Cricket diplomacy takes a hit By Raja Murthy

In 1996, India and Pakistan sent joint cricket "friendship" teams to Sri Lanka during the World Cup the three nations were then jointly hosting, after Australia and the West Indies refused to tour Sri Lanka after a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) bomb attack in Colombo. Top Indian and Pakistani cricket stars played together in Sri Lanka to express solidarity with the island nation. And it was Sri Lankan solidarity for Pakistan that brought its ill-fated team to Lahore, after India canceled its tour as apparent payback for the Mumbai attacks. "Match abandoned due to terror attacks," announced the Google News India home page of the second five-day match in Lahore between Sri Lanka and Pakistan, in the live updates of matches that Google provides for cricket-crazy Indian fans. Such a match-ending line has never been seen in the 120-year recorded history of the game.

The 1999 war between India and Pakistan, the worst military confrontation between the two countries since 1971, happened during the cricket World Cup in England in which both nations were participating. A 2003 Indian tour of Pakistan led to unprecedented warmth between the two neighboring nations, a people-to-people contact that cricket author Rahul Bhattacharya described in his book Pundits From Pakistan (See Bowled over in Pakistan Asia Times Online, May 21, 2005.) No Sri Lankan cricket writer will have such happy memories of touring Pakistan in 2009, following the Lahore attack that raises not just disturbing questions about Pakistan's future as a co-host to the 2011 World Cup, along with India and Sri Lanka, but to its future as a nation.