The campaign to categorise Afghanistan as a "safe country" is misguided and perpetuates the cycle of displacement for Afghans in Europe, Iran and Pakistan.

AVA- Located in the heart of south-central Asia, Afghanistan is widely considered to be one of the world’s poorest nations. It also has the unfortunate reputation as a country with a high-degree of political instability – a nation where millions upon millions of refugees have originated from over the past few decades.
Oddly, the last few years several nations around the world have begun to categorise Afghanistan as a ‘safe country’. Courts in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany have declared that individuals from Afghanistan are no longer in danger and should be returned to their homeland.
This has been formalized through the inking of a repatriation agreement between Turkey and Afghanistan signed in early April 2018. Since this agreement was finalised, more than 7,000 individuals have been returned to Afghanistan with many more undoubtedly in the pipeline.
These actions raise the obvious question – is Afghanistan really safe enough for people to return?
During a recent trip to Kabul to meet with various international organizations, national civil society bodies and local NGOs, there was one key element that permeated every one of my discussions i.e. the overwhelming feeling that Afghanistan is still not suitable, nor ready, for refugees to return.
Whether it was talking to international organisations about the severe challenges that returnees face when accessing the Tazkira (national ID card), to returnee internally displaced persons (IDPs) discussing how ISIS (Daesh) or the Taliban now occupies their villages – these problems are both complex and multi-faceted. 
From these discussions alone, it was blindingly obvious that the security and political situation in Afghanistan means that refugees cannot be guaranteed a safe place to return to.
It’s important to highlight that it’s not just European nations that are mobilising resources for the return of Afghans, but it’s some of Afghanistan’s closest neighbors as well.
In the first five months of 2018 alone, an astonishing 284,000 Afghans have returned from Iran. While it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how many were forcibly deported, how many decided to “spontaneously return” (and I use that term very loosely), and how many were coerced due to hostile living conditions, the fact remains that these figures are huge.
Amazingly—despite more than a quarter of a million people having returned—almost no international media outlets have touched upon this issue in any meaningful manner.
In fact, a simple Google search, a very rudimentary litmus test of determining media coverage in 2018, yielded reports and statements that are exclusively from civil society or NGOs.
By comparison, when looking at the number of officially registered refugees that have returned to Afghanistan from Iran in 2018 as determined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are a grand total of 836 people.
According to UNHCR, almost all of these returning refugees are young males, looking to acquire new identification documents before returning to Iran to commence their tertiary studies.
It’s no surprise that these two sets of numbers simply do not mesh. Whilst the remaining 283,164 may not officially be declared refugees due to a lack of official registration status, they have undoubtedly been living in refugee-like situations for years or even decades.
Throughout my time in Afghanistan, I was particularly curious to learn about people’s migration experiences. Were returnees born in Afghanistan or were they born and raised in a neighboring country to Afghan parents? Why did they return? What challenges (if any) had they faced? What would they do next?
It was during a visit to an IDP camp in Kabul, that I came to learn of the incredibly complex nature of people’s migration experiences.
Perhaps the most striking was a young man by the name of Nazir* who was originally from Herat Province. Born in Afghanistan, he had left for Pakistan with his family when he was a young boy to escape the oppressive Taliban regime. At the age of 26, he decided to return to Afghanistan. While this ostensibly appeared to me to be ‘voluntary’, the young man was quick to point out that the living conditions he experienced in Pakistan provided him with no choice but to leave.
Constant harassment from the local police, the imminent threat of deportation, and a crucial lack of livelihood opportunities, returning to Afghanistan was his only option. Asked what his future held, he inferred that it most likely meant remaining in the IDP camp until Afghanistan improved. With no access to his family’s land, and facing severe threats to his personal security in his village, he decided that life in an IDP camp is the only tenable option at present.
For many refugees, returning to Afghanistan does not provide them with any durable solution by which they can re-establish their lives. Instead, many are forced to subsequently internally migrate, like Nazir, or potentially engage in onward-migration to another country.
In the case of those returned from Iran, a number of these will certainly make their way back to Iran to reunite with friends, family and loved ones. For others, they may make the journey further east to Turkey, or perhaps even further afield again.
The ongoing and future return of displaced persons to Afghanistan is complex. It is not an issue that cannot be solved by simply deporting hundreds of thousands of people in just a few months. Instead, the situation requires long-term engagement and support from a wide range of stakeholders.
Therefore, it is time that the international community breaks free from years of “Afghanistan fatigue” and seriously commits to supporting these populations where they are, up to and until conditions inside the country are conducive for people to return both in safety and with dignity.