Under the gun in Afghanistan
By Philip Smucker
KABUL - Thomas Jefferson, an early advocate of the First Amendment [1] to the US constitution, famously stated, "If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter."
In today's Afghanistan , a harassed government and a struggling free press face off against each other. Both are under attack and both lack strong advocates.
There are troubling signs amid deteriorating security that the Afghan government and some of its Western allies are attempting to restrict the press. In what is already one of the most hostile working environments in the world for journalists, American soldiers and Afghan officials have used threats of physical force against journalists to suppress potentially embarrassing information. Then there are the omnipresent Taliban, who have no interest at all in a free press and remain prepared to execute the messengers of truth.
Advisers to the government of President Hamid Karzai admit they are disturbed by what they consider to be the inordinate amount of print and air time devoted to coverage of the Taliban's ongoing war against foreign and Afghan forces. But most Afghan journalists argue that, after all, the war is "the news".
"When we cover news, we try to use three sources on every story and we try to be accurate and impartial," said Najiba Ayoubi, the director of Radio Killid, a major private station that serves Herat and Kabul . "We're also aware that the Taliban [are] evil and that the actions they embrace are un-Islamic."
Ayoubi doesn't sound like an enemy of the state, but sometimes, she said, she feels as though she is treated as one. She said the public is served well by enterprising reporters.
Afghan journalists often get to a breaking story before the government knows about it, particularly in cases where the Taliban are burning girls' schools in remote areas, said Ayoubi.
Nevertheless, Afghan government arm-twisters consider it their responsibility to keep the pressure up. In Kabul this year, seven men from the Information Ministry paid a visit to Radio Television Afghanistan TV reporter Besoodi Forgh, pinning his arms back and punching him in the face. Among other things, the government thugs accused him of spying for Iran , a charge he was not allowed to dispute in a court of law.
As worrisome as the Afghan government's autocratic actions, however, are those of its main sponsor. Along the Afghan border, leading pro-government radio stations have been offered working space, funding and boosted broadcasting power behind the blast walls of US military bases, said Ayoubi, who contends that these stations have "lost their objectivity".
"This is not the way to go about promoting a free press," she said. "In these areas along the border, the Americans and the Afghan government are only forfeiting public trust." Other radio journalists along Afghanistan's embattled border with Pakistan contend that the Afghan stations inside US bases only report "good news" and do not question mistakes made in the field by coalition and Afghan peacekeepers.
On another level, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its member states run a system of "embedding" foreign and national reporters to provide a presumably uncensored look at the Western alliance's humanitarian and military operations. But reporters working in Afghanistan said in interviews that US military officials have skewed a once-egalitarian system by offering preferred news outlets the best access, while limiting or excluding those reporters who cannot be trusted to report stories that shed a positive light on the mission. The result, they say, is government-imposed censorship of the news.
Apart from micro-managing access, by far the most serious incident involving US military forces occurred on March 4. Angry US soldiers deleted photos and video taken by Afghan journalists - including a freelance photographer and a cameraman of the Associated Press (AP) - covering the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan . More than a dozen civilians were accidentally shot dead, and Afghan officials claimed marine special forces fired weapons indiscriminately along a crowded highway.
Taqi-ullah Taqi, a reporter for Afghanistan 's largest television station, Tolo TV, said that US troops told him (in reference to his pictures), "Delete them, or we will delete you." United Nations officials, investigating the incident, said in interviews that the AP reporter and colleagues were well outside of the "crime scene" cordon set up by US soldiers when they began filming a vehicle of Afghan civilians riddled with bullets.
NATO and US spokesmen disputed that. "The media were trying to break the security cordon set up around that area, and what it ultimately comes down to is people potentially compromising evidence," said Colonel Thomas Collins, an American and a senior spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force mission. "In my opinion, they had a right to confiscate the tape" and film.
But that view contradicts practice and law in the United States . Major US Supreme Court rulings in recent decades have held that there can be no "prior restraint" placed on the public's right to know. Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas wrote in a famous 1971 case regarding the New York Times' publishing of the "Pentagon Papers" that "the dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information".
Threats of physical force against journalists are always against the law in any democracy.
Reporters Without Borders, an international advocate for a free press, demanded to know after the March 4 suicide attack: "If the US soldiers had nothing to hide, why have they done everything to prevent the press from covering the blunder?"
The marine special forces unit involved in the incident has been ordered to return home while a full military investigation continues. AP lodged a formal complaint with the US military but, according to reporters, remains disappointed with the response.
Afghan journalists are also concerned about proposed changes to an already restrictive national media law that could make it possible for the Afghan government to jail journalists for reporting news deemed "humiliating and offensive".
The changes also envisage a powerful "High Media Council" to be run by the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Culture and members of Parliament, but with no representatives at all from the press corps.
All the same, there are already strong advocates of the press in the ranks of the government, some of whom have served as journalists.
"The government believes in freedom of speech and is supporting free and fair and independent media," said Lutfullah Mashal, director of strategic communications for the Afghan National Security Council and a former war correspondent, who broke the story about Osama bin Laden's escape from US forces at Tora Bora, another embarrassing episode for the Pentagon.
"We have 5,000 publications, 98% of which are private," continued Mashal. "By comparison, the Taliban [have] only vicious websites and continue to try to kill and intimidate journalists."
Removing all shackles from the Afghan press is a "win, win, lose" situation for everyone involved, said Mashal. The government will be seen by the public as open and fair, the public will be far better informed, and the Taliban will be exposed for the evil and crimes they foment.
Note
1. The First Amendment, part of the US Bill of Rights, prohibits the federal legislature from making laws that establish a state religion or prefer a certain religion, prohibit free exercise of religion, infringe the freedom of speech, infringe the freedom of the press, limit the right to assemble peaceably, or limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Philip Smucker is a commentator and journalist based in South Asia and the Middle East . He is the author of Al-Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (2004).
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