A NEW report by Human Rights Watch makes for a distressing read. Titled What Are You Doing Here?: Police Abuses Against Afghans in Pakistan, it paints a dismal picture of the worsening plight of the country’s Afghan refugee population.

Pakistan has hosted millions of refugees from Afghanistan since the late 1970s, and it now contains one of the largest displaced populations in the world: the UNHCR counts 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees and about one million undocumented Afghans living here.

True, the status of the refugees was never enviable to begin with; many were relegated to the margins of society to eke out a living as best as they could.

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Nevertheless, for the most part, the state’s approach towards the refugee population was at least civilised; even after the Soviets began pulling out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s, and the world’s focus shifted to other trouble spots around the globe, the state here did not vociferously demand their return and, instead, continued to spend considerable resources on this hapless lot.

Things appear to be changing now, especially in the wake of the Army Public School massacre in Peshawar last year, which led the state to introduce a slew of security measures designed to crack down on militancy and a religiously motivated narrative.

As documented by HRW, Afghan men are being arbitrarily arrested and beaten, their families harassed, their homes and places of work actively targeted — so much so that some are returning to Afghanistan despite the desperate conditions prevailing there.

This growing sentiment against the refugees, some of whom have been accused by law-enforcement agencies of having links with militant groups, is not incomprehensible: minority communities in other countries, too, are targeted for the perceived sins of a few among them.

But it is distressing that many people here are unconcerned that the Afghans — and even Pakistani Pakhtuns as this newspaper’s special report published on Wednesday shows — are being subjected to the same ethnic profiling that they themselves might encounter in the West in these times.

It is the state that leads the narrative. And if it continues to subject the Afghan refugees in Pakistan to discrimination, physical violence and intimidation, it will only encourage other communities to follow suit.

No crime should go unpunished. But holding a whole community responsible for the acts of some among its ranks is not the way to improve security conditions. The state should protect the refugees, not harass them.

Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2015