We should be providing a crumb of consolation for the people of Afghanistan

it feels just a bit churlish for Australia, as it abandons the people of Afghanistan, to call out: ‘The girls had better be allowed to play cricket.’

A Taliban fighter keeps watch on the crowd at a cricket match in Kabul

There is a telling moment in the Afghanistan Papers, the trove of leaked documents published by the Washington Post chronicling the endless failures of the American war in that country, where Donald Rumsfeld complains to a Pentagon official that he still doesn’t know “who the bad guys are”.

It’s September 2003. The US has been at war two years. Yet Rumsfeld complains with a characteristic locution: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.” There was loads of “intel from the community”; none of it was “actionable”. Oh why wouldn’t all the swivel-eyed fundamentalist loons just gather in a cave where they could expediently be bombed to kingdom come?

Ah, but cricket knows who the bad guys are now, eh? It’s the Taliban, an almost cartoonishly evil member of whom popped up on our television screens to express Islamic disapproval of women in sport. So, suddenly, the path was clear.

On September 1, Cricket Australia stated that plans were “well under way” for the Hobart Test, and that there was “goodwill between CA and the Afghanistan Cricket Board to make the match happen, which immediately follows the ICC T20 World Cup in the UAE in which the Afghanistan team is due to play”.

Eight days later, responding to the SBS sound bite, CA announced that in the absence of a Taliban about-face it “would have no alternative but to not host Afghanistan for the proposed Test Match due to be played in Hobart” because “driving the growth of women’s cricket globally is incredibly important to Cricket Australia”.

“Incredibly important”? That’s odd, because I don’t recall CA doing anything to help women’s cricket in Afghanistan in the 20 years coalition forces were there, when there was opportunity and incentive.

But anyway, by the end of the week, we’d basically called the Test off, and we were satisfied that Afghanistan should never play cricket again, starting with the T20 World Cup, with Tim Paine saying that “how a team like that can be allowed to play in an ICC sanctioned event is going to be very, very hard to see”.

A team like what? Because this is what comes of an all-too-casual elision of terms: team, country, people, government and, of course, Taliban, as though they are indistinguishable and interchangeable.

Here’s the thing. The Taliban are not the people of Afghanistan. They are barely even its government, given that they have no recognisable mandate.

They are the country’s conquerors, a minority of vicious religious dogmatists who have seized power at the barrel of an AK-47 by force of their fanaticism.

The people of Afghanistan, meanwhile, are in the main their victims, and we, that is Australia, bear some responsibility for that. The Taliban prevailed when the US and its allies abandoned a mission in which they had frankly lost interest by the time it reached its ignominious conclusion.

So it feels just a bit churlish for Australia, as it abandons the people of Afghanistan to their grisly fate, to call out over our shoulder: “Oh, and by the way, the girls had better be allowed to play cricket or there’ll be trouble.”

Mention the word Afghanistan here, and people say ruefully: “Ah, Australia’s longest war.”

But what about Afghanistan’s war? It’s been crisscrossed by invading armies for the better part of 42 years.

Since Australia’s involvement began, the country has suffered a quarter of a million war deaths. We have abandoned thousands of people who helped us, to probable death. They were our allies.

Afghanistan is desperately poor and getting poorer by the day. Since the Taliban takeover, the World Food Program has reported that about 93 per cent of households are not consuming enough food. Without international help, almost the entire population will slip beneath the poverty line.

So why has CA set to withhold the smidgen of international help that is in its gift? Why has it hastened to action that would seem to penalise less the Taliban, whose interest in cricket is so far as we know negligible, but everyone in Afghanistan who has taken rightful pride in the miraculous advance of cricket in that country?

How much does CA really understand about a political situation so fluid that even the best-placed diplomats are struggling to get a fix on it? Never mind Rumsfeld; this is the Red Queen: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

Which is not to say that I don’t understand, and sympathise, with the impulse. The Taliban are hideous. And gender equality in cricket is a noble cause. But it’s worth reflecting on how long this rich, privileged, fortunate, sport-loving country took to get anywhere near it — because it’s not there yet.

Nor is to say that the time may not arise when Afghanistan’s ties to the rest of the cricket world grow too problematic. But “Afghanistan Out” is not a policy; it is a slogan.

To know in Australia that the Taliban is tramping through the lands we first fought for then essentially ceded is to feel bitter despair. One feels the urge to do something, anything.

But our despair is nothing compared to what it must be like to live through. The problems of Australia, about which we never cease complaining, pale by comparison to those of a country most of whose people were not even born when the Taliban last ruled.

So, for the sake of argument, and not because I expect anyone to agree with me, would it not be worth providing a benighted people with a crumb of consolation, minuscule as it is? I’m quite conscious of most people seeming to have made up their minds. I’m well aware that this is an unpopular position. But sometimes these are the important ones to take.

In a concluding parapraxis, Rumsfeld complained of Afghanistan: “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.” Eighteen years later, it feels to me like we still are.