National Pastime

In the United States, the traditional pastime is baseball.  Spring training happens in early March, the season shapes up by June, the All-Star break is in mid-summer and then the champions are crowned in late October.  There is the seventh inning stretch, Fenway Park (another shout out to the Boston Dunstans and Miguel Jones), peanuts and Cracker Jacks, nickel beer night and shagging fly balls.

Afghanistan doesn't have baseball.  The closest thing that they have is fighting.  Not like boxing, martial arts or any sanctioned sporting event.  The fighting they do instead involves improvised explosives, ambush and guerilla tactics and its been going on for hundreds of years in the same pattern.

In late spring, the beginnings of fighting season start to take shape.  After crop harvesting is complete, usually around the end of May, the fighting picks up and moves forward until the dominant players start to take charge in mid July.  In late September/October, those left standing are usually considered the champions and best set to take charge heading into the off-season.

The Afghanis aren't too particular about who they fight.  They will fight anybody, and they love to fight with each other.  They don't really discriminate though, if it moves, and is disagreeable to them in any way, they will fight it.  Currently they have the NATO/ISAF folks to pick a fight with, and despite not having electricity, they are pretty good at it.  I guess they have to be good at something, in the U.S. I would say we are good at having indoor plumbing, not such a priority in this part of Asia.    


 So let's all root for our home team, how about it?