The Afghanistan squad saw no reason to cancel their Pakistan tour
Luke Harding in Peshawar
In a scruffy cricket ground in the frontier town of Peshawar, a group of young men with beards are playing cricket. Things are not going well in their homeland: there is drought, famine and American bombardment. On the cricket pitch it looks equally bleak for Afghanistan: they are 125 all out.
“They have very good fielders and very good spinners but their batting is not very good,” the Pakistani umpire, Mian Aslam, admitted in the dressing room over tea.
In one of the most surreal episodes so far in the war on terrorism, Afghanistan’s national cricket team this week took on a Pakistani side from the dusty town of Nowshera.
The fixture had been arranged well before the United States decided to drop hundreds of tons of bombs on Kabul and other Afghan cities.
Since the country has been at war for more than two decades, few of the players saw any reason to cancel. “Inshallah [God willing] we will win this game,” Afghanistan captain Allah Dad Noory said, an unlikely proposition since Nowshera’s swaggering batsmen had by early afternoon already put on 93/2.
These days, there are few forms of pleasure in Afghanistan. The Taliban have banned high-heeled shoes, kite flying, television and music. But the ultra-prudish regime has so far discovered nothing immoral in cricket, a game recently imported back into Aghanistan by a generation of young men who grew up in Pakistani refugee camps.
“The Taliban allow us to wear cricket whites,” Javed Ali (17), one of the team’s players, said. “Football is very popular too. The Taliban let footballers wear shorts, as long as they are baggy.”
Ali, an all-rounder, said he had left his home in Jalalabad last week. “A lot of people are leaving because they are afraid of US attacks,” he said. “The poor people especially do not know where to go. We have no connection with the Taliban. I’m very sad because a lot of our Muslim brothers have been killed in these attacks.”
Sitting in front of the clubhouse, Ali recounted how worshippers had been killed when a bomb hit a Jalala-bad mosque. With bombs falling, and the Nowshera fixture only days away, Ali decided it was time to flee. “Pakistan had closed its border, so I climbed over the mountains. I stuffed a bag full of clothes, including my cricket whites,” he said. “I sat in the back of a pick-up truck. My leg was hanging off the end when a second truck bumped into us. That’s why I’m not playing now.”
In Jalalabad, Ali had given up studying to concentrate on cricket. “All the subjects are Muslim subjects,” he complained. There are 240 cricket associations in Afghanistan, including one in Kandahar, the home of the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. Banned from the Olympic games, Afghanistan was admitted into the International Cricket Council in June as an associate member, a minor triumph.
During the Taliban’s five-year reign in Kabul, sport has improbably flourished. Last summer the Taliban re-opened Afghanistan’s only swimming pool, in the grounds of the Intercontinental Hotel. In a city starved of entertainment, the pool was an instant hit. But the capital’s football stadium is also used on Fridays as the venue for public executions, a grim reminder that even innocent pastimes in Afghanistan can manifest a darker side.
After tea, Afghanistan go back to field, hurtling towards inevitable defeat.