influence on young Afghans who had never known normal family
lives in Afghanistan and were disconnected from the channels of
socialisation through which the moderate dimensions of Afghan
life were replicated.
Pakistan as host of Afghan refugees
There was one further reason why Pakistan could not ignore the
Afghan imbroglio even had its leaders been minded to do so. The
porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan made
Afghanistan’s eastward neighbour a natural destination for Afghan
refugees (Maley, 1989a), who quit Afghanistan in their millions.
Muslims who abandon territory under atheist control are typically
labelledmuhajireen, since they emulate the emigration (hijra) of
the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, and
there is no dishonour associated with such movement. Measuring
the scale of the exodus was never an exact science, since some
refugees went unregistered while others registered more than once
(see Dupree, 1987; Dupree, 1988a). None the less, according to the
data of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), by the end of 1979, 600,000 refugees were
already outside Afghanistan, about two-thirds in Pakistan and the
remainder in Iran. By the end of 1980, the figure had risen to 1.9
million, and the total finally peaked, on 1 January 1990, at a stag-
gering 6.2 million, of whom an estimated 3,272,000 were in
Pakistan (Colville, 1997).
The refugees in Pakistan were for the most part ‘acute’ rather
than ‘anticipatory’ refugees, since they were driven to flight by
‘great political changes’ and ‘movements of armies’ (Kunz, 1973:
132). However, their flight was the product of a myriad of individ-
ual decisions, rather than a shift en masse(Connor, 1987: 183–4).
The overwhelming majority of the refugees were Pushtuns
(Sliwinski, 1989a: 46), and their ethnic affinity with the majority
in the province of Pakistan to which they most readily fled – the
North-West Frontier Province – also aided their reestablishment in
exile, although this process was of course not without significant
The Development of Afghan Resistance 71