Taliban Kills Afghan Journalism with Censorship and Crackdowns

A Taliban fighter
WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images
John Hayward

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Tuesday that Afghan journalism is “still resisting after two years of Taliban persecution,” but that resistance is sadly muted.

Censorship in Afghanistan has reached an all-time high two years after President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal, journalists are brazenly jailed or assaulted, and the Taliban seems to be mastering the dark art of controlling both traditional and online media coverage.

The Afghan reporters who talked to RSF were courageous, but also realistic about the grim odds they face, especially those who are women. RSF noted that over 80 percent of Afghanistan’s female journalists have been forced to stop working since the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

“It gets worse every day,” one female reporter said. “I’ve repeatedly been denied the right to cover events simply because I am a woman.”

“As a woman journalist, I must think twice about everything I do. Women journalists cannot participate in a talk show with men or ask them questions. Because of this, many women journalists were forced to abandon their careers. Many chose to leave the newsroom and to stay at home instead of feeling imprisoned at their desks,” she said.

RSF was “sickened” by the wanton destruction of Afghanistan’s newspapers, radio stations, and TV news networks under Taliban rule. Afghanistan had 547 registered media outlets after the U.S. invasion overthrew the first Taliban regime in 2001. Over half of them are gone today.

The Taliban was especially eager to shut down local news outlets that would be difficult for the Islamist regime to monitor or control. National news bureaus have been terrorized into compliance with the Taliban’s oppressive “11 Rules” for media coverage, imposed a month after the fall of Kabul.

“Every journalist is now terrified, crushed and despondent as a result of all the arrests and the harassment to which we have been subjected and they therefore all self-censor their work,” a TV reporter in Kabul told RSF.

“The chief task of the current authorities is censorship. The Taliban tolerate no opposition to their policies. We have no supporters here. We just know that we must deal with it,” he said.

There is no longer much media “resistance” against the Taliban within Afghanistan. The outlets RSF commended for their bravery are headquartered overseas. All of the Afghan reporters willing to go on the record with RSF under their real names were living in other countries. Their correspondents inside Afghanistan remain anonymous or use pen names.

Kabul-based Khaama Press, which still manages to produce reports critical of the Taliban, noted on Monday that censorship reached all-time highs in the second year after the American withdrawal.

“Research and reports about the media landscape under the Taliban rule show that they have imposed stricter controls on media, despite their initial commitments. They now oversee media institutions, curate content, and prohibit news that goes against their ideology. These actions have led to restrictions on freedom of expression,” Khaama Press wrote.

“Violence against journalists, unemployment in the journalistic sector, insufficient funding for media operations, expulsions of journalists, curtailed freedom of expression, constraints on female journalists, arrests of media personnel, and restricted access to information emerged as critical issues shaping the landscape of Afghan media,” the report said.

Khaama Press cited reports similar to RSF’s that found over half of Afghanistan’s media outlets are gone, along with over three-quarters of its female journalists. The country’s remaining journalists are subject to “arrests, beatings, lack of information access, censorship, and violence.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) quoted Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid saying his regime was “committed to the media within our cultural frameworks” and promising that “private media can continue to be free and independent” just two days after the fall of Kabul in 2021.

CPJ found the Taliban coming up short of those promises, to put it mildly:

Despite their public pledge to allow journalists to work freely, Taliban operatives and officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) – the Taliban’s intelligence agency – have assaulted, arbitrarily arrested and detained journalists, while shutting down local news outlets and banning broadcasts of a number of international media from inside the country. Foreign correspondents face visa restrictions to return to Afghanistan to report.

Journalists continue to be arrested for their job. Since August 2021, at least 64 journalists have been detained in Afghanistan in retaliation for their work, according to CPJ’s research. They include Mortaza Behboudi, a co-founder of the independent news site Guiti News, who has been held since January.

Afghan journalists have fled in huge numbers, mostly to neighboring countries like Pakistan and Iran. Many who left are now stuck in legal limbo without clear prospects of resettlement to a third country, and their visas are running out, prompting fears they could be arrested and deported back to Afghanistan.

CPJ said a troubling new trend is the Taliban arresting Afghan correspondents accused of working for “Afghan media in exile.” The oppressive regime is getting better at policing the Internet and has lately considered total bans on social media platforms like Facebook that can slip exile news reports past the Taliban blockade.

The Taliban arrested two more journalists in Kandahar, including Attaullah Omar, a correspondent for leading independent TV network Tolo News. On the same day, the Taliban’s Information and Culture Ministry in Helmand province ordered all local radio stations to stop broadcasting female voices, even those featured in advertisements.

“All the radio stations in Helmand have been warned that if they broadcast the voice of a woman, they will be shut and their owners will be punished,” a station manager in Helmand explained.

CPJ had some ideas for pushing back against the Taliban’s “relentless campaign” of censorship, but those ideas mostly boiled down to increasing pressure from the “international community” on the Taliban to become less oppressive – and those strategies have singularly failed to improve the lot of Afghan since the Biden withdrawal disaster.

Under two years of the heaviest possible international pressure and diplomatic isolation, the Taliban went from banning girls in schools to banning women’s voices from the airwaves. 

CPJ advised foreign governments to “streamline visa and broader resettlement processes” to help oppressed Afghan journalists escape and perhaps broadcast from other countries – but as noted above, the Taliban is getting better at shutting down underground media broadcasts and controlling the Internet. If dissidents on the Internet become a more serious problem for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, it can always ask its friends in China for their expert censorship assistance.

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