Pakistan's success in the Twenty20 cricket World Cup must rank as one of sports' more timely victories. For a state that is supposed to be at war with itself, failing and in danger of fragmentation there cannot be a sweeter way to hit back.

Younus Khan who led his unfancied team comes from the North West Frontier Province, as does Shahid Afridi whose explosive batting took Pakistan to an eight-wicket win over Sri Lanka, another nation wracked by decades of civil war, but coming out of it.

The NWFP is the frontline of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda that has so blighted the nation, left it divided, bleeding and saddled with a huge refugee problem. Indeed Khan said the World Cup was a gift to the people of Pakistan.

Cricinfo compared Pakistan's success to a newly-reunified South Africa's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, saying there had not been a more timely win since then.

Younus also said  cricketing nations must resume playing in his troubled, but cricket-mad nation.

"Everybody must come to Pakistan. We need a home test series. How can we attract the youngsters? Players muct come to Pakistan."

Is the world ready to reconsider? Will India, no stranger to militancy itself, soften up? The 50-over World Cup scheduled for 2011 has been taken away from Pakistan, and is to be played now in only India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The ICC Champions Trophy that it was scheduled to host last year was shifted out, and Australia, New Zealand and England have refused to play there.

Indeed Pakistan's cricket authorities have challenged the decision to drop them from the host nations of the 2011 World Cup and  it has renewed a call to its co-Asian hosts to support its bid to hold the tournament.

Standing up for cricket in Pakistan may also be  a way to challenge the forces of darkness that is the Taliban, argues Tunku Varadarajan in a piece for Forbes. The victory was a monumental boost to a nation drained of all morale.

And cricket, he says "offers an alternative vision of civilization with which Pakistanis can contrast the viciously bleak program of the Taliban."

A retired Indian Army officer has written an open letter to Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani that Pakistan’s The News carried this week and which is now popping up on blogs.

Colonel Harish Puri says it is incredible that the Pakistan Army allowed something as reprehensible as the public flogging of a teenage girl in the Swat  Valley without lifting a finger, even though it coudn’t have happened very far from an army checkpoint.

For a force that is as professional as the Pakistan Army and which has fought valiantly in all three wars with India,  and acquitted itself well in  U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide, such an “abject surrender is unthinkable,” he writes.

The Pakistan Army’s inability to jam militant radio broadcasts in the region that have helped spread their power around is equally incomprehensible, Puri, who is from the army’s Signals unit, says. (The United States has just begun a broad effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from making these broadcasts, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.)

Puri urges Kayani to act, not just for the sake of Pakistan but the entire region. “It doesn’t matter if it is “my war” or “your war” – it is a war that has to be won.”

An Indian Army oficer writing to the Pakistan Army chief is rare and the fact that the letter is published in a Pakistani newspaper even more extraordinary.

Or perhaps these are unprecedented times. McClatchy newspapers ran a story this week quoting U.S. experts as saying Pakistan was a “disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution.”  Counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen has been quoted as saying Pakistan could collapse within months.

The sense of foreboding has risen with the international cricket authorities taking away the hosting rights for the 2011 World Cup from Pakistan, citing an uncertain security situation.

The tournament is still two years away, but it didn’t stop the International Cricket Council from making an early call on the security situation in the country. The tournament will be played in co-host nations -  India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

[Army chief Kayani with troops and supporters of a radical cleric in Islamabad]

The Pakistani state may be facing its most serious threat since its birth more than six decades ago, begging the question of who controls the militants who are expanding their influence across the country.

The question has arisen in the light of escalating violence inside Pakistan including the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team despite a call reported to have been made by the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, urging Pakistani militants to stop fighting at home and instead focus on Afghanistan.

The Guardian reported that Mullah Omar said in a letter to the commanders of the Pakistani Taliban that: “Attacks on the Pakistani security forces and killing of fellow Muslims by the militants in the tribal areas and elsewhere in Pakistan is bringing a bad name to mujahedeen and harming the war against the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.”

Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid wrote in the Globe and Mail that Mullah Omar also said in the letter that “If anybody really wants to wage jihad, he must fight the occupation forces inside Afghanistan.” The Taliban chief is presumably concerned about getting reinforcements in Afghanistan to offset the increase of U.S. forces in the country.

But his call seems to have been ignored as the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore showed. It was followed shortly after by the bombing of the mausoleum of a 17th century Pashto poet outside Peshawar.

  (more…)

Conspiracy theories have filled a void in Pakistan that opened up as soon as the dozen gunmen who attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team made a leisurely getaway  without any apparent casualties after a 25 minute gun battle.

Since the attack on Tuesday, Pakistani authorities have yet to reveal where the investigation was going,  despite Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi saying “important  leads” had been established.

