Dealing with the Afghan refugee crisis

About six months have passed since the Taliban overran Afghanistan and took control of the capital, Kabul, in the midst of a hasty retreat by an international coalition mired in purposelessness and the usual pains of propping up fragile post-conflict regimes.
The ensuing violence and transformations within the country have rightly triggered the international community’s punitive isolation of the Taliban regime. Unfortunately, they have also fueled a humanitarian disaster that began with a severe drought, prior to the violent Taliban takeover, and has only intensified with each passing day.
A collapsing economy and the reemergence of harmful actors under a mostly ambivalent Taliban regime are the least of the concerns among most Afghans. After all, even if a harsh winter is about to end, the combined effects of the suspension of all international assistance and humanitarian aid to the country, the COVID-19 pandemic and a famine have left nearly 9 million people on the verge of starvation.
Meanwhile, an unperturbed Taliban persists with its human rights violations and crackdowns targeting women, girls, human rights activists and journalists. This has left many people facing persecution and has compounded the woes that have already forced some to flee the country to survive, or at least to strongly consider doing so.
Unfortunately, even though the challenging circumstances Afghans face are well documented, many desperate refugees and asylum seekers are yet to receive the generous support and assistance for resettlement they need, particularly from the coalition of nations that were involved in the intervention in Afghanistan.
After that two-decade-long intervention, during which more than 2 million people from other countries served in Afghanistan, the current malaise betrays the propensity for links and connections between the Afghan people and the US, along with some of its allies, that other conflict zones simply do not have.
A number of Western countries have an almost personal affinity with Afghans, and are more cognizant of the Central Asian country’s woes than they are of problems in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Libya. It is these very ties, and an extraordinary level of commitment and dedication by numerous countries around the globe, that resulted in a massive influx of attention, aid and support last August.
Private donors, philanthropists and nonprofit organizations led or joined remarkable evacuation efforts. Countries stepped forward with offers to host Afghans, while Western governments coordinated arrivals, vetting procedures and makeshift resettlement initiatives.
It was a strange model for preempting what could have been a disastrous refugee crisis but it worked, and its relative successes can be used as a basis on which to formulate adaptive responses to similar crises in future.

Granted, necessity, self-preservation and the need to save face might have been the main motivations for this kind of unprecedented alignment of interests after a humiliating conclusion to a costly, two-decade-long intervention. After all, Western societies appeared fairly evenly split on the question of whether to exit Afghanistan completely or deploy more boots on the ground to halt the Taliban advance and protect what little gains had been made.
Regardless, the result was a positive demonstration of what the international community can accomplish when humanitarian needs supersede calls for disengagement in a fragmenting global order at a time when more countries are embracing insularity at the behest of populations wary of costly, rudderless overseas interventions.
However, the apathy, division, hostility and confusion that have overtaken discourse on the continued resettlement of refugees are incongruous with the West’s highly touted humanitarian commitments and accomplishments, and what soon awaits beleaguered Afghans as a result is a horrifying tragedy.

Punishing desperate Afghans and denying them aid is not only unsustainable, it is a harbinger of the worst-case scenario.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

It is a far cry from similar, relatively successful efforts dating as far back as the middle of the Cold War, when the aftermath of the Vietnam War and other conflicts in Southeast Asia resulted in nearly 3 million refugees who were eventually resettled between 1975 and the early 1990s in the US, Canada, Europe and parts of Asia.
Several other programs have also been quite successful but beginning in the mid-2010s, the global resettlement order appears to have become severely atrophied and crippled in its ability to absorb a massive influx of arrivals, a situation not helped by the growing list of trouble spots in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East, and Southwest Asia.
Western responses to refugee or migrant crises in many countries are now susceptible to changing national political tides that favor less involvement overseas and more of a focus on shoring up domestic priorities.
Worse yet, newly resettled, and even well-established, migrant communities are increasingly the scapegoats for escalating socioeconomic ills amid intensifying culture wars promoted by contrarian, anti-immigrant political forces.
These shifting tides continually discourage governments and lawmakers from initiating or fully participating in refugee-resettlement programs because the political costs of doing so increasingly outweigh any potential benefits of accepting new arrivals.
This unsettling reality that is taking root in developed countries is contrary to decades of research and documentation about the ways in which refugees and migrants enrich societies, enhance productivity, stimulate economies and complement labor markets.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that 85 percent of the more than 84 million forcibly displaced people in the world are hosted by middle-income or developing countries such as Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda. Appallingly, in a world where one in every 95 people have left their home countries as a result of conflict or persecution, the contribution of the West to stemming these flows is barely noticeable.
The commendable efforts to assist Afghan evacuees and refugees last year, and Ukrainians this year, demonstrate clearly that there is no shortage of international goodwill, capacity or willingness in the world to provide safe havens for those fleeing violence and persecution.
A lot of work still needs to be done, however, and the current intransigence is simply unacceptable when it is clear that responding generously and well to the extraordinary challenges in Afghanistan is in the best interests of an array of actors, including interventionist NATO members and neighboring countries that are now hosting large numbers of Afghans.
The ongoing Afghan refugee crisis is an opportunity for far-off powers to demonstrate their determination to honor stated commitments or to use their positions of leadership to corral support, in particular Germany, which currently holds the presidency of the G7. It is also an opportunity for the EU to demonstrate moral leadership and show its generosity, to preempt a potential repeat of the European migrant crisis in 2015 should desperate Afghans attempt the dangerous trek northwest in search of hope.
The international community must not rest on its laurels after Afghanistan or simply laud its responses to the crisis in Ukraine. It is paramount that it reinvigorate global refugee resettlement processes to better tackle the flow of Afghan refugees and those from any future conflict-related migration crises.
Host countries must prioritize safety, education, financial stability and community-building for refugees, which are key to any successful resettlement program, especially if they are tailored to better address the differing priorities among those seeking permanent relief.
On a broader level, the international community must also address well-known barriers to successful resettlement and enhance international cooperation, not only to absorb an influx of arrivals but to preempt such crises through smarter interventions.
Clearly, more boots on the ground have proven ineffectual at countering violent escalations of conflicts, especially when the government structures they prop up simply collapse within days of the inevitable withdrawal. Similarly, while measures such as punitive isolation, the halting of aid and the conditionalizing of humanitarian assistance might work as leverage in some conflict-prone areas, so far in Afghanistan they have served to compound humanitarian woes more than to nudge the Taliban toward tolerance of certain compromises that would be palatable to the West.
Punishing desperate Afghans and denying them aid is not only unsustainable, it is a harbinger of the worst-case scenario — which is strange because the world is clearly well prepared to deal with the current crisis but remains unwilling to do what is necessary as the clock runs out.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Twitter: @HafedAlGhwell