The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has triggered global concerns about a new wave of refugees, with shocking scenes of desperate people trying to escape from Kabul airport reinforcing the idea of a migration crisis.
The moral panic over migration generates a politics of crisis, which in turn legitimizes the intensification of ‘exceptional’ measures aimed at securing Europe’s borders. The militarized response by Western states to the human misery unfolding at Kabul airport should be understood in this broader context of crisis and policing. This state of exception has generated a perverse, orientalist representation of the country, centred around the idea that only the US military and its NATO allies stand between Afghan civilians and Taliban barbarity.
This crisis-based reading of mobility through emergency is based on a historically inaccurate understanding of migration patterns in the region, which predates war and Western military intervention – or the ‘return’ of Taliban to power. A different political imagination is needed in this moment of ‘emergency’, one that offers the possibility of thinking about migration beyond the limits of humanitarian crisis. Although the present reality is grim enough, it is important to remember that Afghans migrate for reasons other than war or Taliban repression. The Taliban say that the war has ended and, as the security situation hopefully stabilizes, it is possible that Afghans will resume the regional patterns of migration that have long been key to life and livelihoods in rural households throughout Afghanistan.
