page_title: Afghans in Pakistan
section_title: History and migration
hierarchical_section_title: Afghans in Pakistan / History and migration
context_page_description: Afghans in Pakistan primarily constitute refugees who have fled wars in Afghanistan, but there are small numbers of Afghan asylum seekers, migrant workers, merchants, businesspeople, exchange students and diplomats. Most were born and raised in Pakistan and are under age 30, but are still considered citizens of Afghanistan. They are under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and have been given legal status in Pakistan until the end of 2017.
  The first wave of Afghan refugees to Pakistan began during the Soviet–Afghan War in the late 1970s. By the end of 2001, there were over four million. Most have returned to Afghanistan since 2002. The UNHCR reported in February 2017 that about 1.3 million registered Afghan citizens still remained in Pakistan, distributed as follows: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; Balochistan; Punjab; Sindh and Islamabad.
  They are primarily Afghanistan's Pashtuns, followed by Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Baloch and Turkmen. In March 2012, Pakistan banned visa extensions for all foreigners.
context_section_description: Afghans have migrated from Afghanistan to what is now Pakistan since at least the times of the Ghaznavids in the 10th century. Before the mid-19th century, Afghanistan was recognized as the Durrani Empire and ruled by a succession of Afghan kings with their capitals in Kandahar, Kabul, and Peshawar. In his 1857 review of John William Kaye's The Afghan War, Friedrich Engels described Afghanistan as:
   ... an extensive country of Asia ... between Persia and the Indies, and in the other direction between the Hindu Kush and the Indian Ocean. It formerly included the Persian provinces of Khorassan and Kohistan, together with Herat, Beluchistan, Cashmere, and Sinde, and a considerable part of the Punjab ... Its principal cities are Kabul, the capital, Ghuznee, Peshawer, and Kandahar.
  Interaction and migration by the region's native people were common. After the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the late-19th-century Durand Line demarcated the spheres of influence of British India's Mortimer Durand and the Afghan amir Abdur Rahman Khan. The single-page agreement in 1947 ending political interference beyond the frontier between Afghanistan and the British Indian Empire, inherited by Pakistan in 1947, divided the indigenous Pashtun and Baloch tribes.
  During the 1980s Soviet–Afghan War, many Afghans left their country. As a result of political unrest, mass arrests, executions and other human-rights violations and civil war, about three million Afghan refugees escaped to Pakistan and about two million to Iran. The migration began in December 1979 (when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with over 100,000 troops), and continued through the 1980s. In late 1988, about 3.3 million Afghan refugees were housed in 340 refugee camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). It was reported by The New York Times in November 1988 that about 100,000 refugees lived in Peshawar and more than two million lived in KP (known as the North-West Frontier Province at the time). On the outskirts of Peshawar, the Jalozai camp was one of the largest refugee camps in the NWFP.
  According to one researcher, the refugees were those "who came from politically prominent and wealthy families with personal and business assets outside Afghanistan; a small group who arrived with assets that they could bring with them such as trucks, cars and limited funds and who have done relatively well in Pakistan integrating into the new society and engaging successfully in commerce; those refugees who came from the ranks of the well-educated and include professionals such as doctors, engineers and teachers; refugees who escaped with household goods and herds of sheep, cattle and yaks but for the most part must be helped to maintain themselves; the fifth and the largest group, constituting about 60 per cent of the refugees, are ordinary Afghans who arrived with nothing and are largely dependent on Pakistan and international efforts for sustenance."
  After the September 11 attacks, when US-led forces began bombing al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan, a small number of Afghans fled into Pakistan. They included foreign militant groups (al-Qaeda), local Taliban members and Afghan civilians who feared being caught up in the bombings. By the end of 2001 there were about five million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, including those born in Pakistan during the previous 20 years. The Afghan diaspora in Pakistan was the largest group of Afghans living outside the country at the time. It was projected that the number would increase due to the US-led intervention.
caption: The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is the Durand Line. Nearly all Afghan refugee camps are located in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) (in blue).
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