Radio free afghanistan, p.1
Radio Free Afghanistan, page 1
Dedication
For my parents, Safia and Yassin Mohseni, who encouraged us to be passionate and curious; for my children, who, at times, had to share their father with Afghanistan; and to our fallen colleagues at Moby, whose memory inspires us to keep working.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part I Chapter 1: Taliban Raid
Chapter 2: Ariana Airlines
Chapter 3: Return to Kabul
Chapter 4: Building the Radio
Chapter 5: Arman Launch
Chapter 6: Cleaning Up the City
Part II Chapter 7: Europe, 2022
Chapter 8: TOLO TV
Chapter 9: Wajma
Chapter 10: Bad TV
Chapter 11: Karzai
Chapter 12: Corruption
Part III Chapter 13: A Newsroom
Chapter 14: Tom
Chapter 15: Covering the Taliban
Chapter 16: Ghani
Chapter 17: Football
Chapter 18: Military Target
Part IV Chapter 19: Safia
Chapter 20: Afghan Star versus Herat
Chapter 21: Trauma
Chapter 22: Afghan Stories
Chapter 23: Fall of Kabul
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Coauthor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
Chapter 1
Taliban Raid
Kabul, 2022
When the Taliban official arrived at the Kabul offices of Moby, the media company I founded with my siblings over twenty years ago, Khpolwak Sapai, our head of news, expected him to be angry. Sapai was prepared to be yelled at, told to cancel or to censor a television show, to pull a news story, to apologize on air, even to be detained. If possible, he was ready to negotiate. Interactions like this had become commonplace since the Taliban had taken over six months earlier in August 2021, in the wake of the American withdrawal, and we did what we needed to do, not just to survive but to coexist.
The Taliban were the government now. If we expected there to remain an Afghan media operating within Afghanistan, and not to be reduced to screaming from the margins in DC or London, we had to learn to adapt. The Taliban themselves understood, or claimed to understand, the importance of having a free Afghan media. Months after the fraught early days after the fall of Kabul, when people clung desperately to planes taking off at the airport and thousands of others crowded the gates to get inside, things had appeared to calm down. But, in the midst of that relative calm, the new government had begun to put more pressure on the Afghan media, and one of my Taliban contacts had called me. “You’re not going to leave, are you?” he asked, worried that, from abroad, I was strategizing how to close down our Kabul offices.
“Not if I can help it,” I had said. But I was thinking, That’s kind of up to you, isn’t it?
Sapai is a legendary figure in Afghanistan with a commanding presence tempered only slightly by a preference for authorial brown suit jackets and wire-framed glasses. When Kabul fell, he was in his midsixties and had been working as a journalist in the country for nearly two decades. He was determined and decorated; he had contacts in the Taliban, and he knew how to talk to them, most helpfully to their spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid. Like most of the Taliban, he was Pashtun himself. Over the last four tumultuous decades of his life he had never felt compelled to leave Afghanistan, his beloved country, home to his children. Unlike most of the hundreds of staffers and guests who had come through Moby over those two decades—those who had lived for a generation as refugees in Pakistan, rich Afghans who had been educated in the West, international consultants, actors and journalists and DJs and countless on-air guests—Sapai wasn’t scared of the Taliban. He knew that beneath the cloak of extremism they were Afghans, and he wanted to understand them. A good journalist, Sapai thought, doesn’t see anyone as an enemy or as a friend while they’re working. “You only become a human being again with likes and dislikes after you close the story,” he would tell our staff.
It had been Sapai who ultimately made the call to run the story that had so angered the Taliban official in the first place, bringing him to our offices to conduct a raid. The decision hadn’t come easily—Sapai might have been more comfortable than his colleagues talking to the Taliban spokesperson, but he wasn’t naïve about what the organization was capable of—yet he felt he had no choice. After six months in charge, during which they worked to cement their power over the Afghans who remained in the country, Taliban officials had begun asserting their authority over our offices, summoning Moby employees or dropping by the offices almost daily. Abdul Nafay Khaleeq, a young man who was the head of Moby’s legal department, had been detained twice and in secret, without any warning given to his colleagues or his family. Like Sapai, Nafay was more comfortable around the Taliban than the average Kabul resident; although he had lived most of his early life as a refugee and student in Pakistan, his roots were in Kandahar, also the Taliban’s birthplace and where its leadership was based. It was Nafay who had been one of our main on-the-ground negotiators with the Taliban in the months after their assumption of power in August 2021, visiting judges and ministries, fielding text messages and phone calls, trying to argue against the rules and demands made regarding the programming on our radio and TV stations, which grew harsher with each passing day.
