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As the U.S. pulls back, more Afghans descend into joblessness
KABUL — In a dusty corner of the Afghan capital, stinking of sewage and crammed with makeshift dwellings, families arrive every day in cargo trucks that dump their possessions in a heap. They are among 82,000 unregistered Afghan refugees who have been pushed out of neighboring Pakistan since January — along with about 150,000 workers deported from Iran over the same period — and many have come home to nothing.
“Life was hard in Pakistan, but it was a life. Here we don’t know anyone, and there is no work,” said Shomaila Malik, 45, who arrived in March. Her husband, a laborer, is disabled by kidney disease, and their two young sons scavenge all day for scrap metal to buy food. “They should be in school, but we must depend on them finding Pepsi cans,” Malik said. “If we could afford to go back to Pakistan tomorrow, we would.”
At the other end of the city, hundreds of glum, anxious men start lining up after midnight outside the government passport office, clutching documents in plastic folders. By 7 each morning, when the agency opens, the line of passport applicants has grown to more than 1,000. Many are unemployed and say they are determined to leave the country to find a job, any job, in whatever country they can reach.
“I never expected to leave my country, but the situation is getting worse day by day,” said Sahel Sakhzada, 26, whose small cellphone shop went out of business recently. A dozen other men, some in patched and stained work clothes, nodded in agreement. “Everyone in this line is in the same position,” Sakhzada said. “There is no security, no investment, no future here now. The only hope is to leave.”
Both sides of this human tide — the influx of needy returnees with nowhere to turn and the surge of passport applicants hoping for a way out — are symptoms of Afghanistan’s economic stagnation and overwhelmed government, which have left millions of people to fend for themselves at a time of deepening uncertainty.
Besieged by insurgent attacks, crippled by corruption and shocked by the end of a vast international war effort and its accompanying development boom, the year-old administration of President Ashraf Ghani is struggling against terrible odds to keep the country afloat. The official unemployment rate is about 35 percent — four times as high as it was in 2013 — and economists here say it is closer to 50 percent when the large numbers of underemployed are added.
The phenomenon is visible across the capital, where tens of thousands of men gather each morning at intersections, bus stops and bridges, hoping for a day’s work. As the formal economy shrinks, men who had steady sales or office jobs have been reduced to waiting on the corners with bundles of tools, competing with the chronically unemployed for a stint building walls or digging ditches.
“Two years ago, everything was going well. Now it has been two months and four days since I found any work,” said a well-dressed former government accountant named Nehmatullah as he stood beside his bicycle on a corner in west Kabul, a sack of masonry tools on the seat. “I have six children, and I can no longer support them. Since the new government came, security has deteriorated and jobs have vanished. I am angry at the government, I am angry at everything, and I don’t know what to do.”
ehmatullah’s tenuous perch in the informal economy is only a few blocks from the controlled chaos of the passport office, where men like him are contemplating more desperate leaps into the unknown. The surrounding blocks are crammed with food stalls and sidewalk photocopiers, and police constantly prod and bark at the slow-moving lines of applicants.
According to officials at the Interior Ministry, which runs the agency, every day more than 5,000 people visit the office and about 2,000 receive new passports, the most that can be produced daily. Part of the reason for the crush is the government’s decision last year to annul all old, handwritten passports and require all potential travelers to obtain new computerized ones. So far, about 500,000 new passports have been issued.
The agency director, Brig. Gen. al-Haj Syed Saboor, noted that most Afghans have no need for passports and that many who get them may never be able to use them.
“A passport is nothing without a visa. A lot of people don’t know that,” Saboor said in an interview, shaking his head. “Without a visa, you can only get to Pakistan or Iran. Beyond that, who knows? People who want to go to Turkey or India or Europe, for work or education or business or medical treatment, they all need visas. That is something I cannot help them with.”
In conversations with the men waiting outside the agency last week, almost none said they were planning a temporary trip, while more than a dozen said they were preparing to leave indefinitely. Few Afghan women apply for individual passports or travel alone; those who do are processed in a separate area.
Several laborers said they had been deported from Iran and wanted to return. Several educated men said they were hoping to find better prospects in Turkey or farther abroad, perhaps Dubai. Some, like a penniless farmer from Nimruz province, had no plans at all, merely a vague wish to leave.
“I just want to reach a safe place, a safe country. Then I will do any job I can get,” said Jamshid Aziz, 31, a former flower shop owner and security guard who said he hoped to travel to Iran and then somehow find his way to Europe. “I’ll sell my family land, get a loan, do whatever I can. I need a safe and stable place where my kids can live.”
One problem with such dreams is that they often backfire. Many European countries have started regularly deporting illegal Afghan immigrants, many of whom have paid huge sums to smugglers. Several months ago, the Afghan government formally asked countries including Britain, Norway and Germany to slow these forced repatriations, but officials said chartered planeloads of returnees still land in Kabul every few weeks.
Islamuddin Jurat, a spokesman for the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, said many Afghans are “taking huge risks to leave, by forest and jungle and sea, but they end up frustrated and sent back. We have appealed to these countries to slow down, because we have no jobs or means to support them, but they keep sending them anyway.” He said the government has started a campaign to warn people of the risks of illegal emigration, to little avail.
“With 40 percent of people jobless, it is hard to persuade them,” he said.
Meanwhile, streams of returnees continue to pour across the eastern border from Pakistan — where police stepped up pressure on undocumented Afghans to leave after a school massacre in December — and across the western border from Iran, where each week authorities deport busloads of Afghan laborers whose work visas have expired.
Even for families who have made only a 100-mile journey from Pakistan, readjustment can be a shock. Many longtime refugees raised their families there, found steady employment and had no plans to come home to a country still ravaged by poverty and war. Now, with Pakistani authorities pushing them out and no official Afghan programs to resettle them, life has become a daily struggle in an alien land.
Mohammed Musa, 17, worked as a carpet weaver in Pakistan for at least five years, but his family said police began harassing them several months ago and they moved back to Kabul. Musa said the work was exhausting and cramped but earned him a steady wage. Now all he can find are odd jobs loading carts in produce markets for pennies an hour. His mother, Nikbakht, said Musa is frustrated that he can’t do more to help her and his four younger siblings. Their father is ill and cannot work.
“My son keeps begging me to let him go overseas and find some work,” Nikbakht said, looking worriedly at the muscular teenager. “I don’t want him to go. It is much too dangerous. But we have nobody to help us, and we have a lot of debt. We still owe the truck driver who brought us.” She sighed. “My son hates being jobless. Maybe one day he will just go.”
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