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Seeking to ban the Afghan cricket team is colonial virtue signalling

It would do nothing to sway the Islamic Emirate and, like so many other actions intended to target the Taliban, would only add to the suffering of ordinary people.

Pictured are two cricket players from the Afghanistan national team wearing the national uniform. Amit Dave/Reuters
The Afghan cricket team continues to set and break records, but some are calling for the squad to be banned due to the Taliban-led government’s restrictions on women and girls, including barring them from all public sports.

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Over the last few weeks, a campaign calling for Afghanistan’s cricket squad to be barred from international competitions in protest at the Taliban-led government’s closure of female sports teams has gained some traction. It even reached the halls of the British parliament, where Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi said she believes that if England refuses to play Afghanistan in an upcoming Champions Trophy match, it would make a clear statement against “the Taliban's unconscionable oppression of women and girls".

The UK isn’t the first nation where calls have erupted for a shutout of the record-setting Afghan team. The movement began when Cricket Australia refused to play its first ever test match against Afghanistan in November 2021, months after the Taliban returned to power. When a Taliban official told Australian media, “It is not necessary that women should play cricket," this further emboldened Cricket Australia’s stance; and now some former Afghan politicians who haven’t been to the country since the Taliban takeover have even joined the campaign. 

What began as a boycott based on the International Cricket Council’s requirement that any nation with Test status must have an active women’s team has morphed into a catch-all protest against the numerous limitations placed on women and girls in the Islamic Emirate.

As someone who has continued to live in Afghanistan and who covers the Islamic Emirate’s current rule from the ground, this campaign seems misguided, and the target of its ire misdirected.

Simply put, in a world where nations have repeatedly said they won’t officially recognise the Islamic Emirate until women and girls are able to return to secondary schools and universities, a cricket boycott won’t do much, if anything, to sway the Taliban; nor will it leave a positive impact on the daily lives of the women and girls actually living in Afghanistan.

It comes off as colonial virtue signalling that highlights the hypocrisy of Western-dictated political standards in what are meant to be apolitical international sports federations – something the Islamic Emirate and its supporters will be only too quick to weaponise. 

Pot, kettle

If we are going to hold sports teams accountable for the actions of their governments, then the Islamic Emirate would be far from alone in having to sit out international sporting competitions due to valid human rights concerns.

For more than 460 days, Israel, a nation often referred to as “the only democracy” in the Middle East, launched onslaught after onslaught on the already besieged Gaza Strip. Their military campaign has resulted in up to 64,000 deaths and more than 110,000 injuries – the majority of them women, children, and the elderly. Despite being accused of running a decades-long apartheid state, expanding illegal settlement projects, and carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Israel has never been barred from a single sports league, or even the Eurovision competition (despite being firmly located in the Asian landmass).

From 2003 to 2011, the United States illegally occupied Iraq based on a “big lie” about so-called weapons of mass destruction that never materialised. That $728 billion war led to the deaths of up to 210,000 Iraqi civilians, but the US has never been barred from a single athletic competition – not even when Jim Crow laws were firmly in place or when 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in concentration camp settings. As for the UK and Australia, where the calls for the bans and boycotts are the loudest, both have been accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan during the US-led occupation.

Unlike Afghanistan, the United States, Israel, the UK, and Australia are all democracies. Their populations – including their athletes – can openly speak out against their governments flawed policies with little fear of retribution; and yet there was no outcry that their athletes didn’t do enough to call out their countries’ deadly and discriminatory policies.

The Afghan cricket team, however, has spoken out against the Islamic Emirate’s restrictions on education for women and girls on numerous occasions, including last December, when female students were barred from studying at medical institutions. This puts them at far greater risk than athletes in the West or Israel would ever be.

Why cricket? 

If the ban is about the participation of both sexes in sports, then that too must be applied fairly.

It should be noted that despite having a men’s cricket team since 2001, it was only in 2010 that the Western-backed Islamic Republic government in Afghanistan formed a women’s team, who only played a single match before being shut down due to outcry from religious figures.

