Friday, September 28, 2001
I am shocked to announce that the boffins in Lahore have fulfilled one of their promises. A key plank of the new strategy for revamping domestic cricket was to introduce overseas players and the PCB, Allah bless their cotton salwars, have exceeded all expectations. They have recruited a whole overseas team for the forthcoming Quaid-e-Azam Trophy.

The application was received at an unexpected time (last Wednesday, in fact, as the world teetered on the brink of war), but the Afghanistan cricket team has been welcomed into the tournament with open arms. It is incredible that this request emerged from Kabul at the same time as Afghanistan's clerics dwelt on matters of at least equal import, such as what they planned to do with Osama bin Laden.

But it is no surprise that Pakistan, the only country to retain diplomatic links with the Taliban, should agree to Afghanistan's request. The PCB sponsored Afghanistan's successful application for affiliate membership of ICC, and Pakistan has already hosted the Afghan national team for friendly matches.

ICC has announced that it will debate Afghanistan's continued membership at its next meeting in October. While it is easy to make moral judgments about why Afghanistan should be shunned by the international community, I think it would be a mistake to reach this unhelpful and unnecessary conclusion.

Making moral judgments is something the ECB chief executive Tim Lamb does not want to do, although Nasser Hussain is surely more correct when he says that moral judgments cannot be avoided. Indeed there are many Test countries that you could make moral judgments about. All the south-Asian nations have major blemishes on their human-rights record. Even Australia has been criticised for its treatment of Aborigines and, along with England, it might also have questions to answer from humanitarian lawyers about the treatment of asylum-seekers.

The crucial question is, where do you draw the line? A system like the apartheid regime in South Africa deserved a moral stance from the international community. It was right to impose sporting sanctions because cricket and rugby were so dear and pivotal to white South African society. They were sports exclusively enjoyed by the oppressors. Sporting isolation was an important factor in bringing about reform.

Until last week you could have made a convincing case for England's tour of Zimbabwe to be scrapped (as was argued a few weeks ago on Wisden.com), but Robert Mugabe's recent concessions make the tour more justifiable. It would also be unfair to punish white Zimbabweans, who want the tour, as they are among the oppressed.

Before September 11, Afghanistan might have been excluded from cricket's community on the basis that it discriminates against women and beheads murderers in Kabul's soccer stadium. But it wasn't. The United States executes murderers too, and Saudi Arabia is the regime closest to the Taliban in its interpretation of Islam. ICC would not dream of spurning either of those two rich nations.

Yet the world has changed since the terrorist attacks, you might argue. Yes, but that doesn't make it right to further isolate Afghans. The Taliban reluctantly allowed cricket because cricket fever gripped the Pushtun (Pushtu-speaking) tribes of Pakistan after Imran Khan led Pakistan to victory in the 1992 World Cup.

The Taliban and most Afghans are Pushtuns. That interest spread west across the Khyber Pass and is kept alive by Shahid Afridi, who belongs to a prominent Pushtun tribe. Indeed many Pushtuns watch cricket in Pakistan simply for Afridi's take-no-prisoners approach, and march out of the stadium in disgust the minute he is out. Cricket was the only sport that I saw being played on the war-ravaged streets of Kabul when I visited in 1998.

It is the Afghan people who have fallen for cricket, not the Taliban. Why deny a people who have suffered at the hands of the Russians, civil war, and then the Taliban, any escape from their dismal lives?

War, poverty, and isolation have created the Afghanistan of today, and allowed the Taliban to prosper. Relieving (not deepening) those burdens will pull the country away from extremism and make the world safer. Malcolm Gray is on record as saying that any country that has a cricket organisation and is sponsored by an ICC member will qualify for affiliate membership. There is little need to rethink Afghanistan's membership. It will achieve nothing. In the grand scheme of things it is an embarrassingly minor issue.

By addressing it ICC will try to demonstrate its relevance to our modern world. Instead it will simply expose its irrelevance to the real issues that face international cricket.

Kamran Abbasi, born in Lahore, brought up in Rotherham, is assistant editor of the British Medical Journal.

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