WAR IN
AFGHANISTAN
MEDIA: ISLAMIC
RULE APPLIES
Edward R. Murrow once said, "Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions." However, the Obama administration has been quite actively advertising the end of the war in Afghanistan as one of its primary objectives and, consequently, successes. In May, 2012, the president announced, regarding the end of the conflict, that the "transition and the eventual withdrawal in 2014 of the U.S. forces and other NATO forces from Afghanistan is good for Afghanistan and good for our allied countries." The American leader also declared that a "clear road map" was established and that the war would be brought to a "responsible end."
No matter how relatively "well" the war that has been recurrent for the past thirteen years may come to an end and how seemingly the U.S. intends to support the country in the following years in its road toward "progress and peace," notably in the American model, the socioeconomic reality of Afghans seems to indicate a very different denouement to this dystopian endeavour. Largely, the media is to blame.
Although the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has made remarkable progress toward ambitious goals since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, social and economic development, human rights guarantees, and sociopolitical security have remained strikingly backward, especially because of the country's fervorous embracement of sharia law. Media in the country is a microorganism, a symbol of this vast retardation. The Taliban banned the use of the Internet in July, 2001, because the group considered it a means of broadcasting "obscene, immoral, and anti-Islam material." After the fall of the fundamentalist Muslim militia, which had been in power in the country since early 1995, openness and innovation were welcomed in Afghanistan; however, the country's recent history of terror and repression have left an imprint that impedes steady advancement.
The informations communications technology (ICT) in the country is extremely recent -- with the aid of international actors and donors from the private sector, it has started being built up only in 2002. Given this context, not only do a select minority of Afghans have access to the internet, but the country's leaders also regulate media coverage, reporting, and publishing of domestic events to the best of their abilities.Despite such key and classic indicators of censorship, the government does not filter information technically. For this reason,
It is important to understand the reasons behind Afghanistan's exclusion from the world cybersphere, one of them being literacy rate -- only 28 percent of the population is considered literate and the rate for women is the lowest worldwide, only around 13 percent. Another phenomenon that accounts for the country's eviction from the World Wide Web is violence and oppression toward the student population, notably girls. As described, it is no shock that a country defined by such religious paradigm, paralleled by ongoing violence and prejudice toward women and minorities, has an exiguous 1.5 million Internet subscribers. A third obstacle to media access in the country relates to the economy. Not only are the costs of modernization very high, the mindset of the people is still retracted from innovation and mostly wealthy Afghans are interested, if at all, in the benefits computer technology has to offer. Despite the striking advances in hardware and software technology in the past decade, especially made in the U.S., Afghanistan's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) has had trouble implementing a wireless network throughout the country's provinces, mainly because the amount of fixed lines is constrained.
Now… why does Islamic rule directly apply to the media in Afghanistan? The answer is simple: material that is against Islamic, or sharia law, is forbidden. Non-governmental radio stations have irritated religious conservations for the past years and images of women are usually pixelated and self-censored by TV stations. As described by the BBC News, "Internet services have been boosted by an international fibre optic cable connection," but the reality of web access is no doubt interconnected to the country's religious sphere of influence that is much more widespread than recent technological innovations, unfortunately.
the OpenNet Initiative -- whose mission is to "identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogues about such practices" -- does not have conclusive data about filtering in the categories of social; political; conflict and security; and internet tools regarding Afghanistan. Nor has the organization been able to pinpoint typical strategies of governments that engage in filtering, which would be the following and are present in nations such as China and Saudi Arabia: technical blocking, search result removals, take-down, and finally self-induced censorship. The OpenNet Initiative was also unable to measure consistency and transparency in the country's regulation practices, though, considering other indicators, it is not hard to infer these are not positive either. For instance, only 3.6% of the people in the whole territory are considered "Internet users" and the population's "voice and accountability," in a scale of 0-5, is a meager 1.1.
Given the context of repression and violation of freedom of speech and expression, one should be able to easily see the parallels between the current situation in Afghanistan and that of Nazi Germany back in 1945. The comparison is broad, but we must take into account at least one aspect of both nations: mass communication. According to political theorists Friedrich and Brzezinski, totalitarianism, amongst its six chief characteristics, includes the governmental monopoly of the means of mass communication. While under Hitler, films and radios were both controlled and produced according to the Fuhrer's policy and aims under the banner of Nazism and anti-Semitism, in Afghanistan the same occurs, only under a different pretext: Islam. At the same time, because both have violated inviolable freedoms according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and because they have qualified under Friedrich and Brzezinski's analysis of media reproduction as repressive, both Germany in 1945 and Afghanistan in 2013 are considered totalitarian.