---- by Rahilla Zafar, Kabul ----

Eight years ago television was banned in Afghanistan and its single national radio station was Taliban-run.

William Reeve was a BBC Afghanistan correspondent for two years in the early 1990s during the time of the warlords and for two years in 1998-1999 during the Taliban regime.  

He remembers the days when the main sources of reliable information for Afghans, before and during the time of the Taliban, were the daily BBC broadcasts in Dari and Pashto. In a country that has suffered through decades of war, reliable news was needed to ensure safety.

“Surveys have shown that when big stories were being played out in Afghanistan, as many as 70 per cent of the Afghan population would hear what was happening in their country from BBC broadcasts in their own languages.  Their lives would often depend on this. So they tended to glue themselves to the evening BBC broadcasts all around the country,” Reeve recalls.

Today the country’s independent media are considered to be a major success story – but like most developments in this war-battered nation it finds itself increasingly under threat.

While the establishment of an independent media has played a pivotal role in uniting an ethnically-divided country, the re-emergence of warlords and a reluctant government puts such gains in jeopardy.

Since 2002, hundreds of media outlets opened with the help of an international donor community that recognised a free press as a necessary ingredient of nation-building in a country where 90 per cent of its people live in rural areas.

“There were so many media trainers here in 2002 that I wondered who was going to feed the people,” says Dominic Medley who served as country director for Internews in 2002, an organisation that has helped to set up 35 regional radio stations.

And despite a promising start, sustaining independent media stations has become a challenge in Afghanistan. Obstacles include the rise of warlord-backed media outlets; a growing lack of security for journalists; and the reluctance of Afghan officials to embrace an independent media.

With so many actors involved from international military forces, foreign governments, as well as Afghan political leaders and warlords, the media have evolved at a fast pace that far exceeds what the actual market size of 22 million dollars could support.

For example with the 2009 presidential elections looming, the number of television stations has nearly doubled in the space of six months to 20 from 12, with a number of political parties creating their own outlets.

There is a growing concern that, as in Iraq, many broadcasters will fold when international funds disappear from Afghanistan as they rely on that funding.

And while over the past six years a number of agencies have continued to provide training to journalists, the country still lacks a proper journalism institute.  

Critics feel that the international community’s involvement in Afghanistan’s media should focus more on the sector’s sustainability. For example, millions of dollars in foreign funds are being poured into producing public information campaigns many feel are ineffective and poorly made. However, several Afghan outlets say that they must air them because it brings in vital advertising revenue.

The United States government for instance will not fund Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) because it is state-controlled. However they have been willing to provide funds to independent stations and, as a result, many of the best RTA journalists have left to work for other outlets that pay five to six times more.

A debate still lingers in Afghanistan, similar to Rupert Murdoch’s criticism of networks that do not rely entirely on commercial funds, such as the BBC. Its founder, Lord John Reith, believed that broadcasting was too important to be a commercial enterprise and that its priorities were to inform, educate and entertain. In Afghanistan, where very limited commercial funds exist, relying purely on the private market to sustain the media industry has become a huge concern.

The battle for a public service broadcaster

In 2002, Hamid Karzai, the country’s then interim president, pledged to turn state-controlled RTA into a public-service broadcaster that would receive government funding, but be run by an independent commission.

In the Afghan context, a public broadcaster would be able to not only help support smaller media outlets in the provinces, but also offer educational programming and investigative journalism; areas that are not seen as being profitable activities for commercial outlets.

According to Medley, “a public broadcaster has a guaranteed income and can afford to produce programming for the good of the nation and in minority languages. In the UK, for instance, ITV cannot afford to make documentaries only a million people will watch like the BBC can.”

However, since the formation of Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005, political leaders have often been opposed to giving up control of RTA.

“There is still an old communist mentality that the government must have its own voice through a state broadcaster,” says Adrian Edwards, Director of Communications for the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

As a result of political meddling, RTA failed to attract international donors as they were not prepared to fund something still under government influence.

Then in 2007, President Karzai vetoed a media law to establish an independent commission to oversee RTA. The failure to establish a public broadcasting service has been a concern for many, as the number of politically-biased media outlets in the country has increased dramatically.

“There has been a rapid growth in television and electronic media at a rate that exceeds the market. Even in terms of newspapers, a number will say they are independent but open up the paper and you see there are barely any adverts. Look at the advertising market, look at the size of it, look at how much it costs to fund a station, do the math, it’s not rocket science,” explains Edwards.

According to Syed Anwer, a producer for the BBC Persian Service, politically-reliant media outlets are causing problems among Afghan intellectuals and university students.

“Independent media do not have the resources to distribute all over the country, but political media do. Warlords from Ismail Khan to Burhanuddin Rabbani are able to distribute their publications to every district in the country,” he says.

In addition to creating their own media, local warlords have also threatened many independent journalists.

“What most concerns me today about the Afghan context is not whether there are some political media (outlets), but if journalists are allowed to operate without threat from the government, warlords, the Taliban or other members of their community. In that regard, the threat comes as much from the government recently as from anywhere else,” says Ivan Sigal, who was formerly a regional director for Internews and now heads Global Voices, a non-profit citizen media project.

With increased threats and the rise of political media, many Afghan journalists worry about the loss of credibility and trust that the industry has gained over the past six years.

“Afghanistan has a good media law, but if we look at these problems that someone cannot express their own ideas or say something about someone because of influential warlords in power this creates problems for us,” says Danish Karokhel, a journalist for the Afghan newswire Pajhwak.    Go to page 2 of 3