Even frustrated Red Sox fans love October baseball. Remember how we felt when the World Series was cancelled in 1994? Bummed out, we blamed the greed of owners and players. Now consider this scenario:

What if those owners had been the U.S. government and those players had, in normal years, been more or less compelled to play? In other words, what if the spectacle of play were subject to political control? And finally, what if the government – for whatever reason – just couldn’t get it done one year … or for 20 years in a row?

Here’s what happened to October in Kabul, Afghanistan. A government sponsored sports tradition – the national buzkashi tournament – was interrupted in 1982. Last winter, in those first heady months of post-Taliban liberation, there was talk of reviving it this fall. Like the talk of finding Osama bin Laden, we no longer hear much. There’ll be no national tournament this year. The government can’t get it done.

Public spectacle and serious politics are often close cousins. Witness The Anniversary. There were prayers and tears, flags and anthems, dignified ceremonial … and (despite White House protestations) carefully stage-managed politics. Presidential appearances at all three crash sites reinforced the image of post-attack George W. Bush: stern, plain-spoken and implicitly masterful.

Political? You betcha, but deniably so. Supposedly there was no partisanship, only egalitarian Americanism. But note who got to be front and center on the first Patriot Day. And, because of presidential decree, Bush will front the re-run on 9/11/03: Crafty politics in the guise of patriotism.

It reminded me of the Afghan government’s buzkashi event, likewise decreed as annual and supposedly non-political. Way back in 1953 Afghanistan’s then-royal regime concocted a politically brilliant notion: to stage in the capital city a controlled demonstration of the metaphorically uncontrollable.

Buzkashi is the wild, violent, equestrian game of northern Afghanistan, a free-for-all in which horsemen struggle for control of an animal carcass. Kabul is located in the South. Bringing buzkashi south, across the towering Hindu Kush mountains which split the country in half, was always phrased as fun-filled competition – much as The Anniversary was phrased as somber commemoration. The tournament also served deeper political purposes. It helped bind together an inherently fragmented nation. And it was scheduled to coincide with the birthday of the king.

Responsibility for tournament organization fell, superficially, to the Afghan National Olympic Committee. A royal cousin, known for his elegant manners and frequent overseas boondoogles, served as ANOC’s top official. The heavy lifting, however, was left to Afghanistan’s much feared Ministry of Interior. As elsewhere outside the US, “Interior” deals with internal control rather than environmental conservation. Enforcement comes from the secret police rather than Smokey the Bear. ANOC used to set the date and issue player invitations; Interior made sure that the date was kept.

The word went forth to 10 provincial governors across the remote latitudinal band of northern Afghanistan. Until the 1880s this region was largely ungovernable. Until the 1960s there was no all-weather road between the North and Kabul. Even in the 1970s, when I traveled with one of the teams, some players resented strong-arm government pressure that took them, with scant compensation, away from their homes, families, and fall harvests. Non-compliance was unthinkable. “Every year the policeman asks me to play,” the great buzkashi rider Habib told me. “And every year I play.”

Between that policeman and Kabul’s head of state was a vast, still shaky, but gradually more effective system of control. Every year the roads improved. Every year more taxes were collected. Every year fewer rural lads evaded the draft. Afghanistan was slowly coming together, and the tournament kept pace: more teams for more days. Even the hiccup coup of 1973, which replaced King Zahir with his close relative and former prime minister Daoud, did little to alter these trends. They progressed year by year – until the Marxist take-over in 1978.

And so, by the mid-70s, 10 teams of 10 riders apiece were keeping the annual date, like it or not. Most had gotten to like it as a festive occasion, but there was always the deeper point that they had no choice. With them came horses, grooms, and – most important for the game’s welfare – horse-owners. These were the men who kept buzkashi going in its native context up North. Mostly rich landowners, they paid vast sums for champion horses and lavished favors on hired riders. Each winter the horse-owners sponsored private games complete with costly prizes. They did so for fun (“to give the people a good time”) but also for prestige, the currency of traditional Afghan politics.

As rural big men – called khans – these men were structural descendants of exactly those local leaders who, in earlier generations, had most actively resisted Kabul-based centralization. Now Kabul obliged the khans to send their horses and riders for the government extravaganza. Even more, the khans had to attend themselves, theoretically as “guests” of the ANOC but in fact under Ministry of the Interior control.

On the surface Kabul’s national buzkashi tournament represented playful competition between provincial teams. Underneath it was all about government’s capacity to control. Up North, buzkashi may have been – may still be – the wildest game in the world. Inherently violent, it gives rise to frequent disputes. Then the mayhem can quickly shift from “for fun” to “for real.” But not in Kabul.

Circumscribed by concrete stadium walls and supervised by armed soldiers, the Kabul tournament was dispute-free. Argumentative riders were first warned, then penalized … with jail time. Horse-owner khans, the principals up North, now sat in the stands just like anyone else. It made little difference which team won the championship. The real message had to do with government power – and thus with the enhancement of government prestige.

The October Kabul tournament became a fixture, part of the annual landscape of public events. When the king was deposed, a new Olympic Committee shifted the key date from his birthday to United Nations Day. In 1978 the Marxists installed their own ANOC and shifted the start yet again to celebrate Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. All these, conveniently, fell in October. No matter what the regime, an October tournament was expected. Prestige was at stake. Only a strong government could make the tournament happen. Fewer teams or days would signal weakness.

And exactly such weakness was signaled in the early 1980s. Afghanistan was at war with the Soviet Union and itself. The communist puppet government in Kabul lost control of the hinterland. Many buzkashi people had joined the anti-Soviet jihad. From 1978 onwards, the number of teams and days dwindled. Roads were unsafe. Interior Ministry officials were unreliable. And the riders, grooms, and horse-owners simply refused to come. In 1983 the tournament was abandoned. Except for a couple of days last winter, there’s been no buzkashi in Kabul since.

What does it say that there’ll be none this October? On the cosmic scale of Afghan needs, not a whole lot. The government (and its US sponsor) can argue, correctly, that buzkashi is only a game, that a tournament would divert resources from infinitely greater priorities. The greatest of these is physical security.

But failure thus far to secure this key priority is what, more than anything else, makes a Kabul buzkashi tournament impossible for October 2002. Roads are still unsafe. Bombs explode even – and now especially – in Kabul. And the old pattern of ethnically mixed teams, one from each northern province, will be hard to reconstruct after decades of inter-ethnic conflict.

We know (or, in this suddenly uncertain world, assume) that there’ll be another Patriot Day in September 2003. And another World Series in October. Will there finally be a revived Afghanistan national buzkashi tournament one year from now? With all Bush’s election-driven ruckus about Iraq, let’s not forget another question: A year from now, will there be an Afghanistan?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.