Mohseni recalls that Karzai said, “ ‘You better fix up your TV station!’ ”

“When you fix your cabinet, I’ll fix my TV station,” Mohseni said.

“Your TV station should be easier!” Karzai said, sardonically, which elicited the first smiles of the meeting. Zaid and the Tolo employees were released. “It was a good lesson for us about how vulnerable we were,” Mohseni says today.

Still, Freston worries that Mohseni can be reckless: “He treats his personal security almost too casually.” Sarah Takesh, his Iranian-born third wife, whom he married in 2007, worries about his safety. “The odds of something happening to him are high,” she says. Other TV and radio outlets in Afghanistan have also put themselves at risk by reporting on official corruption and the mistreatment of women. Media Watch Afghanistan, a press-freedom organization, reported in 2006, “Intimidation and harassment against media outlets and media practitioners continues unabated.” In the past four years, ten journalists have been murdered in Afghanistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Mohseni says that a few years ago Tolo was offered a hundred thousand dollars not to air a particular news story. Tolo ran the story, but, Mohseni said, if someone is powerful enough to offer a substantial bribe, “what stops him from killing someone?”

In July, 2009, on the eve of a Presidential debate hosted by Tolo, Karzai refused to appear, claiming that the network was biased and that he hadn’t had sufficient time to prepare. His campaign manager, citing an Electoral Media Commission report, asserted that fifty-nine per cent of Tolo’s coverage of Karzai in the previous week had been negative. Mohseni was angry. Even the Taliban talked to Tolo, he argued. During the broadcast of the debate, Tolo left Karzai’s lectern empty in the center of the studio.

Karzai is correct, however, in seeing Mohseni as a vociferous critic of his administration. He regularly proclaims that Karzai “does nothing” to combat corruption, to diminish the power of warlords, to reform the police force, to prosecute the Taliban. Mohseni wants the U.S. to press for greater reforms by “placing more conditions on its assistance.” Although Tolo made no editorial endorsement in the Presidential election, Mohseni’s friends knew that he favored the candidacy of the former foreign minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Once a fervent supporter of Karzai, Mohseni now says, “My views have changed. I no longer feel the government can bring about reform.”

In August, as voting began, Tolo reported that many votes cast for Karzai were fraudulent. (Later, an electoral commission invalidated nearly a million votes for Karzai, and more than three hundred thousand for his opponents.) The station aired dramatic footage of uniformed electoral officials at voting stations literally stuffing ballot boxes. Mohseni proudly says, “We were so far ahead of everyone else in coverage. We showed no fear. We informed people. We entertained them.”

However accurate Tolo’s reporting may have been, Karzai was not alone in believing that the network’s coverage was sometimes biased. Another Presidential candidate, Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister, praises Mohseni for trying to create a freer society, but says, “Saad, in the Presidential campaign, favored one candidate. He tilted. He became partisan.”

By American standards, such an outspoken owner—whose news director asks him to approve stories, who recruits advertisers as clients for his ad agency while his news divisions monitor their businesses—would invite criticism. By Afghan standards, Mohseni is advancing the cause of a free press.

Tolo’s biggest hit is “Afghan Star,” the most popular show in the country. Every Thursday night, an estimated one-third of Afghanistan’s thirty million citizens gather in front of television sets to watch. In rural places without electricity, people fill generators with gasoline or hook up their TVs to car batteries. The show, which was shepherded by Jahid and Wajma Mohseni and débuted in 2005, is a Central Asian version of “American Idol.” In a season-long competition, Afghan citizens—many in traditional costumes—appear on a silver-colored stage to sing in front of a frenetic studio audience. Thousands of contestants apply each season; three finalists compete for a five-thousand-dollar prize and a recording contract. The music sounds foreign to Western ears, with hand drums and exotic scales, but other aspects of the production are familiar: three or four judges, dancing spotlights, and a host looking into the camera to ask “Are you ready to find out who won this round?” before pausing for a commercial. (Moby co-produced a documentary about the show, which won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, and was shown on HBO.)

