Do we like them?

Do we like Rashid Khan?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with a late and cautious stand on women's education as the one contested spot.

Rashid Khan is the Afghan leg-spinner who became a global T20 name, and until March 2026 he captained Afghanistan's T20 side. He was removed after the team failed to reach the Super Eight at the T20 World Cup, with the board citing a rebuild and a new head coach. He stayed in the squad as a player, and the board credited him with guiding Afghanistan to the 2024 World Cup semi-finals.

The stoush that follows him is less about cricket than about the country he plays for. The Taliban have barred older girls and women from medical education and training, and the UN says at least 1.4 million school-age Afghan girls are being deliberately deprived of education. Anyone wearing the Afghan colours gets asked what they think about that, and a star like Rashid gets asked loudest.

On the harm check, here's what we could verify. In December 2024 he posted that the ban was “deeply unjust” and that educating everyone is a “moral obligation”, a clear call for the Taliban to reverse it. We found no words from him that target LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no pattern of dodgy company in the pages we could open.

The asterisk is about timing and scope, not malice. Commentary elsewhere has noted that he was quiet for years on the exclusion of women from Afghan sport, but we couldn't open those pieces to check, so treat it as a question, not a finding. A call on education is good; it isn't the same as a full stand, and we couldn't fully test it.

On the good-person side, there's no court record or credible allegation of mistreating anyone in what we could open. Plenty of fans love him for lifting a country that most of the world only sees through war, and for his charity work, though the pages for that were closed to us this session. That's honestly the whole list we can stand behind here.

Nothing new on him lately that bears on the harm test; the most recent story we could verify is the captaincy change. Where this lands for you depends on how much weight you give a public plea made from inside a country under Taliban rule, against the silence that came before it.