From a poignant video posted to YouTube:
Under the Taliban, Kabul’s football stadium was a place of fear and execution. Football was discouraged and spectators banned from cheering. But through all the years of oppression, love of the beautiful game remained. Now, in a symbol of the country’s rebirth, Afghanistan is rebuilding its national team. We follow football legend Ali Askar Lali as he returns from exile in Germany to select and train the new players. Working in farcical conditions, he tries to prepare the men for their first symbolic international match. Will the team be ready? And do they stand any chance of success?
Alas, they’ve disabled embedding, so you’ll have to click on the link to see it. For other stories of how football can be tied to broader questions of society and politics, I highly recommend How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.