Talk:Afghan diaspora

Constant reverting
People (virtually only anonymous IP's) have to stop constantly reverting the article based on single newspaper references or personal opinions. Bring it here to the talk page and reach a consensus if you think that what you have to bring deserves to change the current article setup (WP:CON). It's getting a nuisance and if it continues like this, we'll have to bring it to WP:ANI. Let's not bring it to that point. - LouisAragon (talk) 05:01, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * It is you who is vandalizing this page, removing primary sources and deleting credible refs. I just went through the history of the article and found out that you are trying to push your POV by deleting refs and editing the article, while providing no supporting sources. Therefore I put the refs back in and reverted your attempt to push your POV in this article. I will watch this page as well as other pages you are editing from now on, and the next time you try to delete refs, vandalize the articles and push your POV, I will raise up this matter with admins. Consider this as a warning. --103.10.197.130 (talk) 15:59, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * A discussion about this page is going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Deletion_of_refs_and_Pushing_POV

--103.10.197.130 (talk) 00:17, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Unreliable info
"In December 2014, there was a terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar by the Pakistani Taliban, and over 100 school children were killed. A few Afghans were involved. "

NO Afghans were involved in the Peshawar school attack, so this is clearly POV slander which will be removed. Akmal94 (talk) 12:40, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Citation needed
"In December 2014, there was a terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar by the Pakistani Taliban, and over 100 school children were killed. Following the attack, Afghan refugees in Pakistan began to encounter serious harassment and often were told to return to Afghanistan. There was a mass exodus of tens of thousands of refugees, which as of February 2015 was ongoing." - The second sentence about harassment does not have a citation and as the current repatriation of Afghan refugees from Afghanistan is one of the biggest issues for Afghan refugees, more information is needed about the mass exodus and its impacts. — Khgsu (talk) 20:20, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Removed table
Krzyhorse22 has removed the following table

As shown in the table below, the refugees (both legal and illegal) fled Afghanistan in four main waves:


 * Soviet war in Afghanistan (1978-89)
 * Civil War (1992–96)
 * Taliban Rule (1996–2001)
 * War in Afghanistan (2001–present)