As on “American Idol,” winners on “Afghan Star” are determined by the judges, the audience, and text messages sent from mobile phones throughout the country. Before the show aired, Mohseni made a deal with Roshan, the country’s leading mobile-phone company, and ran promotional ads on Tolo and Arman instructing citizens how to place a vote. (The text messages cost voters about seven cents, the equivalent of a loaf of bread; three hundred thousand votes were cast in the final week.) With suspicious egalitarianism, the finalists have often been from each of the three main Afghan ethnic groups: Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras. At first, losers reacted badly on the air, smashing stage equipment and claiming ethnic prejudice, but, because their tantrums were so public, they were humiliated and seen as dividers.

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In the third season, one of the finalists was Lema Sahar, a Pashtun woman from Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. Religious leaders were outraged that a woman was allowed to perform in public, and Sahar received death threats. In the “Afghan Star” documentary, she said, “We hide the songbooks and other things at night. If the Taliban come at night, we have a special place to hide the computer. If they find something, they kill you.” She was undaunted. “If I do not sing, what else can I do?” she said. Sahar’s performances on the show demonstrate a somewhat tenuous relationship with pitch and rhythm, but she was a crowd favorite. Mohseni told a reporter at the time, “They all realized how it was for her to come from Kandahar, and we all want to root for the underdog.” The text-message voting did something else, Mohseni says: It “has changed Afghanistan in ways you could not imagine ten years ago. It has given people power to vote someone off.”

Moby and the other media have been part of sweeping changes in Afghanistan. Ghani says, “The majority of the population is under twenty-two. They behave differently. Women have overcome gender segregation. I know a dozen young women who want to be President one day.” Women are more assertive, according to Zahra Mousavi, Moby’s manager of current affairs. “I am so full of hope about that,” she says. “They believe in women’s power now. In our shows and news, we have a lot of women. It’s normal.”

Arezo Kohistany, who is twenty-one, fled with her family to Virginia, in 1997, to escape the Taliban. After graduating from college in Virginia, last fall she returned to Kabul, where she is the marketing manager for the Azizi Bank. Except for the scarf she wears outside, she looks and talks like an American coed. The media “has opened Afghan women’s minds,” she says. “Over here they were told they can’t do this, they can’t do that. Even though people say there has been no improvement in Afghanistan, eight years ago women were not allowed to go to school. They were not allowed to go out of the house without a man. Now you see women having a career any man can have.”

Mohseni says, “One of the reasons Afghanistan has not exploded is that the media give people an outlet.” Cyrus Oshidar, who once worked for Tom Freston at MTV India and now works for Moby Group in Dubai, says that in poor countries like Afghanistan and India the media allow people to escape their misery. “It’s why Bollywood movies are three and a half hours.” The media “takes you away,” he says. “It provides hope. New images. It’s escapism.”

Even Fazel Ahmad Manawi, the spokesman for the Ulema Council, concedes the media’s impact. Manawi, who is forty-three, is a respected former Supreme Court justice who was appointed by Karzai in April to chair Afghanistan’s Election Commission. He remains opposed to “Afghan Star” and the “immoral” Indian soap operas. “It is not allowed, according to our religion, that girls appear onstage and perform in front of people,” he said. But he praises the newscasts, including Tolo’s, which have “played an effective role in modernizing Afghanistan” and educating the public. He was sitting on one of three black leather chairs in a bare-walled office whose windows were covered and whose doors were guarded, because, he says, the Taliban have murdered up to “fifty members of the Sharia.” To his left were shelves filled with religious books. To his right was a small television.

“I have the TV, and it is on always,” he said. He has two sets at home, and he and his four sons are devoted to Tolo’s broadcasts of “24.” His two young daughters watch cartoons and children’s shows, and he conceded that television often “improves the way people behave. When my little daughter faces a problem, she calls out, ‘Help.’ She learned that from TV. Before, she would just cry.”

Television has become part of Afghan life, he said. “If the Taliban came back to power, they could not ban television.” Manawi does not oppose men and women talking with one another on television or radio—“as long as the woman has the hijab,” or head scarf—but he was still amazed to see the former foreign minister for the Taliban, who now lives in Kabul, “sitting next to a pretty female on television.”

“The media is a huge success story,” Masood Farivar said. “It’s contributed to nation building and democracy by educating the public.” The day before the August, 2009, election, he said, “the Minister of Foreign Affairs directed that the media not report on violence in the election. It was ignored by most media.” Today, he continued, the public “takes it for granted that their leaders should be elected and held accountable. That is not an expectation people had ten years ago.”