Kabul had fallen so quickly. In the aftermath, our company stayed afloat hour by hour. Moby survived the first few days by helping staffers who wanted to leave—in the end, the majority of our on-air staff—fill out the paperwork necessary to show they were at particular risk because of their role in the media. Sapai had to replace the staffers who were fleeing daily, train the new ones, and keep the programs going. He had made the call to air footage of the panicked crowds around the airport, to make the story the human toll of the withdrawal. When one of his high-ranking Taliban contacts asked to come on air at TOLO to, he said, reassure the public that this government will be different from the Taliban of the 1990s, Sapai allowed it, assigning a female journalist to do the interview, viewers relishing the official’s obvious discomfort. “Saad,” Sapai promised me. “I won’t let the screens go dark.”
Every day, we adjusted to the new reality, sometimes by trying to anticipate what decisions the Taliban might make next. Our music programs on both TV and radio were the first to go—no surprise there; playing and listening to music had been banned under the first Taliban regime. Then we canceled all the programs where men and women appeared together, including on radio shows that had been on air for nearly the entire twenty years. We accepted that our employees would now have to pass through Taliban security when they came to work; the same group who, in 2016, had declared TOLOnews an “important tool of warfare of America and the crusaders” and a legitimate target, were now our best defense against other lethal threats like the Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-KP), the local branch of ISIS. All female employees made sure that their heads were scrupulously covered and, after a Taliban edict in May 2022, their mouths and noses too, although we staged a protest requiring male presenters and guests, including Taliban officials, to wear black surgical masks on air. “It’s hard to talk, isn’t it?” one of our journalists asked a Taliban minister during an interview.
We stopped using the term “Taliban” to refer to the new government and instead started referring to them as representatives of the “Islamic Emirate.” We put up curtains in our offices to separate the seating areas for men and women and, after women were banned from appearing in them, canceled many of our entertainment shows—singing competitions, some foreign dramas, locally produced mixed-gender comedy and talk shows—which we knew Taliban leadership would find irredeemably offensive. Because morale in the office, and in the country, was so low—not only had President Ashraf Ghani and the ruling elite fled, but so had authors, writers, academics, doctors, schoolteachers, and, of course, media personnel—we wrote PSAs intended to promote national unity in a time of crisis. “They’re part of this country,” we sighed. “Let’s send a message of peace.”
When Kabul fell, I was by coincidence abroad. I avoided being consumed by dread by consenting to almost every interview request that came my way; there were hundreds. “There’s no government, there’s no one else, no one understands what’s going on,” my friend Tom Freston, the cofounder of MTV and former CEO of Viacom and a Moby board member, told me. “You need to talk to them.” Meanwhile, I implored the pragmatists I knew within my own contacts in the Taliban to make their objections to the hard-liners known.
When we could, we have rebelled. In April 2022, an Islamic scholar delivered a Ramadan sermon on TOLO TV wearing a suit and tie, going against the Taliban’s preference for traditional dress. While we separated male and female hosts, we tried to give them equal speaking time on air. Sometimes, that meant that, while men appeared on camera, women read the promotional material off-screen. We worked on the studio classroom where we planned to film educational shows for children, now mostly girls banned from going to school beyond sixth grade. We hired more and more women, in Kabul and in the provinces, until in some departments they outnumbered the men on staff. We booked a female Islamic scholar, educated at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, to appear on a segment of our popular Ramadan talk show. (Afterward, a Taliban contact called one of my colleagues to say, just between them, that he had been “impressed” by her knowledge of Islam.)
Foreign shows—Indian and Turkish soap operas, mainly—had been a mainstay of our programming since Moby’s television station, TOLO, was launched. Without resources to make original Afghan serials, we purchased content from abroad, and Afghans had received these dubbed soap operas with an almost instant and obsessive love, which now, with so little available to distract from the reality of a second Taliban era, had only grown stronger. Asking for the sudden disappearance of these shows was, as Sapai said to me, like asking us to suddenly turn off the water to a thirsty village. “They are basically telling us to shut ourselves down,” he said.
Without knowing what to do, and thinking perhaps the new edict was more the grievance of one man than the new policy of the entire organization, we ignored him. We weren’t going to start digging our own grave just because one guy from the ministry told us to, and we weren’t the only media company to push back. For a few weeks, soap operas, foreign dramas, and comedies were broadcast into Afghan homes as though nothing had changed, and although every time the phone rang in our offices we were sure it would be the Taliban official, nothing happened and no one complained. But we were foolish to think a rebellion, even one via soap opera, would sail under the Taliban radar, and soon enough Nafay, along with representatives from all the remaining media companies, were ordered to attend a meeting at the General Directorate of Intelligence for a scolding. Once there, we continued to push back, a more or less united front against an unreasonable request. “Getting rid of all the foreign content is impossible,” one of the media heads complained in the meeting. “There’s just not enough Afghan content.”