On the number of Afghans in Iran
I changed the infobox's count of Afghans in Iran back to 2.5 million, despite that figure being significantly older than the previous estimate of 979,400. If you look at the reference, it is a count of all refugees in Iran, so it includes non-Afghan refugees and excludes non-refugee Afghans. The 2015 estimate seems to be closer to what this article is trying to list: the number of ethnic Afghans of any kind in Iran. There's further discussion of this issue at Talk:Afghans in Iran. Vahurzpu (talk) 16:49, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Afghan diaspora > Afghan refugees
When sourcing figues please note that the article is about the Afghan diaspora, that is all people abroad of (recent) Afghani ancestry which comprises more people than just Afghans abroad with a refugee status. Meaning official refugee figures are usually just a lower bound for the diaspora figures, which depending on the country can be sufficiently larger.--Kmhkmh (talk) 17:22, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Pakistan is sort of like North Korea when it comes to national security. It's difficult to believe that 1.6 million undocumented Afghan refugees (illegal aliens) would be freely roaming the country. In Pakistan all citizens of Afghanistan are categorically "refugees" except those who possess a valid Afghan passport with a valid Pakistani visa. Each refugee is registered for free in a national database and given a non-Pakistani ID card (Afghan Citizen Card). A person without such card gets arrested and put in jail for up to 5 years. Without the card a person cannot rent a hotel room, rent a house, travel between cities, open a bank account, receive money through Western Union, get treated at a hospital, or even send mail to anyone. Such person basically cannot do anything but spend time in jail. Where are the 1.6 million undocumented Afghan citizens? In which city or town? The UNHCR says 4,381,907 went back to their native Afghanistan (as of 10 Jun 2021). Does that mean nothing to you? You cite randomly-picked news reports in which a person makes a passing reference to 3 million Afghan refugees but does not explain anything about the millions who went back. The infobox should have better sources for the 1.6 million undocumented Afghan refugees.--39.41.73.74 (talk) 21:29, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
 * First of all Pakistan is nothing like Nortk Korea and the control of various tribal and border region by the central government is rather weak despite the recently build fences, so what you claim to be implausible doesn't look impausible to me at all.
 * Secondly we compile what the most reliable and reputable sources state and not what we personally think might the real figure might be. Plenty of sources give the 3 million figure for the current number of Afghanis in Pakistan including the 2 currently cited in the article (one of them is by an academic researcher/expert on Pakistan and Afghanistan) and we yet have to see a source here that explicitly disputes the 3 million figure.--Kmhkmh (talk) 20:58, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It's impossible for 1.6 million citizens of Afghanistan to live in hiding in Pakistan. That many people form a big city. The 1.4 million registered Afghan citizens only reside among the Pashtuns. Most Pakistan is non-Pashtun, and all Pakistanis are known to snitch on illegal aliens. There are no reports of mass arrests of illegal Afghans. There is simply no kind of evidence to support this 1.6 million illegal Afghans (ghosts) hiding in Pakistan. The person you praised is nothing.
 * Like North Korea, Pakistan is controlled by its military and the whole world knows that. Like North Korea, nobody can enter Pakistan without a visa or a national ID card. So OK, you want the world to believe that roughly 1,600,000 citizens of Afghanistan are hiding inside Pakistan from Pakistan's government. I'm saying this is some kind of a scandal. Such scandals are nothing new in Pakistan. One of the reasons why Pakistanis may prefer a much higher number is to be credited by the international community. Another is to blame Afghans for everything bad happening in their country, just like Americans doing this against Mexicans. The third is to obtain extra millions of dollars from the international community. The fourth is to express to the world that it already has way too many refugees. And the fifth is to put political pressure on Afghanistan.
 * The border regions have already been thoroughly combed by Pakistan's military (village by village), see Operation Zarb-e-Azb, and Pakistan enacted a very tough law in 2012 which calls for the immediate arrest and deportation of everyone who is inside the country illegally. That law obviously applies to the 1.6 million citizens of Afghanistan (ghosts) that you believe exist. I'm aware that there are countless online statements about the 3 million. But those are unverified general statements or expressions made by Pakistanis and they refer to something that existed in the past. We all know that there WERE 3 million in the past but that number obviously cannot be the same if 4.3 million have already returned to Afghanistan. Afghans love their country the same way Pakistanis love their country. Everything that is available for them in Pakistan is available for them in Afghanistan. The whole world knows that Pakistan is not a safe or rich country where people flock to, it's one of the poor countries where crimes and disasters occur everywhere just like in Afghanistan. It's economy is in bad shape. Only small percent of the 220 million live comfortably. Most citizens can't afford basic things, and they flee to others countries like the Afghans.
 * If all the Afghans that carry the NADRA-issued cards move back to Afghanistan permanently, will you still claim in this article that there are 1.6 million Afghans in Pakistan? At that point who will be the one claiming that there are 1.6 million Afghan citizens inside Pakistan? In the United States there are over 6 million illegal aliens from Mexico and over 400,000 from India. These numbers are NOT added in Mexican Americans and Indian Americans. I'm sure you'll agree that those numbers are plausible. So why are we adding in the infobox here something that may be totally untrue?--39.41.79.238 (talk) 02:16, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry but all of that is mostly irrelevant from Wikipedia perspective as it is your personal assessment of the figures. What you need to provide is reputable source explicitly disputing the 3 million Afghans (or 1 to 1.5 Million unregistered Afghanis) for the 2019 to 2021 time frame. Short of that Wikipedia simply goes with the sources I provided, that is simply how wikipedia works (= what the project guidelines and policies mandate). Note a figure is not disputed or questionable for Wikipedia just because you personally doubt it for reasons that are convincing for you, instead you always need one or more reputable sources disputing that figure.


 * Wikipedia policy aside I don't really agree with your assessment of 1.5 million illegals being impossible for Pakistan either. Note that other countries than Pakistan do feature such figures (illegal immigrants in the US, Korean refugees in China, etc.)
 * --Kmhkmh (talk) 14:48, 23 August 2021 (UTC)