A famous victory

That Pakistan should win the World Cricket Twenty20 Cup was an achievement worth celebrating, but its being related to the War on Terror was more because among the costs to Pakistan of the War was the inability to host foreign teams, and thus to hold events like the World Cup, which was shifted away from Pakistan to the UK in a hurry because Pakistan was not considered a suitable venue from the point of view of security. This has been followed by the call for the matches Pakistan was to host for the next World Cup to be cancelled, and the venue to be shifted. Pakistan countered with a proposal to host those games at Dubai, which it proved a suitable venue for cricket with the one-day series against Australia.
The reason why teams do not want to visit Pakistan is not because any cricketers have lost their lives, but because the New Zealand team hotel was attacked in Karachi, and then the only team which dared tour to Pakistan, the Sri Lankan, was itself attacked by terrorists in Lahore. As a result, Pakistan became a non-destination for cricket teams in a way that Sri Lanka had not, even with a Tamil insurgency raging. All that happened was apparently that the Sri Lankan authorities did not schedule any matches for the insurgency-hit part of the country. Because Pakistan suffered under this disability, its win at Lord's, and that too over Sri Lanka, which had itself progressed to the final, gained in significance. However, to describe as the first piece of good news for a nation afflicted with terrorism, is perhaps to give it more significance than it deserves.
It perhaps lumps this win with other acts of terrorism, and does not acknowledge that the Twenty20 championship is a further Americanisation of a game purists already find too Americanised. The game's governing body, the ICC, is not dominated by the USA, but it is now pursuing American ideals of expansion, and it is in these expansion plans that one comes across another participant in the War on Terror, Afghanistan, which is one of the six teams, probably seven, that take part in the top division of the Intercontinental Cup, whose second division brings to 10 or 11 the total number of the Associate Members taking part in this tier of competition just below the full ICC members. Previously, there was either Full Membership, which started off with England, Australia and South Africa before World War I, and which saw New Zealand, India and the West Indies join before World War II, or nothing really. After World War II, the new members were the by-products of the UK's decolonisation process. Pakistan was admitted after a successful MCC tour here, back in 1952, while Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe depended on wins in the World Cup, but more relevant was their dominance in the ICC Trophy, the qualifier for the World Cup. This was also the route taken by Bangladesh to Full membership decades after its departure from Pakistan, one of the two dominions into which the British split their Indian colony.