is no longer seen as a viable option for those seeking protection abroad. Asylum acceptance rates have also dropped sharply and an EU declaration signed in October 2016 has paved the way for at least 80,000 Afghans who have had their applications rejected to be returned.243 A major campaign has also been underway in Pakistan to push Afghan refugees back home. More than 600,000 registered and undocumented returnees arrived in eastern Afghanistan between July and December 2016. Asylum space in Pakistan and Iran has been shrinking for some time, and new refugee registration exercises have not been conducted in either country since 2007.244 These large-scale returns, whether forced, spontaneous or assisted, have prompted UN agencies and NGOs to warn that significant secondary displacement is likely, and the humanitarian country team for Afghanistan has said this will create considerable needs. 245 Undocumented and involuntary returnees are at particular risk, because they tend not to be monitored or assisted, but rather fall off humanitarian agencies’ radar soon after returning. As such they are far less likely to reintegrate into their communities.246 62 GRID 2017 Afghanistan’s national policy on IDPs is clear that returnees, including those coming back from outside the country, should be counted as internally displaced unless they are able to settle sustainably in their places of origin.247 So far, however, there has been no concerted effort to assess the impact of large scale returns on the number of IDPs in the country, nor has it been possible to record the true extent of secondary displacement more generally. There has also been a sharp increase in the number of IDPs in Afghanistan in recent years. Every province currently either produces or is hosting IDPs, and the country is already struggling to respond to their protection and assistance needs.248 Addressing those of the huge influx of returning refugees in the east of the country and a predicted surge in 2017 in the number of refused asylum seekers coming back from Europe will be a major challenge.