Mick Hartley

Tunku Varadarajan on Pakistan's victory in the Twenty20 World Cup:

I am stating the obvious in saying that the cricket win is a monumental boost to a nation drained of all morale. Besides, my broader point is about much more than morale. Cricket offers an alternative vision of civilization with which Pakistanis can contrast the viciously bleak program of the Taliban.

The Pakistani team has just beaten the world at something the Taliban would swiftly extinguish. How could cricket survive in a society where boys are not so much immersed as "waterboarded" in the Koran from a tender age; where pleasure is taboo unless it is derived from prayer (and even then one dare not call it pleasure); where music is banned, beards compulsory, cinema anathema, women caged away–where even the flying of kites is a punishable offense. What hope is there for cricket in a land where paper kites are ripped from the sky?

Cricket is a potent secular force in Pakistan, a secular lesson. It teaches people that man-made rules can be just, and give satisfaction. It teaches an honor unconnected to religiosity and modesty, tribal slights and vengeance. It teaches that exuberance can be constructive, and that individualism and innovation can be blessings (and, equally, that conservatism can often be dangerous). Cricket allows Pakistanis to play against men from other faiths and lands, and to belong with pride to a sporting commonwealth of cricket-playing nations that is a world away from the aridity of the ummah….

The Islamists in Pakistan fear cricket, or else they would not have attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team earlier this year– as a result of which all cricket tours to Pakistan have stopped. The Islamists fear cricket not as a game, but for the fact that it represents values that stiffen the secular resolve of Pakistanis. Pakistan's culture and history is not merely Islamic: The country has a massive British, and British Indian, legacy, which no amount of revisionism by mullahs and politicians has been able to stamp out entirely. Cricket is living proof of that, and so its presence in Pakistan is a daily reminder to the Islamists that the country has a core that they have yet to touch. And in winning the cricket World Cup, Pakistan's cricketers have just rendered that core even more inaccessible to the Islamists.

I have a modest proposal. Of the billions of dollars in aid that the U.S. sends Pakistan's way to fight the Taliban, why not earmark a decent amount to furnish children in all corners of Pakistan with cricket grounds and academies. The war against the Taliban will be won on the playing fields of Lahore … and Peshawar … and Swat.