By Dr Muhammad Shahid
Which international community, exactly, is lecturing Pakistan today?
The same one that pulled the shutters down on Afghan students in March 2026. The same one that spent 2025 quietly stripping away the exemptions that once protected even Afghanistan’s most vulnerable applicants.
In March 2026, the United Kingdom introduced what it openly called an “emergency brake” — a nationality-based ban stopping Afghan nationals from receiving new study visas or Skilled Worker visas altogether, alongside citizens of Cameroon, Myanmar, and Sudan. The Home Office’s own impact assessment estimated the measure would block around 4,300 Afghan study visas if left in place for eighteen months. Afghan women holding unconditional offers to study artificial intelligence and civil engineering at British universities were told, in effect, that their passports made the decision for them. Some are now fighting the policy in the High Court.
Washington moved in the same direction, and further. A December 2025 presidential proclamation stripped away the Special Immigrant Visa exemption that had, until then, protected Afghans who had worked alongside American forces — interpreters, contractors, people whose lives were put at risk precisely because they trusted Washington’s word. As of January 1, 2026, Afghan nationals fall under a full entry suspension, with SIV holders needing a visa issued before that date just to be allowed in.
So: London and Washington, having spent the past year building higher walls against Afghans than either has built in years, now find standing to demand that Pakistan — a country that has hosted Afghan refugees for over four decades — simply look past its own visa paperwork, its own security vetting, and its own law when it comes to who stays and who doesn’t.
Pakistan took in millions of Afghans starting in 1979, when the Soviet invasion emptied Afghan villages into Pakistani refugee camps that were, at the time, meant to be temporary. They were not temporary. Pakistan absorbed that population through the Soviet withdrawal, through a civil war, through the first Taliban government, through the post-9/11 American invasion, and now through a second Taliban government — all while the international attention and funding that arrived in 1979 largely moved on to other crises. The world handed Pakistan a crisis in 1979. It never really took it back.
What Pakistan is doing now — deporting individuals who lack valid documentation — is not a new or radical policy. It is the same standard that Britain and the United States are, at this very moment, applying to Afghan nationals seeking to enter their own countries: no valid paperwork, no entry. The only difference is that Pakistan is applying that standard to people already inside its borders, after decades of hosting them, rather than turning away applicants who haven’t yet arrived.
It can be debated as to how deportations are carried out. But that is a different conversation from the one being demanded by capitals that have just spent a year demonstrating, in policy rather than rhetoric, exactly how a state protects its own borders when it decides Afghan arrivals pose a risk it isn’t willing to take. Islamabad is not asking anyone to take in refugees it doesn’t want. It is asking for consistency: that the states now issuing statements of concern be measured against the standard they have just written into their own law.
None of this absolves the Afghan Taliban administration of its own responsibility. If Kabul objects to the pace or manner of returns, the more productive response is not to protest Pakistan’s enforcement of its own laws, but to put its own house in order — building the reception capacity, housing, and reintegration support that returning Afghans actually need. A government that has spent four years consolidating control over its territory should be able to absorb its own citizens coming home, rather than leaving that burden, once again, for its neighbours to carry.
Whoever feels that Pakistan’s approach is too harsh is welcome to open its own doors wider. Until then, Pakistan will not compromise its security for the applause of governments that closed their doors first.
The writer is a media analyst and researcher.