In 2020, when the Afghanistan Cricket Board tried to revive the women’s team by awarding 25 women with contracts, officials warned: “The first thing is we should not challenge the cultural and traditional norms and principles… We are in dire need of resources and facilities that people do not question in terms of religion and cultural issues.”

So where was the outcry about a women’s team when Afghanistan was under US occupation?

Additionally, cricket is not alone in not having a female team in Afghanistan.

Like cricket, Afghanistan’s futsal and football teams have made major strides in recent years, winning titles and medals. Also, like the cricket team, both squads have also recently met with Islamic Emirate officials after their respective victories.

For some reason, the outcry only seems to have been directed against the cricketers.

All three teams have players who either live in the country or whose families do. As athletes in national teams, they must interact with the government in charge of those squads, in this case the Islamic Emirate. To hold this against them conflates living in the country with collaboration, which is unfair, untrue, and, again, not a standard applied to other athletes around the world.

In an interview with The Guardian, the captain of the English team due to play Afghanistan in February, Jos Buttler, said a boycott was “not the way to go” and that his squad wanted the fixture to go ahead: “As a player, you don’t want political situations to affect sport.”

Lisa Nandy, the culture and sport secretary, agreed. “I’m instinctively very cautious about boycotts in sports,” Nandy said during an appearance on the BBC. “They can also very much penalise the athletes and the sportspeople who work very, very hard to reach the top of their game and then they’re denied the opportunities to compete. They are not the people that we want to penalise for the appalling actions of the Taliban against women and girls.”

The Taliban is not alone

Sadly, the Islamic Emirate isn’t the only nation to curb or ban women’s participation in sports. 

Saudi Arabia didn’t send female Olympians to compete until the 2012 games in London. It took another six years for women to be allowed to attend sporting matches in the Kingdom itself. 

Iran, too, has set up major obstacles to female participation in sports. Until 2023, female fans were barred from even attending sporting matches in the Islamic Republic.

However, neither country has ever been officially banned from the Olympics or the FIFA (football) World Cup, despite their decades-long discriminatory policies. And Saudi Arabia has even been rewarded with the honour of hosting the 2034 FIFA World Cup.

So, where is the moral consistency?

If the standard for participation in sports is political, then two of the countries where the outcries against the Afghan team are the greatest have also been accused of heinous human rights abuses in the very country they are now trying to morally police.

If it is about equal participation of women and men, then even the host of the 2034 World Cup has its own long history of gender discrimination in sports.

To what end? 

Not only will a ban on the Afghan cricket team do nothing to sway the Islamic Emirate’s views on the rights of women and girls to education and sports, but like with so many other actions meant to target the Taliban, it will only hurt the already suffering Afghan people.

For the last decade-and-a-half, sports, including cricket, have been one of the few consistently positive stories to come out of Afghanistan.

Now, if some Afghans abroad and foreign nationals get their way, even that source of happiness will be taken from the millions of men and women inside Afghanistan who look to the cricketers as a source of hope and inspiration.

As someone who lives in Afghanistan and has witnessed my female relatives and friends joyfully cheering on the cricket team, I can say with certainty that there are much more effective actions that these activists can take.

For better or worse, the former female politicians living abroad who have turned this into a cause célèbre have the ear of the international community.

More than 9,000 female entrepreneurs currently operate in Afghanistan. Their biggest challenge is getting more finance for their businesses. Rather than using their platforms at international venues to claim that cats and dogs have more rights than Afghan women, these activists and former politicians should be pushing international donors to invest more in women-led businesses in Afghanistan.

Likewise, Afghanistan has become full of shady offices promising scholarships to study abroad for young men and women, something which has left them vulnerable to scams.

Rather than symbolic gestures targeting one of Afghanistan’s biggest success stories, these activists could be putting pressure on foreign universities to offer more legitimate scholarships and opportunities to Afghan girls – because even for the few Afghan girls who do get accepted, financing an international education can be next-to-impossible. Or, for starters, simply donate to Afghan families to buy solar panels and internet access so their daughters can study online.

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