There has been finger pointing in the Pakistani media in various directions, but the sympathies of the indiviual reporter or media group have to be examined in every case. Only the conspiracy theorists have answers to who could have done it and why.
 
    WHO ARE THE SUSPECTS?
    Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani jihadi group blamed for the slaughter of nearly 170 people in Mumbai last November. There were some similiarities, but LeT hasn’t got any history of attacking inside Pakistan.

Maybe LeT fears the Pakistan government, having already arrested a handful of LeT members named in the Mumbai case, seriously aims to put it out of
business and wanted to send a warning, destabilise a Pakistani government it thinks is soft on India and Kashmir. Maybe it is worried the old  friends in Pakistani intelligence are abandoning them.

But the rationale for targetting Sri Lankan cricketers, in Lahore, a city where the LeT has moved easily in the past, is hard to see.

 Another Sunni militant group with far stronger ties to al Qaeda is Lashkar-e-Janghvi. Like LeT, LeJ is a Punjabi group.

But LeJ has provided footsoldiers for al Qaeda operations, and has been involved in spectacular attacks, most recently the  suicide truck boming of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad last September, which killed 55 people.

As the Daily Times notes, the involvement of LeJ, or another group in al Qaeda’s thrall makes sense on some levels. But the question of why the Sri  Lankans were targeted is hard to square unless the answer is that it could have been anybody. The attack has certainly achieved an  al Qaeda objective in terms of ruining Pakistan’s international image and undermining faith in the government.

 The Pakistani Taliban also have ties to al Qaeda and have been blamed for the assassination of former prime minister  Benazir Bhutto, though there’s a surfeit of conspiracy theories around her slaying too.

(more…)

It's just not cricket.

Ducking for cover as bullets replaced bouncers... players evacuated in a military helicopter that lands right next to a 22-yard pitch... the same strip at Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium that saw Thilan Samaraweera score a double century the previous evening.

Samaraweera was hit on his leg during an audacious attack by armed militants on a convoy taking his team to the venue, an attack that left six cricketers injured and more than half-a-dozen Pakistani security personnel killed.

The world of cricket will never be the same again.

More worrying is the fate of Pakistani cricket. Tours to Pakistan were already a trickle with teams like Australia refusing to travel.

The matches against Sri Lanka came after more than a year of near pariah status. And even this tour was hastily arranged after India pulled out post-26/11.

After months of shadow boxing and pulled punches, the ICC had to suspend international cricket in Pakistan.

Tuesday's attack also raised serious doubts about Pakistan's chances of co-hosting the 2011 cricket world cup.

Authorities were already considering five alternate venues for the Champions Trophy.

The cricketing fraternity has expressed solidarity with both the Pakistani and Sri Lankan players. They were both shocked and saddened.

They also say the game must go on, but where?

When will Pakistan get to host an international cricket match again?

Some like former fast bowler Sarfraz Nawaz are worried that other cricketing nations might even refuse to invite Pakistan over fears of the threat of terror trailing the team all the way to their doorsteps.

It will indeed be sad if international cricket is denied to Pakistan, not just to the players but to the public too.

It's a game that has many a time been a metaphor for peace between India and Pakistan. The sport has been held hostage for that very reason too.

But diplomacy is a game played in the corridors of power, an arena far removed from the subcontinental dustbowls and narrow bylanes that has unearthed many a gem that has embellished the game of cricket.

What are the words that spring to mind when you talk about Pakistani cricketers?

Talented, temperamental, explosive and, more than anything else, unpredictable.

Hanif Mohammed, Mushtaq Mohammed, Imran Khan, Zaheer Abbas, Javed Miandad, Abdul Qadir, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Inzamam-ul Haq, Mohammed Yousuf, Younis Khan -- the list is impressive and rather long.

What makes these players churn out performances which swing from the sublime to the ridiculous to supreme craft remains one of the mysteries of the world of cricket.

Unlike England or Australia or even India, many who represented Pakistan on the world stage emerged despite the system in a country which today is bereft of a proper domestic cricket calender.

Today, the question is whether that mystique will be lost to the world, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future.

And will the country itself be pushed into further isolation?

“Everything is officially going to hell.” The verdict of a reader quoted by All Things Pakistan said perhaps better than anyone else why the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore marked a defining moment in Pakistan’s agonising descent into chaos.

Six Sri Lankan cricketers and their British assistant coach were wounded when gunmen attacked their bus as it drove under police escort to the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore.  Five policemen were killed.

The death toll was small by South Asian standards.  But what defined it — beyond the audacity and apparent sophistication of the attack – was the assault on the identity of a country where cricket, as in neighbouring India, is a national obsession.

