Three years on from their dramatic seizure of power, the Taliban are eradicating the freedoms that Afghanistan’s women nominally enjoyed during the twenty year interregnum. This dashes the forlorn hopes of those who had dared to imagine that they might have ruled in a more enlightened manner than they did between 1996 and 2001.  

New morality laws now prevent women from speaking outside their own homes, and further limit the number of areas women are allowed to be visible even within the confines of their homes, to prevent them being seen from the windows of other buildings. This is on top of existing rules blocking girls and women from formal education, and effectively barring women from seeking medical treatment by banning females from practicing medicine, and from being treated by male doctors. 

For some reason, though, the Taliban have taken a more relaxed approach to sport — for men only, of course. This is in contrast to their previous stint in government, when footballers were flogged for wearing shorts. At the time of writing, the Afghanistan national cricket team is still scheduled to participate in the ICC’s Champions Trophy, which begins in February. This leaves the ECB and other western cricketing authorities in the awkward position of being expected to play a cordial if competitive fixture against a team representing one of the world’s ultimate pariah states. Furthermore, Jonathan Trott, one of the most respected English cricketers of his generation, last month extended his contract as Afghanistan’s head coach for another year. 

Understandably, there have been calls for England to boycott the Champions Trophy if Afghanistan are still included, and for Trott to resign his position with the Afghanistan side. There has been a spirited campaign by feminist groups and anti-Taliban activists on social media to insist on a full sporting boycott of the isolated nation, and The Telegraph’s chief sports writer Oliver Brown wrote on Friday that it would be cowardly for England to go ahead with their game against Afghanistan. Playing against the country would legitimise its policies toward women. 

This is a perfectly reasonable position, and I suspect it is what will come to pass. Cultural and sporting boycotts of rogue nations are now established practice. But in the case of the Taliban and its policies on women, the effects of boycotting Afghanistan’s cricket team will begin and end with Afghanistan’s cricket team. Furthermore, a lot of the analysis around the case for the boycott fundamentally misunderstands the reality of Afghan society, and misguides people into thinking that they are helping — or indeed that they still have any capacity to help. 

The laws that are being imposed represent the codification of traditional Pashtun social norms

Firstly, there is a temptation for people in the West to think of the Taliban as a totalitarian intrusion that, having swept away the interim order, is now reimposing its vision for Afghan society from the top down. Perhaps for some inhabitants of Kabul and the other large cities it must feel this way, but for many people across the country, the Taliban takeover — and the new legal restrictions — has not and will not change life very much. Just as it didn’t when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, or when they originally came to power in 1996. 

The laws that are being imposed represent the codification of traditional Pashtun social norms, which have governed life for the vast majority of ethnic Pashtuns for at least a millennium, and which outside of the cities were largely undisturbed by reforms or conflict in the last century. Whilst these norms are bewildering and intensely restrictive for the non-Pashtun majority in cities such as Kabul, they are not a modern invention inspired by recent fanaticism. They reflect deeply rooted customs, to which almost all rural and traditional Pashtuns hold. As most of humanity does to its own social customs, the Pashtuns  inextricably associate their traditions with morality. 

There is precious little research about the views of women living within traditional Pashtun social structures toward the customs that govern their lives; such research would be nearly impossible to carry out. However, such people have very little to compare their lot in life against, and people living the lifestyle that their forebears lived for countless generations tend to have grown comfortable with it, no matter how limited and unfulfilling it may seem to outsiders. Furthermore, such rustic people — women no less than men — often tend to be bewildered and revolted by the lifestyles of those who live differently to themselves, particularly those of urbanites.   

What we are witnessing in Afghanistan is the imposition of a deeply traditional, tribal code of honour and morality, over the relatively small urban pockets in the country where that code had been far more lightly applied in the recent past. It is a clash of what we might less politely refer to as “backwardness” and progress — in a country where the forces of the former have both the guns and the numbers. These are people who think little of blocking women from seeing a doctor or going to school, because they’re unlikely ever to have been to a doctor themselves, and whatever formal schooling they received will have been rudimentary at most. 

You cannot change a people’s understanding of morality by punishment or isolation from the outside

Punishment, social isolation, and moral judgement from outside — which is the implication of a boycott — may be effective in situations where the wrong-doer is aware that they have transgressed against a commonly held system of morality. At the very least, it requires a common understanding of a system of morality, or some appreciation that a commonly held system of morality might exist, even if there are conflicting interpretations of it. Obviously, there is no commonly held system of morality between Westerners who believe in the equal individual rights and liberties of men and women, and the Taliban. You cannot change a people’s understanding of morality by punishment or isolation from the outside, especially when you have no common point of moral reference with them. It is just not how human nature works. 

