Media Development: Best Intentions Blinded By Forces Unrecognized

Michael Hedges February 7, 2022 Follow on Twitter

Populations emerging from repression and conflict have benefited greatly from media development efforts. Updating broadcast and publishing output, sometimes just getting them started, measurably improves civic discourse. At the same time these programs can irritate if not antagonize certain authoritarian elements preferring their own communication, or even darkness.

After a 21 year respite, the Afghanistan population has again come under Taliban control. What this means for the country’s nascent media sector - and everybody it touches - is abundantly clear. The wild-eyed religious fanatics are not fans of modernity - meaning anything since the 9th century - or properties there of. As the mullahs streamed into Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on the fateful Sunday, a beauty salon owner was seen painting over posters depicting women, reported AP (August 15, 2021). Billboard panels have been removed or whitewashed. Through recent weeks, scattered around the country, once popular local radio stations stopped offering music as well as women’s voices, replaced by Islamic sermons. One in Kandahar was renamed Voice of Sharia, others simply closed.

Tensions in Afghanistan among media workers sharply elevated the months ahead of withdrawal of Western forces in August 2021. Extremist elements, not limited to Taliban, have made no secret of their dismay with media outlets, their news reporting, even their presence. During its earlier rule - 1996 to 2001 - extremist mullahs forced all TV stations off the air, flogged and imprisoned members of the public for having television receivers and restricted what newspapers could publish. Listening to radio channels was a clandestine activity, both for listeners and broadcasters.

“In 2001, it was a completely different situation because there were no Afghan media outlets, unlike now,” said Human Rights Watch Asian advocacy director John Sifton to USA TODAY (August 22, 2021). “There wasn’t an Afghan media world. There was just international media and its Afghan staff.”

Almost immediately after Islamist extremists were ejected in 2001 Afghan media development became one of several Western priorities, designed to strengthen civil society. During the earlier five-year tenure Taliban militants systematically obliterated almost all broadcasting and publishing in Afghanistan. All observers noted thereafter “dramatic growth” in the Afghan media sector “making significant contributions to peace building.”

Off and on, there has been a state-operated broadcasting service in Afghanistan since the early days of radio. According to the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Radio Kabul started broadcasting foreign language programs in 1906. It became Radio Afghanistan in 1965. Television arrived in 1978 and the name changed again; to Radio Television Afghanistan. The one TV channel and two radio channels endured several conflicts only to be shutdown by the Taliban.

Hardware - transmitters and studio equipment - was provided through Japanese and Indian governments. Several public broadcasting organisations contributed training and financial support for RTA to transition into a public service broadcaster. An educational broadcasting service aimed largely at rural areas arrived in 2004 through grants from Italian public broadcaster RAI and UNESCO, which later assisted in developing internet services. BBC World Service Trust, known as BBC Media Action since 2011, provided significant support to RTA from 2002. Afghan activities of BBC Media Action have been supported through grants from the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

The US agency then overseeing government international broadcasting - the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), replaced by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) - granted funding in 2002 through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to enhance various radio services through Voice of America (VOA) and RFE/RL as well as establishing Radio Free Afghanistan (RFA), now Radio Azadi, a subsidiary of RFE/RL. The initial priority was buying and installing radio transmitters. By 2006 RFA had a small facility in Kabul and 45 staff members.

Media development specialist Internews Networks provided support to Afghan media and media workers from 2002. A network of 42 local independent radio stations was established and regional media development agent Nai Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan (SOPA) was launched in 2005 with financial support from USAID for training, advocacy and production services. Youth-oriented investigative newspaper Etilaat Roz was founded in 2018 with support from Internews and Open Society Foundations. In the midst of that activity there were conferences, workshops and training. Etilaat Roz publisher and chief editor Zaki Daryabi was awarded Transparency International’s 2020 Anti-corruption Press Award. Open Society Foundations created a US$10 million fund in 2021 to support Afghan journalists as well as human rights and women’s rights advocates “in grave danger.”

The conflict zone specialist among the major media development organizations is the London and Washington DC based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). Funded by some of the same sources as others in the field, including USAID, DFID and the European Union, IWPR was present in the Balkans, then Syria. Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai was introduced to public dialogue advocacy as an IWPR trainee.

IWPR’s mission, Afghanistan and elsewhere, has been to offer “practical” journalist training with attention to humanitarian issues reporting and support for local publications since arriving in-country in 2003. Its early activity was to develop print media and it founded the well-regarded Pajhwok Afghan News agency in 2004, which produced a news feed in Dari and Pashto languages as well as some English.

Donors and the agencies they supported were understandably interested in accountability. Considerable time, talent and money had flowed into Afghanistan for media development. Within a few years after the Taliban was routed, specialist studies were commissioned to evaluate successes, weaknesses and a future.

Using media tools to “counteract the effects of insurgent (Taliban) communications in order to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people” were fraught with difficulties, wrote the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in its 2010 report Afghanistan Media Assessment. Those experts suggested moving away from “building media institutions or infrastructure that the Afghan economy cannot support” to investing in “the Afghan media’s production and dissemination of socially constructive contents.” In addition, the report recommended that “media interventions… be accompanied by face-to-face community outreach activities that provide Afghans an opportunity to put into practice ideas and options that the media have brought to their attention.”

The growth and entrenchment of the country’s media sector “is now irreversible,” said Afghan president Hamid Karzai shortly after leaving office, quoted by Tolo TV News (January 28, 2014). His successor, Ashraf Ghani, credited media development as a key factor enabling Afghanistan’s young democracy in an address to the Atlantic Council (May 20, 2014). US-based civil liberties advocate Freedom House was far more circumspect at the same time. “Afghan media continue to expand and diversify, but media workers face major challenges, including physical attacks and intimidation,” said its 2015 Freedom of the World report. “a growing number of journalists have been arrested, threatened, or harassed by politicians, security services, and others in positions of power.” Human Rights Watch noted (January 21, 2015), “With most foreign military forces having withdrawn from Afghanistan (in 2014), and a substantial decline in foreign donor assistance to the country, the freedom that spurred the media’s growth is in peril.”

The idea that civil order after the Taliban “was built on the foundation of democracy and freedom of speech, still there are too many hurdles against these values and these problems get from bad to worse every day,” said media support group NAI SOPA (February 2017). It noted the still present disparities between “local Afghan media outlets in the provinces (and) the capital Kabul.”

“Today, anyone with the financial means can set up a TV or radio channel,” wrote European Journalism Observatory (November 24, 2020). “(Journalism) training should steer away from Western concepts of the profession, where the journalist is primarily a critical watchdog. Instead, mediation should be a key role of the media in Afghanistan.”

“One of the biggest triumphs of the two decades since the US invasion of Afghanistan is the flourishing of a dynamic media space,” said former Human Rights Watch Afghanistan researcher Heather Barr to Reuters Institute (April 13, 2021), before the Taliban returned. By that date more than 100 newspapers and 170 radio stations were operating in Afghanistan. A 2020 BBC World Service report to the UK Parliament International Relations and Defence Committee estimated about 60 “private TV channels” and about two-thirds of Afghan households having a receiving device.

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