Pakistan's Blameless Cricketers Are in Desperate Need of Allies

It could have been worse – far worse. The rocket missed, the grenades failed to detonate, the ramshackle security fought tigerishly and the targets did not come to serious harm. To inbound tours of Pakistan, furthermore, Tuesday's attack on the Sri Lanka team bus probably makes next to no difference: in practical terms the distinction between near and total isolation is negligible.

Just about everything else to do with the incident, however, is tragic and lamentable. The warm inner glow from England's return to India in December after the horrors of Mumbai has well and truly dissipated. A vague pall of "terror" has hung over Pakistan cricket for much longer than is commonly imagined: the ambush took place within sight of Gaddafi Stadium, named for the bellicose colonel after some particularly florid anti-western demagoguery at a 1974 meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Maintaining cricket amid the greater game of war-on-terror whack-a-mole, however, now seems altogether too difficult.

And that is a bigger problem for cricket than anybody has bothered to pretend. So far the response of the game's other nations to deteriorating conditions in Pakistan has been a reflexive and buck-passing one. That is: we're not going. Indeed there is already abroad some misplaced self-satisfaction with all those tough-minded "security analysis", even if it could be argued that timidity about touring Pakistan made cricket a bigger rather than a smaller target. Mere threat having proved so effective at undermining the country's sporting relationships, how tempting must an act of violence have seemed?

Whatever the case, the shock of Lahore advertises by worsening a crisis that all cricket has a stake in. Even before Tuesday the Pakistan Cricket Board was in disarray, its executive locked in a power struggle with senators aligned to the former director Javed Miandad, who flounced out five weeks ago, and striving to reduce a staff that mysteriously expanded to 800 during the previous administration.

Now that the last hope of a resumption of inbound tours is finally snuffed out, the PCB's revenue base is effectively destroyed. The cancellation of Pakistan's series against India cost $40m; the departure of Sri Lanka preludes further losses, short and long term. The board's financial problems seem intractable: rebuilding the Gaddafi Stadium itself halted in January amid claims of "massive irregularities". In short, it is as capable of fulfilling its obligations as co-host of the World Cup two years hence as it is of hosting the FA Cup final. Who, then, will salvage cricket in Pakistan? Don't everyone answer at once.

The obvious answer – or, to be more precise, the answer traditionally bandied about when nothing else springs readily to mind – is the International Cricket Council. Except that the ICC today is altogether dominated, in governance and finance, by India – seriously, perhaps even irrevocably, estranged from its neighbour.

There will be forces in India, particularly in an election year when "security" is a volatile issue, that welcome the calamity in Pakistan, regarding it not only as just retribution for the atrocities in Mumbai but as an opportunity further to humiliate and immiserate the country they hold responsible. The Indian Premier League looms as a further opportunity for India to flaunt its global thrall, even as Pakistan is held to ransom by the forces of religious reaction. Six matches in the IPL's second season, which begins in five weeks, are scheduled in Chandigarh, a little over 200km from Lahore. The plutocrat and the pauper of cricket in south Asia will shortly be living side by side.

The other answer to the PCB's travails is the state itself. Some form of a national bail-out or government guarantee would be less of an ideological stretch than, for example, the Obama administration propping up AIG. But that would entail sacking an administration only six months old, whose chairman, Ijaz Butt, was appointed by the president, Asif Ali Zardari, himself; it might make cricket in Pakistan even more enticing to violent elements, too.

In other words, although it is enervating and dismaying to repeat a worn-out sentiment, there are no easy solutions. Nonetheless the time when the problem of Pakistan can be reduced to individual security analysis and deferred to an unspecified future is past. The country's blameless cricketers and benighted public need to feel they have allies. Sri Lanka tried to play their part; now others need to fill that breach.