Tim Palmer reported this story on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 18:38:00

TIM PALMER: In the space of a little over a decade, Afghanistan moved from being a country where news and even pictures were banned to hosting a bewildering variety of media: from Taliban twitter feeds, to warlord-run TV stations and most popular of all, that dominant form of the modern media age - the soap opera.



But how free is the press in Afghanistan, and what will happen to it should the Taliban swing back into power in one form or another?



The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid is considered one of the world's pre-eminent writers on the Taliban, and on the so-called nation-building that Afghanistan has witnessed over the past 12 years.



He describes Afghan society as experiencing an enormous flowering of public expression over that period, but he says it will all be up for grabs again when the Western forces leave the scene in 2014.



I asked Ahmed Rashid how critical the resilience of Afghanistan's new-found media will be once Kabul is left to its own devices.



AHMED RASHID: Yes, it's absolutely critical. The media has played an enormous role in allowing Afghanistan to develop democratic institutions, literacy.



The concept of a free media encourages the process of education, encourages young people to work and send their children to school so that they can read the newspapers and watch and understand the television.



And television has become now the number one source of entertainment for the first time, after many decades of war.



So all this is off course at risk, because the future is uncertain. We don't know what kind of government we're going to get in Afghanistan. Are they going to censor the press? Are the Taliban coming back to power either as a power-sharing partner or as something more?



And in which case, will they revert back to disallowing everything they consider un-Islamic?



So all these questions are being grappled with by the Afghan TV satellite channels and with the newspapers and magazines, all of which have been shown an enormous flowering in the last 12 years.



TIM PALMER: How free is the expression of the press across Afghanistan, because with warlords dominating various regions of the country, are journalists essentially subject to their whim, or are they able to operate however they wish?



AHMED RASHID: Well in many areas that is very true. You've got very powerful warlords who dictate what can be reported and can't be reported by the local (inaudible) or local reporters.



Many of the warlords have their own TV channel by the way: this is quite an extraordinary development.



But certainly independent press has been harassed a lot in the past, and if there's going to be a collapse of government after 2014, we are going to see fewer and fewer independent journalists able to stand up to these warlords.



TIM PALMER: Let's just go back a little over a decade, when the Taliban were removed from power.



I remember seeing in Herat, in the west of Afghanistan, people gathering around noticeboards, where for the first time in many years, they were able to look at pictures and articles put up on the noticeboard, and what they were looking at there was in fact news of the assassination of the northern leader Ahmad Shah Massoud which they'd only heard of by word of mouth.



What it showed was that what they really wanted to see after coming out of the repression of the Taliban was news.



AHMED RASHID: Well absolutely. I mean, there was just a complete blackout of news during the seven or eight years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.



TV was banned of course. There was only one radio station, which was run by the Taliban. There was no press.



There was a ban on having pictures; there was a ban on any mention of the Koran or any religious artefacts.



TIM PALMER: Did they even know at the time why the war was being prosecuted in Afghanistan, given that, as you say, there would have been a total blackout on what happened at 9/11?



AHMED RASHID: Well, you know the first time I went into Afghanistan right after 9/11, most people had no idea what had happened.



I had a magazine and I was showing them pictures in the magazine as to what had happened to New York and Washington with the bombing by al-Qaeda, and they just couldn't believe it.



And they thought what they'd been hearing was just rumours and accusations and they couldn't believe that it had actually happened.



So no, they weren't informed at all about international events.



TIM PALMER: So were the Taliban to return to power, as you foreshadowed, in some sort of process after the Western forces leave, would they be able to put the genie back in the bottle?



Would they repress the media to the same extent, do you think?



AHMED RASHID: No, I really don't think so.



By and large, I think the media now has become incredibly powerful.



The Taliban themselves have been using their own media and even Kabul media to propagate their cause.



So I think they understand and realise now what they did before was very short-sighted and very stupid, but on the other hand obviously there will be restrictions.



For example, they have been opposed to some of these soap operas that the Afghans love very much and which are run by the TV stations - Afghan soap operas and Turkish and Pakistani and Indian soap operas.



Now, they've been very much opposed to that. I'm sure there's going to be a big battle of the soap operas if the Taliban do come in.



TIM PALMER: Do the Taliban really acknowledge how much they might need the media themselves?



For example, if they are going to move into a phase of detente, of negotiations with Western forces?



AHMED RASHID: Well what was so amazing when the Taliban were ruling - they had banned all the media, yet the moment they were defeated and they came out and settled in Pakistan mostly, and they restarted their insurgency in 2003, 2004, the first thing they did was to organise a media cell, which put out DVDs and videos of their battles, and they had a fake radio station, they had Twitter, they had email, Twitter, they had web accounts, they had everything.



They put up everything that they had banned.



TIM PALMER: There was a time when journalists would seriously consider whether they should at all meet to interview, for example, someone from the Taliban.



Have those circumstances changed?



If a Western journalist in Afghanistan was now offered the opportunity, should they safely take it?



AHMED RASHID: No, because right now, there has been an enormous fear of kidnapping.



In fact most of the Western journalists who try to interview the Taliban in recent years have been kidnapped. It's not safe at the moment to interview the Taliban.



TIM PALMER: Is it likely that once the Western troops go, that the majority of Western journalists will follow soon after, and Afghanistan will largely disappear from the front pages?



AHMED RASHID: I think so; I think this is the big fear. This is what happened in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal.



I mean nobody is going to be particularly interested about the political developments inside Afghanistan, and I think this is a very big fear.



It's very important, I think, that the international media keeps its eye on the ball, because this region is inherently unstable. We may get over one crisis, but you know, there's bound to be more.



TIM PALMER: The writer Ahmed Rashid, speaking from Lahore.