Buzkashi

"Buzkashi means, literally, goat-grabbing. It is a very famous game played in North Afghanistan which is a bit like polo played with a dead goat, or rather a calf because the Afghans say a goat is too fragile and the game ends too fast! In this type of polo a scrum of horsemen battle to grab the carcass and break free with it to win the round. It is a very exciting game because there are no rules, no teams and no boundaries. People can go in any direction including into the audience. The game goes on until the carcass is gone or the prizes are exhausted. The Afghan government adopted it as their national game with rules, boundaries and teams, which most aficionados thought missed the whole point of the game. Yes, there are a number of parallels that Whitney Azoy looked into. We worked in the same province. He came a year after I did, so he was focused on the organisation of this game – not just how it was played on the field but how it was organised. People often talk about Afghan politics as a buzkashi, by which they mean a free-for-all. What he noticed was that it was a non-violent way of doing politics. It was a way of working out who was powerful and who wasn’t. You look at the game and you don’t know what is underneath it. What you discover is that the riders are a bit like footballers. They don’t own the horses but are paid to ride them. It is all about the prestige of the player and the horse owner. Horses are very important in Afghanistan. Just after the Taliban was overthrown I went to meet the warlord of Northeastern Afghanistan and the first thing we did was go down and admire his buzkashi horses. The Taliban were never into buzkashi because they are from Southern Afghanistan and puritans who weren’t into game playing. That was to their detriment because the game allows networking to take place. In addition to playing for prestige the games have to be organised. That is one of the most interesting parts of Azoy’s book. He points out that this is a high risk thing because you have to get people to come. If they don’t come or the game goes wrong it’s an embarrassment that shows the organisers up as weak and they lose power and credibility. Another problem is that your enemies are going to try to thwart you. So organisers will never announce the exact date until the last moment. Otherwise someone might try and organise another game on the same day. Once you’ve done it, people will ask, How well did it go? Will people remember and talk about it? So people’s reputations are on the line. This helps to explain Afghan politics today. If a politician proposes something, people wait to see if he can carry it through. That is one of the things Karzai has a problem with – he promises big and doesn’t deliver. His credibility is undermined. People who want to know why he has such problems with getting people to co-operate need to understand that people in Afghanistan willingly follow success and flee failure. Of course Karzai’s enemies want him to fail, but the bigger audience (as in buzkashi) are the spectators on the fence watching how well he gets on and then deciding whether or not they should risk their own credibility by joining with him. There is a bit of the chicken and the egg situation here: they won’t help until he proves himself, but he cannot succeed unless they do."