“An ambush targeting the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore earlier this morning has literally sent waves of disbelief and shock across Pakistan,” said a post on Metroblogging Lahore. “Citizens of Lahore are specifically terrified at the extent of sophisticated weaponry used by terrorists in an incident that caused unprecedented damage to the country’s image and its cricketing future.”

“Why can’t we ever just have a slow news day … every day there’s something new,” complained another post on Twitter.

South Asia is no stranger to violence, from the days of partition onwards. But there seems to me to be something qualitatively quite different in what is going on now, in which brutality and the alienation of the local population is not so much incidental but central to the method.

It’s been there in the assault on traditional Pakistani music and culture, in the deliberately grisly videotaped beheading of a Polish geologist last month, in the targeting of girls’ schools in the Swat valley and now in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers.

Even in darkest days of the Kashmir insurgency which set Pakistan and India at each other’s throats you didn’t see anything like this — in fact one of the signs of normal life there came from boys out in the street playing cricket.  In Afghanistan, the hardline Taliban which banned most sports appear to have been less hostile to cricket, as Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming wrote in this feature about the country’s fledgling national cricket team. I’ve even seen Pakistani soldiers spontaneously playing cricket the harsh terrain of the Siachen battlefield beyond Kashmir, bowling a few balls in the drizzling snow under the lee of steep mountain walls.

Pakistani officials are already speculating about Indian involvement in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers, in revenge for last year’s assault on Mumbai.  This speculation will probably run and run — it’s echoing through comments on blogs and on Twitter. But it may obscure a more important point. When you attack a national institution like cricket, it’s an expression of brute power, an assault on culture akin to the burning of books.

According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, quoted by the Independent: ”I think this is a deliberate attempt to undermine the government at the time when there is a huge political crisis in the country. They are trying to create a vacuum of power in which eventually they can take over.”

(Reuters photo: Pakistan’s Salman Butt in match against Sri Lanka)

You have to be living in Pakistan, or have gone through the “madness” of the last year or so to understand the despondency that is likely to be caused by the International Cricket Council’s decision to postpone next month’s Champions trophy because of security concerns, writes columnist Osman Samiuddin.  

Cricket is close to most people’s hearts in South Asia, and for Pakistan to lose the game’s second most important tournament after the World Cup hurts. Yes, there is a war out there in the northwest,  yes there are suicide bombings, and in the middle of all this, there is political uncertainty that can turn ugly very quickly, as has happened so often in the past.  

But do you shut out the country? Or stand behind it, especially if it goes out of its way to ensure that no harm would come to the players, no matter the multiple threats that ordinary Pakistanis face each day. Australia, as the Pakistanis said , hasn’t toured the country in ten years, so how it ever going to remove its negative perceptions unless it pays a visit?

As late as last week the ICC said it was satisfied with the security arrangements. But then, five of the eight nations  due to take part in the tournament said they wouldn’t be able to send their teams. Perhaps the one silver lining was India and Sri Lanka held out, refusing to join the boycott, which isn’t suprising, given that both suffer from the menace of violent attacks in varying degrees.

One writer said Pakistan was a soft target for the “ancient powers” of cricket, Australia and England,  and that they wouldn’t treat India the same way because of its economic heft.

It’s not an easy call to make. Lives are important, and these are superstars we are talking about. If the players don’t feel confident about their well-being and are going to live in fear, can they really focus on the game ? 

With a five year-ban on playing for Pakistan and a $3.65 million defamation suit slapped against him by the country’s cricket board chief, fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar has his hands full, even by the standards of his tumultuous cricketing career.
 

Is this the end of the road for the pin-up boy of Pakistani cricket and one of the most recognisable figures of his country ? A tragic victim, at age 32, of his success, talent, fame and showmanship?
 
For many of us, there is no better sight in cricket than watching Shoaib steaming in to bowl, raw pace at its best and the crowds in a packed stadium behind him. The “Rawalpindi Express” crossed the 100 mile per hour speed barrier in the 2003 World Cup and there aren’t many in international cricket that quick.
 
This week as he arrived in India to play in an Indian Premier League after the Pakistani cricket board temporarily suspended the ban on him and the defamation suit was withdrawn following a public apology by Shoaib, the buzz was starting to pick up in the cricket-mad region.
 
For Shoaib, for all his indiscipline, late nights, missed training sessions and even a doping scandal, can still turn a match on its head and the crowds love it. His record of 178 wickets in 46 Tests and another 219 in 138 one-day internationals speaks for itself.  And all this, after he missed dozens of matches due to fitness or  disciplinary-related problems, the last straw being when he hit a teammate with a bat in South Africa.
 
