From today's Australian.

AFGHAN refugees are returning in unexpectedly high numbers to their war-ravaged homeland, with more than 22,000 fleeing Pakistan's rising insurgency and employment squeeze for an uncertain future across the border in the past month.
Close to 1000 Afghans a day have filed through the UNHCR's two reprocessing centres -- in the restive Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Quetta -- since the UN refugee agency reopened its voluntary repatriation program late last month.

The latest figures come just a fortnight after the Australian government announced it was suspending all Afghan and Sri Lankan refugee visa applications to try to dissuade a growing number of asylum-seekers arriving by boat. That decision is unlikely to have been a motivating factor for the thousands of families who have chosen to return to Afghanistan.

The UNHCR said that, over the past month, returning refugees had cited rising living costs, fewer jobs and the difficult security situation in Pakistan as key reasons to go back to Afghanistan.

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A far smaller number said they were encouraged by the improving security situation in Afghanistan.

More than 70 per cent of all Afghan returnees are from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North West Frontier Province), on the border with Pakistan's tribal areas, where the military is waging a fierce battle with Taliban and al-Qa'ida militants for control.

UNHCR Pakistan spokesman Mengesha Kebede said: "Whatever their specific reasons, the 22,000 people who opted to return in the past month -- marshalling their families through our repatriation centres and loading their worldly possessions on to huge trucks -- will need all the resilience they've shown as refugees to rebuild their lives at home.

"Afghanistan has absorbed one-fifth of its population in returning refugees over the past nine years and many still face shortages of housing, jobs, schools, and clinics as well as security problems."

More than five million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban government in late 2001, increasing the population by more than 20 per cent.

Only a fraction of that number has done so since 2006, when security again deteriorated.

Many who did return faced violent struggles over land, an increasing scarcity of resources and jobs and a Taliban insurgency that now threatens to topple the state if the US and NATO military surge fails to halt its advance.

In its latest assessment, the UNHCR warned that "while reconstruction and development efforts have advanced, security has become more problematic and Afghanistan's capacity to absorb more returns is limited without further targeted support".