A Taliban bobsled team?

The Independent Observer and me wuz debriefing the other night, after the Games That Must Not be Named©®™, when one of us started asking dumb, semimythical questions about a suspiciously illogical link between sporting performance and national pride.

I'm not saying our Prime Minister ascribes to this dubious philosophy. But only because it seems kind of obvious already from the quality of his recent public electioneering ummm, pronouncements on the topic. That and his disturbing recent penchant for athlete-glomming photo-ops. I digress.

Anyway, some people seemed to place an awful lot of emphasis on a warlike beating of chests and thumping of rivals' noses into the snow. Almost as if they saw the games as a must-win-at-all-costs surrogate for military endeavour. Kinda like, say, certain failed former East European SSRs now known to have indulged in the odd steroidal binge during the Cold War.

But maybe this kinda stuff ain't much of a skate from the original Olympic ideal (Oops. Damn! Named 'em...). I mean, very early games may well have been set up to give warring Greek city-states a more wholesome outlet for their rivalries than, ummm, epic bloodshed.

So it occurred to us that maybe we could institute world peace if we just invited everybody to the games. Why couldn't everybody just get along? Maybe the Taliban are just cranky because they never get invited to play! And wouldn't it be cool to see a Taliban bobsled team instead of a Taliban insurgency?

Especially the part where they plant improvised trackside bombs to blow up rival bobsleds...