One is reminded of the recent ratification of Uganda’s horrifying laws which mandated the death penalty for homosexual acts. Amid the frantic search for ways in which the West might put a stop to it, one suggestion came forward that the UK could prevent Lloyd’s insurers from writing credit insurance for Uganda’s imports of staple foodstuffs. Rather than make arguments from first principles, perhaps it was just easier to starve the Ugandans into accepting the fundamental rewiring of sexual morality that it had taken western societies a century to come to terms with? This is obviously a far more extreme approach than a cricket boycott, but it’s an example of the same attempt to threaten people into altering their socially conditioned but genuinely-felt conceptions of right and wrong. 

The process of altering popular morality, such as that around the rights and roles of the sexes, and about sexual morality, comes about through incremental social and economic change. This can be influenced through the culture; and yes, sometimes through the observation of other societies that appear to be more successful (the mythical “soft power”). But more often than not, it is the result of rulers or elite classes introducing reforms cautiously from the top down. Sadly, Afghanistan’s history has taught the Pashtuns to be exceptionally wary of such progressive leadership. Instead they prefer to rely on a dogged adherence to their own traditions, and to their faith that the foreigners will eventually always lose patience and leave them alone.

A second point that has come up in favour of a boycott is the apparent success of sporting boycotts against South Africa during the Apartheid era. Few would argue that the boycotts themselves forced the end of Apartheid, but they certainly contributed to the sense among white South Africans in the 1970s and 1980s that their country had become an international pariah. This in turn contributed to the gradual fracturing of the Afrikaner National Party’s electoral coalition, which pushed P.W. Botha and F.W. De Klerk into the process of reforms which ultimately brought about the end of Apartheid. Could a cricket boycott of Afghanistan not be the beginning of a long process to achieve something similar against the Taliban’s repression of women? 

There are a number of differences between South Africa in the 1970s and Afghanistan today that present flaws in this plan. Firstly, while a clear majority of Afrikaners remained stubbornly determined to pursue a policy of racial essentialism and separation despite international disapproval, they did feel the cost of that isolation. They would have liked international investment in their economy. They would have liked to have seen their national sports team — particularly their beloved rugby team — defeating their traditional rivals on the field.  And they would have preferred to have maintained friendly ties with their kin and erstwhile allies in the Netherlands, the Commonwealth and the US.  

There are very few parallels with the Pashtuns, who have extremely limited links or interests in the Western world. Some may have picked up a passing interest in cricket from time spent in Pakistan, but the sport has not had time to put down real roots in Afghanistan. Nor do many have any real prospects or desire to travel or do business internationally. International isolation suits them far more instinctively than it did white South Africans. 

Furthermore, Afrikaners had common moral points of reference with Westerners. Many of the generation who introduced and led the National governments that imposed Apartheid had fought among Commonwealth forces in the world wars. While they might have thought that Westerners were naive, sentimental and even hypocritical regarding the rights of black Africans, they at least could understand why most Europeans and Americans thought Apartheid was wrong. This is not true of the Taliban who regard our opposition to their policies on women as being every bit as immoral and evil as we regard the policies themselves. 

Sporting and cultural boycotts of South Africa were part of the closing off of what had previously been deep and warm links. South Africa had until recently been a fraternal country, but seemed to peel off from the path that most people in Britain at the time felt that civilised countries ought to have been on. This is very different from the Taliban and its Pashtun support base — against whom we were fighting a very real, very protracted war, until very recently. They are well aware that we disapprove of them, and they find reassurance in our disapproval. They disapprove of us too. They think of us as bad people; as corrupt, Godless, and until recently as invaders and occupiers.  

What we are being forced to contend with here are the limits of Western power, and of the power of Western values. We have become used to assuming the inevitability of Western liberalism as being the ultimate result toward which the long arc of history bends, carried aloft by pure grace. But to the extent to which liberal ideals were ever meaningfully carried in Afghanistan during the two decades of Western stewardship, they were carried by the M16 rifle and the MQ-9 Reaper.  

Our genuine and meaningful, albeit ultimately futile contribution to the rights of Afghanistan’s women and girls, is embodied by the 3,621 coalition personnel who never came home, including 457 British personnel. The West was defeated, and must accept the consequences of military defeat; the abandonment of former friends, the betrayal of our ideals, and the loss of power to shape the future of that country. Although it must be noted that the non-Pashtun elements of Afghan society who now chafe under the Taliban yoke were also ultimately unwilling to fight for the kind of Afghanistan we had hoped to build. 

The idea that by playing a game of cricket against Afghanistan’s team, England will somehow “legitimise” the Taliban’s rule, is to imagine ourselves absurdly at the centre of the moral universe. In the eyes of the Pashtuns, and indeed many other Afghans, the Taliban’s rule already enjoys the truest form of legitimacy; that which is won on the battlefield, in dogged defiance of the invader. 

We are talking about boycotting their cricket team because we’ve lost any credible avenues of influence in Afghanistan. We might comfort ourselves that we might be “taking a stand”, but the truth is that, having been solidly beaten, we would just be taking our ball and going home.