Taliban ii: 'clearly appalling'

How evil do you like your evil? Cricket rushes to decide...

Sshhhh… Can you hear it? Right there… the sound of cricketers being sold down the river by administrators, board members and politicians trying to work something out: exactly how evil do they like their evil to be before it’s politik to do something about it? In less than one month, the players will be the ones in front of television cameras and microphones being asked difficult questions that they should not have to answer.

Yes, the Taliban are back (well, as of three years ago), the Afghan women’s cricket team is no more (again, as of three years ago) and a story that I began to think about writing on Tuesday morning has already, in the hours since, twisted this way and that, refusing to lie still. Why is this happening now? Is it the creeping proximity of England’s Champions Trophy group tie with Afghanistan? Or the re-emergence of a Times newspaper piece by Janice Turner headlined Time To Confront The Taliban’s Gender Apartheid? A campaign on X? Some other reason? In the end, who knows why tipping points tip, but that is what’s happening.

To recap: five days ago I wrote a pretty gentle substack post, essentially a mea culpa about having only just read the piece mentioned above, which the Times website had re-run as part of its Best of 2024 selection. At the second time of asking, it seemed to be getting some traction.

The Times’ Lizzy Ammon ran a story that evening in which the ECB “reiterated” England’s commitment to playing the Champions Trophy tie in Lahore on February 16. Instead they would not be scheduling any bilateral series against Afghanistan in protest at the Taliban’s policy of Gender Apartheid.

That position held for a day or so, inviting the examination of this strange duality, this Schrodinger’s Cat of a stand against the Taliban and its methods. Were they too awful to be played bilaterally, but not quite dreadful enough to be boycotted when part of an ICC competition? Hey women of Afghanistan, we know you can’t look out of a window or make a sound in public, but this is the Champions Trophy we’re talking about, not a bilateral series – it’s the second-most prestigious men’s 50-over tournament in world cricket you know [well, you probably don’t know because you’re not allowed on the internet, but it is…]

Okay, that’s a cheap shot and ignores the invidious politics of a global sport in which the ECB are as ensnared as anyone else. But it’s also a classic piece of ECB fluff. What exactly were they sacrificing by not ‘scheduling’ a bilateral series against one of the teams that generates low ticket sales and little TV interest? The answer is nothing. It is no sacrifice at all, more like a win-win.

On January 6, 160 politicians signed a statement calling on England to boycott the Champions Trophy game. Among the signatories were figures as philosophically opposed as Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. With more than reiteration now required, ECB CEO Richard Gould responded with a lengthy statement that read in part: “While there has not been a consensus on further international action within the ICC, the ECB will continue to actively advocate for such measures. A coordinated, ICC-wide approach would be significantly more impactful than unilateral actions by individual members.”

The ECB would, Gould said, “explore all possible avenues for meaningful change” while “acknowledging there are diverse perspectives” on the issue within the ICC [decoded for those not inside cricket: India has zero interest in any kind of action, and India are very important to the ECB].

Was that enough? Would that do? Will it all stop now?

No. A few hours later, comment from the Prime Minister himself, Keir Starmer, a man who had spent the previous 24 hours under heavy fire from Elon Musk over his handling of historic sexual abuse cases involving Pakistani grooming gangs and was probably in no mood to sort out some piffling cricket organisation.

Starmer took the only viable political line available, at least the only line that might stop all of this rebounding onto the players when they rock up in Pakistan for the game: he called on the ICC to “deliver on its own rules.”

“The erosion of women’s and girls’ rights by the Taliban is clearly appalling,” he said. “We’ll work with the ECB on this issue, we’re in contact with them. Ultimately this is a matter for the ICC in relation to the Champions Trophy.

“We should remember that Afghanistani cricket for a long time has been a beacon of hope for the Afghanistani people. It’s terrible the way in which the women’s team has been suppressed. This issue in relation to the erosion of women’s and girls’ rights by the Taliban is clearly a bigger issue than cricket. The focus here shouldn’t be on the cricketers, but on the Taliban.”

So, from three years of nothing to a statement from the Prime Minister in six days. But what is really happening?

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A day after the Substack post, I had an email from Roman Abasy. He is a former member of the Afghanistan Taekwondo team and an Asian Games medallist, an elite athlete evacuated from Afghanistan to Australia in 2022. “Since then,” he wrote, “I have been working to raise awareness about the challenges Afghan women and girls face under the Taliban regime, particularly focusing on the intersection of politics and sports.”

