The Afghan men’s cricket team is one of 12 Test match sides. The limited-overs team competed in last year’s World Cup — with prestigious victories over Pakistan and England — and on Monday in India the Test side will play New Zealand. Why? The only possible answer is that the international community cares not a damn for Afghan women.
Among the Taliban’s first acts when it roared into Kabul three years ago was banning the women’s cricket team, exiling some players and threatening to kill those who remained if they picked up a bat again. Sport was only the first joy removed from Afghan women’s lives.
The Taliban is certainly thorough. First it stopped girls attending school and university, removed women from most jobs and demanded they cover themselves in chadors head to toe. Then it pondered other female pleasures, barring women from gyms, beauty salons, hairdressers and public parks, and making shopping trips, eating out, even buying a coffee illegal without a male chaperone. But a few chinks of happiness remained, so last month it banned the female voice from singing, reciting and speaking in public.
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Even then, these devious women might post on Instagram or enjoy the solace of WhatsApp, so now Taliban female spies are tasked with infiltrating friendship groups to punish all remaining private joys.
Invisible, silenced, risking torture and execution if they protest, or a beating if they show an ungloved hand, Afghan women are imprisoned at home. This is a rare nation where the female suicide rate exceeds the male. “It is a dark and hopeless time,” one campaigner tells me. While Russia is sanctioned over Ukraine and millions march against Israel’s war in Gaza, Afghan women feel abandoned by the world.
Later this month, in the UAE, the Afghan men’s cricket team will play South Africa. A bitter irony. Throughout the apartheid years, sporting boycotts were used to pressure Pretoria to end violent white supremacist rule and to punish its bar on black cricketers. The world took a moral stand: we refused to fill stadiums with cheering fans for a racist state.
Without wishing to diminish that evil regime, the Taliban is a far more meticulous oppressor. Black children received an inferior education but could still attend school. Black people were barred from many jobs and received pitiful pay yet could still earn a living. Those corralled into black townships kept the most basic human freedoms: to play music and sport, to dance, sing, laugh and chat with friends, or simply feel the breeze in their hair.
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Officially, not a single nation recognises the Taliban government — yet many preach co-operation, including Tobias Ellwood, who last year as chairman of the Commons defence committee declared the country “transformed” and proposed reopening the British embassy in Kabul. (He later resigned.) At talks in Doha, organisers ceded to Taliban demands that no Afghan women’s groups be present. “Education of girls is banned,” announced one Talib. “And so are questions about educating girls.” Without any voice, Afghan women must rely on diplomats tagging on a question about their rights at the end of broader meetings.
It is hard, everyone admits, to have leverage over the Taliban. It has crushed opposition, closed itself to the West. To make food aid conditional on allowing girls back to school could lead to mass starvation. Campaigners say the Taliban doesn’t care. Its leaders pocket enough stolen wealth to afford huge houses, several wives and to keep their families safe — and their daughters educated — in Gulf states. Subject to Russian-style travel bans, they nonetheless fly private jets to Dubai for health treatment, while an unaccompanied Afghan woman cannot hail a taxi to take her sick child to hospital.
International silence about the regime is born of shame. America is embarrassed by the fiasco it caused by precipitously pulling out its forces. Afghanistan, once a noble, liberal, democratic project, is a failure never to be spoken of again. We tried for 20 years is the conceit, but abandon a garden and nature surges back. What do you expect when civic society, especially the participation of women, was alien to Afghan culture?
Campaigners are enraged to hear that female advances in every sphere of life, from law to sport, were a mere blip. They say the Taliban’s edicts are neither social “norms” nor Islamic law but mechanisms of social control (and of men, too, who are brutally punished for not keeping “wayward” womenfolk in check). What they endure needs a name and in October the UN legal committee will debate codifying a new crime against humanity into international law: gender apartheid. Existing laws address abuse of women but campaigners, from Nobel laureates to Amnesty, believe none fully capture the codified, systemic abuse of Afghan women.
This new crime could allow the prosecution of the Taliban in international courts and would declare its unique evils to the world. Could the International Cricket Council keep an apartheid nation on its fixture lists? Boycotting the Afghan team would not be a peevish act but the deployment of a rare political lever against the Taliban, which permitted the men’s game when it forbade all other pastimes. Its leaders both love the sport and know a ban would be too unpopular to sustain. Afghan players pose regularly with Taliban chiefs, who relish victory over a team such as England. A boycott would hurt.
Like many women observing an unfolding dystopia that exceeds even the The Handmaid’s Tale, I’ve despaired that there is anything we can do for Afghan women. But there is: it starts with regarding their human rights as no more negotiable than those of black South Africans and treating the Taliban as what it is, the ruler of an apartheid state.