One can only wonder what  the temperamental player could have achieved  if he simply had been more disciplined in his cricket.
 
For as they say no player is bigger than the game, and Shoaib has had his chances.
 

A crack has opened in the cast-iron rules surrounding Pakistan’s madrasas, and cricket, South Asia’s favourite sport, has rushed in.

Students from 24 religious schools in Islamabad, including the hardline Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), have been taking part in the past week in a cricket tournament organised by the city authorities as part of measures to regulate and revamp the schools. The students swapped their shalwar kameez for track pants and T-shirts, and sticks for cricket bats.

By all accounts, the games have been successful as enthusiastic crowds of skull-capped and turbaned students thronged the grounds to watch their schoolmates play with teams drawn from other schools, some of them from different sects who have often clashed in the past.

One blogger wrote that the games were a ray of light during a week clouded by a resurgence in political violence. Women students also took a break from their rigid, dawn-to-dusk schedules to take part in a badminton tournament held alongside the cricket contest.

Change was coming to the madrasas, but it would take a lot of doing before the schools shed their image as breeding grounds of extremism, Pakistani blogs and newspapers said. Indeed, some students from the Red Mosque said they had come to the tournament against the wishes of their teachers who said it was “unIslamic” because it was being covered by television channels.

Others said it was not cricket but a conspiracy against the seminaries.

The Lal Masjid, in the heart of Islamabad, was the scene of a bloody battle last year when troops stormed the mosque to put down a Taliban-style student movement, triggering in turn a wave of suicide bombings and blasts throughout the country culminating in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

The assault on the mosque after a long siege was widely seen as the turning point in the war against militancy. The mosque has since opened and Islamabad officials, prodded by a new civilian government, are hoping to introduce maths, science and computer studies in the madrasas in the capital after the cricket success.

In a new book launched this week about the ill-fated attempt by British imperialists in the mid 19th century to occupy Afghanistan, I came across an interesting detail: the Afghans refused to play cricket. During the occupation of Kabul by British troops from India, “the Afghans looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players”, writes former Reuters journalist Jules Stewart in ”Crimson Snow: Britain’s First Disaster in Afghanistan“.

With NATO reaffirming its commitment to Afghanistan in a “strategic vision” statement issued at a summit in Bucharest this week, I wondered if there was a bigger lesson in this refusal to engage in cricket,  just as the Afghans have never submitted to foreign occupation — seeing off the British Raj in the 19th century and defeating Soviet occupiers in the 20th century. ”The Afghans will always win,” writes Stewart in the conclusion to his book.

The lessons of history would suggest the odds are stacked against NATO. It has just 47,000 troops in the country, whereas the Soviet Union had between 100,000 and 120,000 troops there at any one time. U.S. Army General McNeill, the commander of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, has said U.S. doctrine suggests a force of well over 400,000 Afghan and foreign troops to fight an insurgency in a country of Afghanistan’s size and population, although he has made clear he does not expect NATO to provide that.

The situation is made additionally complicated by instability in Pakistan, whose lawless tribal areas are used as a refuge by al Qaeda and Taliban militants fighting in Afghanistan. As Karl Inderfurth, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, wrote earlier this week, Pakistan can “make or break” the NATO mission in Afghanistan: “Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked. There can be no successful outcome for Afghanistan if Pakistan is not a part of the solution.” 

Indeed, so bleak is the outlook that some are calling for an exit strategy as in this article by Patrick Seale, who says NATO has ”got itself into a colossal muddle in Afghanistan”.

But there are other voices to be found too. In the foreword to Crimson Snow, British General David Richards, a former commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, says that this war is different from those that preceded it.  While admitting that today’s diplomats and soldiers frequently make the same errors as did the British in 1841-42,  he argues that “after a hesitant start, lessons have been learnt”. He quotes polling in late 2007 that, he says, indicates that more than 80 percent of the Afghan population want its elected government and the international community to succeed. “While the lessons of history tell us that we do not have forever, in this Afghan war the Afghan people and the foreigner are for now on the same side.”

So is he right? Is there still cause for optimism in Afghanistan? Or is NATO condemned to the same fate as the foreign forces that preceded it?

As an afterthought, I checked with our Afghanistan correspondent Jon Hemming whether cricket has finally caught on in Kabul. He pointed me to a story he wrote late last year about a fledgling Afghan cricket team itching to take on the best sides in the world. Before, he writes, “the absence of cricket in Afghanistan was a sign that the Afghans, unlike neighbouring imperial India, had never been conquered by the British”. But the sport has now finally been brought to Afghanistan by refugees who had fled to Pakistan and then returned  when the Taliban were toppled in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.