He sent some links. One was to a film of Rashid Khan on a video call to Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban’s Foreign Minister.

Another was to two still images of various Afghan team members with Afghanistan Cricket Board Chairman Mirwais Ashraf and Taliban figures including Anas Haqqani, the brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s Minister of Interior. Roman went on: “The Haqqanis are listed on the FBI’s most-wanted list for international terrorism, and they are responsible for policies that deny Afghan women their fundamental rights, including participation in sports and access to education.”

The images support several UK media reports, including Janice Turner’s original Times piece, that the Taliban are using cricketers for propaganda.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Liew wrote yesterday: “High-ranking Taliban officials have posted photos with the team at official functions, called senior players to congratulate them after wins, allowed games to be shown on big screens in public parks to a grateful male-only audience. This is politics: how could it not be? Cricket is uniquely popular among the young Pashtun men who form the backbone of the Taliban’s appeal. This is the only reason the fun police have allowed it to continue: this team is now essentially a client outfit, a PR offensive, a form of cricketing diplomacy.”

The regime’s closeness to the cricket team is designed to play inside Afghanistan, but also in India, where the Modi government, while not officially recognising the Afghan government, has been building bridges for pragmatic geo-political reasons. As Liew reported, the Afghanistan board released a statement thanking India for their “continuous support” after Afghanistan reached the World T20 semi-final last year.

I messaged my friend and team-mate Peter Frankopan, who, handily, is Professor of Global History at Oxford, and asked what he thought was happening.

“Of course some players may have sympathies with the Taliban, but for the most part it will be pragmatic to turn up at things like this,” he replied. “For one thing, the players have families in Afghanistan and keeping them safe is a priority. Not showing up, or making a stand, may put them in danger as the Taliban aren’t exactly warm and cuddly when challenged. Equally, allowing themselves to be used for positive propaganda can help improve conditions at home.

“So either the ICC bans Afghanistan or if they don’t, it shouldn’t be up to England cricketers to face personal judgement calls on this.

“The big line, I think, is that the Taliban have not been recognised as the legitimate Government of Afghanistan. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria do so. So I would be asking the ICC and ECB if the Afghan team are a team in exile, or [if not] how a sanctioned state is allowed to take part in international events. Shouldn’t Afghanistan be like Russia in the Olympics and have no flag/demarcation? I’d think that was not a bad idea…”

Peter makes a wider point about sport that I think plays here, too. Much has changed since the South Africa boycott that began in the 1970s. Sport is no longer a pure force, a noble form with the power to speak moral truth. Rivers of dirty money run through it. Self interest and corruption is everywhere (not least in English sport). It might be impossible to find anyone entirely free from taint. So what weight can the England cricket team bring to bear? What use would a protest be anyway, if the Taliban simply paint it as more Western hypocrisy?

Except that cricket is all that’s left. It’s the single thread that joins the Taliban to any sort of attention that it can’t just ignore, at least without taking a few more steps backwards into ideology and perhaps provoking its fan base of young men.

The South Africa boycott boiled down to this: the brutal oppression of human beings because of their race. The Afghanistan boycott boils down to this: the brutal oppression of human beings on grounds of their sex. It is utterly fundamental. It goes beyond politics, beyond ideology, beyond trade, beyond money. It’s such a bare choice between right and wrong it somehow demands to be made.

England and possibly Australia not playing Afghanistan next month will not ruin the Champions Trophy. One of them may still win it. Or perhaps Afghanistan will. It’s not going to be a Nelson Mandela walk to freedom moment either way. But at some point, someone has to refuse to swap their seat on a bus, or decline to step forward and be inducted into an army, because you never know where those things might lead, especially in a world that pivots on a digital pinhead.

The ECB has a chance to stick its neck out, to take one for the team, to stop worrying about what everyone else thinks for once. They can wonder all they like about why this is happening now and not three years ago, or last year, or last week, and why it’s happening to them. But it is, and as a member of cricket’s Big Three, they are weighty enough not to fail here. Afghanistan’s players are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. England’s players shouldn’t be left with any choice.

Read more about Roman Abasy’s campaign here.

And Peter Frankopan’s essential substack on world events, Global Threads, is here.