Social media was rife with the derogatory comments for a country that has already faced enough destruction due to a prolonged war. The same country which is still bearing the brunt of our country’s policies of interference in the matters of other countries under the disguise of ‘national security’.
But, according to social media, we did all that for the betterment of Afghanistan and now they have become ungrateful. How dare they become ungrateful when we host around millions of them? We have done so much for them – they should have supported the Pakistan team instead of their own.
We provided them with the camps to live in and when they tried to integrate we ensured that they never find an identity so we can send them back to the country they came from one day. These thankless Afghans!
The fact of the matter is that we only remember and propagate certain memories and forget all other memories. I presume there is a term for it in psychology. Or are we just hypocrites?
We tend to remember that we host millions of Afghan refugees but we forget that these people were forced to leave their country.
Our social media remembered Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s visit to Pakistan just a day before the match but forgot that the same day the match was happening at least 42 Afghan forces were killed in a Taliban attack.
We are not new to misogyny either. Women are used as slurs in arguments they have absolutely nothing to do with. When it comes to hating on women or belittling them, we can just win that world cup (if there was any) by not even trying at all. In fact, since we are drawing comparisons between 1992 and this world cup, hating on women is also something that has not changed since then.
So, when we won the match, it was evident that we were going to bring women into it. We started reminiscing scandal of Imad Wasim, who played the winning shot of the match, with the Afghani woman and we were very casual about our sexism. Sexism – this is something we never fail at.
The match did not expose our xenophobia, hypocrisy or misogyny. Because all these traits were never hidden. These are just a few of our traits that have always remained in the open and I am not saying that other countries are immune to these drugs: We are all high on them.
I call them drugs, but there are no rehabilitation centres for this kind of addiction. I call them drugs but I can find no treatment for this kind of addiction. What is sadder is that most of us seem to be addicted to these drugs.