The World Cup Perspective

As little as five years ago, playing soccer in Afghanistan might have cost you your life. Under Taliban rule, soccer was forbidden, along with television, chess, egg-rolling, and the national pastime of kite-flying. The sports stadium on Kabul's outskirts stood empty, except when the Taliban assembled an audience for its public beheadings.

Today, this is hard to imagine. World Cup mania has descended on Kabul like you would have never thought possible in a country where grass is as rare as guys wearing shorts. But it's a fact: The Afghans are crazy about soccer.

In the car to work every morning, I have to pretend that I watched the game the night before; anything else would make me a sorry excuse for a European. The men--and sometimes even the women--will talk about the game, the shots, and the exceptionally tall Czech goalkeeper. The morning after Sweden's pitiful draw, my commute turned into a geography lesson, as nobody had ever heard of Trinidad and Tobago--let alone of their soccer team.

My coworker Basir takes this general soccer craze to a different level. This is a guy who walks out of a rusty tin door of a mud shack every morning looking like he's about to host a show on MTV. When a few nights ago electricity went out mid-game, he packed his TV into a car (might have been a donkey cart) and went to look for a place with a generator. Now, that's committment.

I have made a habit of asking Afghans if things are really better now than under the Taliban; the riots two weeks ago made me doubt whether the people of Afghanistan think that this invasion-turned-assistance mission has done anything for them. This past week, everyone I've asked has said the same thing: "You are joking, no? Under Taliban, we cannot watch football!"

In a country where I rarely manage to make sense of things around me, it's good to see that football transcends even the most vaste cultural differences.