bread stand as low-income wage labour), you also fight wars? Oh, really?!” The danger is that such sentiments will lead to more extreme acts of violence. The rise of right-wing movements around the world, combined with an international system destabilised by Israel’s war in Gaza, has encouraged Pakistan to act with growing confidence.
Global attention is fixed elsewhere and, frankly, doesn’t seem to care what happens to Afghans.
Of course, the Afghan Taliban is neither an innocent nor a weak party, but Pakistan is significantly the stronger power, operating in a bullish mode.
Grave and large-scale acts of violence do not emerge out of thin air. They build over time, waiting for the conditions in which they can unfold. Pakistan’s own history teaches us this—from partition in 1947, to the violence of 1971, and ongoing repression in Balochistan.
The warnings are already here. Sanaa Alimia is an academic and author of Refugee Cities. Follow Sanaa on X: @SanaaAlimia Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.