“Why not broadcast some nice scenery?” GDI officials suggested, echoing what their colleagues at the Ministry of Information and Culture and the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had been telling the Afghan media since September 2021. “You can send people to villages and take some nice videos,” the officials said. “Play those instead.”
“They have no idea how the media works, or what the audience wants,” Nafay complained to me. “They suggested airing recitations of the Koran. We’re supposed to do that for sixteen hours a day?” The government channel had been airing such footage, but only, Nafay assumed, because they were at a loss for how else to fill the airwaves. No Afghan was really sitting down to watch hours of water flowing over rocks in some remote part of Afghanistan, no matter how beautiful that part of the country might be.
Among the GDI officials at the meeting was Jawad Sargar, a young Talib whom Nafay had dealt with more than once and thought of as relatively sensible and open-minded. Sargar was well educated and spoke fluent English, following contemporary religious scholars from Egypt, and once or twice, during Nafay’s many visits to the ministry during those months, the two had joked together. Prior to 2021, Sargar had a job delivering newspapers around Kabul, including to the Moby offices, but since the withdrawal he had risen quickly through the ranks. As negotiations stalled, and the media heads resoundingly rejected the idea of replacing popular soap operas with footage of village life, he took the lead at the meeting.
“By tomorrow you need to have cleaned up the shows or replaced them with something else,” Sargar told the room. It was very important, he stressed, that we not air any program that featured a woman who was not wearing a hijab. As always, the most important part seemed to be about women.
It was five in the evening, though, when the meeting was dismissed, too late to reasonably change or censor that night’s lineup, and so we went to bed again hoping that our small rebellion would fly under the radar but waking up with the sneaking suspicion that it would not. “You have one more day,” Sargar told Nafay over the phone, annoyance creeping into his voice. “That’s it.”
Now a little shaken, but still feeling we were in the right to push back, we reached out to ministry officials who might be less zealous than those in intelligence at enforcing the rules. Nafay appealed directly to officials he knew at the culture ministry and the vice and virtue ministry, who were more open to negotiation. Sargar’s directive, that we cease airing shows that went against Islamic values or Afghan culture, was too subjective, he said. If we didn’t know what the red line was, how could we avoid crossing it? One of our most popular Turkish soap operas at the time was based in the early Ottoman era, and the actresses were exquisitely but chastely dressed. (Built around a flattering, nostalgic depiction of Muslim warrior-leaders, it was also a favorite of the Turkish president Erdoğan.) Nafay invited an official from the vice and virtue ministry to visit our editing room, where he could approve of the changes our editors were making to certain scenes. In place of our Indian shows, where Hinduism and other elements of Indian culture were on display, we added in a few more bombastic hours of Kuruluş: Osman.
But the few other remaining media companies didn’t make as many changes as we did. Maybe they weren’t as organized, or didn’t have as much expertise or as many resources to snap into action quickly, or they didn’t take the government as seriously. Perhaps it was a protest, which they were willing to take further than we were. Whatever the reason, they continued to broadcast as usual, with the same images that had gotten them into trouble before, and sure enough a few weeks later Nafay and the other media heads were called back to the Taliban offices, where the mood in the room let Nafay know this would not be another round table on the beauty of rural Afghanistan.
The meeting started late, “by design,” Nafay told me. “To intimidate us.” Taking his position at the front of the room of men—at least none of the companies had thought it an appropriate provocation to send a woman representative—the young official now felt personally insulted. Sargar began by rebuking them. “We support the media continuing to operate in Afghanistan,” he insisted. “But it has to be within the limitations and boundaries set by the government.”
When that didn’t work, he tried explaining why, now that they were in charge, the Taliban were obligated to carry out their vision for the country. “The people who sacrificed their lives for our cause, their families are looking to us now,” he told them. “Their families say, our sons died to bring this kind of law to Afghanistan and when you don’t implement it, you are betraying us.”
Finally, seeing that he was getting nowhere, Sargar lost what remained of his patience. “If you don’t do this,” he threatened, “then don’t blame us for what happens next.”
What might happen exactly, he did not say. “Will they come to our offices? Will they shut us down? Will they take us from our homes and detain us?” Nafay asked me over the phone, and I had to admit that I didn’t know. It could be all of that, I thought. It could be worse. It could be nothing; it was often nothing.
