Afghanistan, on its own | The Indian Express

Captain Babar Azam was the prime target; coach Mickey Arthur, others too weren’t spared. By the time he came to the team’s fitness, Akram had switched to Punjabi. “Look at their thick, broad faces … do they have eight kg of nihari and kadhai everyday?”

Another international cricketer Kamran Akmal too was in a foul mood. He also looked crestfallen. “This is too painful, no one will ever forget this day. Even my 11-year-old son will remember this pain. We have been losing to India, now yeh bhi maar ke ja rahe hai (now even they — Afghanistan — are beating us).”

On another channel, a seasoned journalist, a veteran of many World Cups, was struggling to hold back his tears. Choking with emotions, he uttered a heart-breaking line that summed up present-day Pakistan. “We have nothing left in our country, cricket was the only entertainment, now you want to take even that from us,” he said addressing the team.

For an outsider, it seemed Pakistan was being unreasonable. A seasoned cricket-watcher would call it an over-reaction. Afghanistan is no longer a minnow, it is a team with quality batsmen and one of the best white-ball spinners in the world who easily beat England. Babar’s much-hyped bowling unit could get just two Afghan wickets as they marched past the target of 283.

The Afghan dug-out ran on to the ground, the team’s super star Rashid Khan was leading the joyous group dancing. His close Indian friend, player-turned-commentator Irfan Pathan, would join him. Within hours Pathan was the most-hated man in Pakistan. Why had Pakistan gone mad over their out-of-form team’s loss against the ever-improving neighbour?

Cricket had got used to the hyphenated Indo-Pak complexities. This World Cup, they got initiated to the de-hyphenated AfPak intricacies. Though, it has changed of late, for years, Afghanistan cricketers got their early cricket lessons in the refugee camps of Pakistan. Settled in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan border regions to escape the foreign occupation and war at home, the battle-hardened Afghans, with a proud history of being unconquered for ages, were the homeless muhajirs.

James Astill, the The Economist’s Asia editor, worked out of Pakistan in 2003-04. Having travelled the regions several times, he understands the place and pulse. Astill has also written an award-winning book on cricket, The Great Tamasha. He is equipped to talk about the World Cup upset, the geopolitics of the region and the Great Game.

“Losing to Afghanistan is acutely painful to Pakistan in both a sporting and political sense. In cricketing terms, the Pakistanis must fear they are slipping from the game’s top tier. Losing to Afghanistan for the first time sharpens that fear,” he says before explaining the larger context of the AfPak cricket game. “Politically, the loss is doubly humiliation because of how a lot of Pakistanis think of Afghanistan — as a wild, woolly and not entirely civilised neighbour. Its players learned cricket in Pakistani refugee camps, for goodness sake! Yet they have just smashed the best team Pakistan can field.”

Astill’s reading of the situation has resonance at the ground level. Afghanistan’s assistant coach at this World Cup, Raees Ahmadzai in a riveting account to The Indian Express, painted a Dickensian picture of the refugee camps. “Some of us started cricket in refugee camps in Pakistan, living in tents, where our movement was severely restricted, sometimes we were not allowed to go beyond a certain area. No running water. Life was tough,” he explained of beginnings where cricket wasn’t a happy hobby, but an escape from trauma.

Even in the moment of their greatest triumph, the Afghan players had on their minds the plight of their displaced country men. Man of the match Ibrahim Zadran said he wanted to “dedicate this award to those who are sent back to Afghanistan from Pakistan”.

When the Taliban took over Kabul in 2021, the then Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was the first to welcome the change of guard. The World Cup winning captain and the mass leader called it “breaking the chains of slavery”. The script would go awry. There have been a series of suicide attacks around the border regions in Pakistan — the latest left over 50 dead. Pakistan has blamed the Taliban within Pakistan, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). As a reaction, the interim government has now asked close to 1.7 million illegal immigrants to return to Afghanistan by the end of the month. Zardan wanted the world’s attention on the potential forced mass exodus.

A thread of mistrust has run all through this long toxic love-hate relationship between neighbours. Experts say that Pakistan believes that Afghanistan should feel obliged for the war-time help it received, and express gratitude. Afghanistan blames Pakistan for being the insensitive Big Brother, not treating them as equal. There are also allegations of Pakistan secret intelligence agencies messing up their country.

Meanwhile, for the majority of Indians, Afghanistan has historically meant that stereotypical gregarious Pathan with a big turban and bigger heart. Kabuliwala, Frontier Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Khuda Gawah’s Badshaah Khan and now Rashid Khan — fictional or real, these are the popular Afghans. All seemed to be cut from the same fabric. Their cricket team also wears blue.
Rashid grew up in a refugee camp. He was schooled in Pakistan, learnt wrist-spin while in the land of Abdul Qadir. When he moved back home to represent Afghanistan at the U-19 level, he faced the grim realities of war. One night during the U-19 camp at the academy, a bomb went off in the area. It was accompanied by an apocalyptic thunder. The building that housed the young cricketers shook. The plaster from the wall turned to powder and clouded the room. Rashid couldn’t even see his two room partners.

In an engrossing podcast with sports journalist Neroli Meadows, Rashid says he thought his life was about to end. He imagined, like in the movies, that attackers would soon open the door and shoot all three of them. Thankfully, the knock on the door was by their trainer. He took them to the field, where they stayed from 1 to 8 am.

That loud boom that Rashid heard as a kid still rings in his ears when, during his travels around the world, he hears of a blast in Afghanistan. Rashid says he doesn’t let these worries show on his face. The famous Rashid smile is always there. He says he wants to spread positivity, wipe out the grim image of his country. As for a win against Pakistan, it brings the entire nation on the streets.
But he broke Pakistani hearts, left them hurt by dancing with Irfan. Was Pakistan over-reacting? How would you, as a big brother, feel when your younger sibling, after beating you, goes dancing with a neighbour with whom there is a long family dispute?

sandeep.dwivedi@expressindia.com