Taliban laud cricket team’s success but where are the women, question activists

From its status as a sport played by Afghans living in refugee camps in northwest Pakistan to the Afghan team securing a place in the semi-finals of the ICC Twenty20 World Cup, cricket certainly has come a long way in Afghanistan.

As the Afghan men’s team beat Bangladesh by just eight runs in a match played in faraway St Vincent in the Caribbean, impromptu celebrations broke out in cities across Afghanistan on Tuesday. The match, which began at 5 am Kabul time, was shown on large screens in many cities and the celebrations continued until well into the night.

Perhaps for the first time since the Taliban takeover nearly two years ago, people danced and played musical instruments during public celebrations on the streets of Jalalabad.

The Taliban setup, which has been in power in Kabul since mid-2021, and is not particularly known for the promotion of sports, was quick to get into the act of joining the public to fete the members of the victorious team.

The Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) posted a video on X of the Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi congratulating Rashid Khan, the captain of the Afghan team, for reaching the semi-finals and wishing the team further success. In his brief remarks, Muttaqi noted that the Taliban had “kept cricket away from politics”.

Suhail Shaheen, a leading Taliban spokesman and head of the organisation’s political office in Qatar, told HT: “Our players learnt cricket in Pakistan and they developed in India and are still developing. So, we are at the level which all the world is witnessing now.” Shaheen even suggested that games such as cricket and football could keep youngsters away from drugs.

“We have four million drug addicts in the country which is the result of the past 20 years. The government is handling that by treating them. Cricket, football etc is extremely important for us to keep our youth engaged in constructive activities,” he said in a post on X.

Shaheen was referring to the way in which a generation of young Afghans, who sought refuge in Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, first took up cricket while living in camps in the northwestern parts of the neighbouring country.

While several former Pakistani players, such as former captain Rashid Latif, played a role in training the Afghan team, India too played a key part in popularising the sport as part of its development cooperation programme that saw New Delhi pouring billions of dollars into creating infrastructure, including stadiums.

In 2016, the Shahid Vijay Singh Pathik Sports Complex in Greater Noida became the home ground for the Afghan cricket team after they decided to shift from Sharjah. In 2018, after Afghanistan acquired test status, the team changed its home base to Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium at Dehradun, before making the Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow its home stadium in 2019.

In 2022, the ACB and the Emirates Cricket Board (ECB) signed an agreement under which the Afghan team would play its home games in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the next five years. Most of the top players, such as Rashid Khan and Mohammed Nabi, live in the UAE and several are part of the cash-rich Indian Premier League (IPL).

Despite the Afghan cricket team’s current success, it is unlikely that Afghanistan itself will host any major game in the near future, given the isolation of the Taliban regime by the world community.

While Rashid Khan has said think his team’s presence in the semi-final will be a “massive inspiration for the youngsters back home in Afghanistan”, others have noted that Afghan women cricketers won’t be among them.

Afghan-origin journalist Yalda Hakim, who has for long focused on the issue of Afghan women being kept out of various aspects of public life, noted that the country’s women’s cricket team was scrapped after the Taliban takeover. While celebrating the men’s cricket team’s success, people can’t forget that women are still banned from playing any sports, from going to high school and being in public without a male chaperone, she said.

“No education, no sport and no freedom – this is the reality of life for women and girls across Afghanistan,” said Hakim.