Zahra Mousavi is unsure how long the Afghan government will tolerate the freedom that she has at Tolo. “Sometimes they order us,” she says of the government. “Sometimes they say ‘please.’ They say ‘please,’ but it’s like an order for us. Sometimes I worry if in the future it will be better or worse.”

Afghanistan is an Islamic state by constitutional writ, and there is a fundamental tension between a constitution that protects freedom of the press yet forbids content that is “contrary to the principles of Islam.” Television and radio are subject to government license and easier to shut down than satellite or Web-based media, which operate outside a nation’s borders. The presence of Western money and media would be a deterrent, but not an insurmountable one. The U.S. has said that it will begin removing soldiers in 2011, and, as in Iran or Burma, reporters can be expelled. With little Internet presence, the social media that boosted the Green Revolution in Iran are not potent. E-mail and blogging are limited by widespread illiteracy.

Even in countries where new media have taken root, governments have had surprising success in restricting the Internet. In the past few years, China has successfully pressured Google to censor search results for the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square, and information about Chinese leaders, and has blocked blogs, scanned text messages, and broken into the e-mail of suspected dissidents.

But, often, economics proves stronger than politics. Joseph Ravitch, the media investment banker, recalls that, earlier this year, the Chinese government tried to curtail screenings of “Avatar” and replace it with “Confucius,” a biography of the philosopher. The edict was largely ignored. Citizens demanded to see the movie, and theatre owners did not want to be denied ticket sales. With governments and corporations increasingly dependent on the Internet and cellular communications, Ravitch believes, “no one—unless you want to take your society back to the Stone Age, as Pol Pot and Mullah Omar tried to do—can afford to cut themselves off from the electronic age.”

The economic incentives that worked against censoring “Avatar” also work against a media crackdown in Afghanistan, which is desperate to build a private economy that creates jobs and growth. Moby Group, along with the rest of the country’s vibrant media sector, must be counted a business success. According to the Afghan Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the country now has thirty-one private TV channels and ninety-three radio stations. Jeanne Bourgault, the executive vice-president of Internews Network, a nonprofit that has supported local media in seventy countries, including Salam Watandar’s network, gives a measure of credit to the Karzai government, which, she notes, “has been more open to media than many other countries. We haven’t gotten the pushback we have in other countries.” But, of course, should the government reach an accord with the Taliban, the kind of independent journalism and entertainment programming championed by Saad Mohseni could be portrayed as subversive.

Of all the business cards that Mohseni has collected, perhaps the most important one belonged to Tom Freston. In the early seventies, Freston left the advertising business to travel through Europe and ended up in Afghanistan, where he established a clothing-design-and-manufacturing business. He returned to the U.S. soon after the Communist government took power, and helped found MTV, eventually rising to become C.E.O. of the parent company, Viacom. Freston met Mohseni through Sarah Takesh, and, with Mohseni, he returned to Afghanistan for the first time in 2007. He soon became a member of Moby Group’s board, and he introduced Mohseni to a galaxy of Western media figures: Rupert Murdoch, Jon Stewart, Charlie Rose, Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt, and Joseph Ravitch.

The introduction to Murdoch was particularly fruitful. He and Mohseni have certain things in common—roots in Australia, a desire to spread free media, and an instinct for making money—and at their first meeting, in 2006, they talked animatedly. They agreed to work together to form Farsi1, which now beams Turkish and Latin-American soap operas and action shows like “24” to a hundred and twenty million Farsi speakers in Iran, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. The channel is half owned by Murdoch’s News Corp., and its C.E.O. is Zaid Mohseni.

Moby has hired a hundred Afghans who speak Iranian-accented Farsi to dub the programs that it broadcasts to Iran. To try to avoid offending Iranian sensibilities, Farsi1 offers no news, and it screens its programs, erasing or blotting out kissing and sex. Still, last month the chief of Iran’s state-run television denounced Farsi1 programs on the ground that they promoted moral corruption, and Kayhan, a hard-line daily newspaper, accused it of “promoting dysfunctional families and adultery and portraying unmarried relationships and abortion as normal.”

Farsi1’s offices are in Dubai, in Studio City, a tax-free industrial park in the middle of what was once desert. Mohseni spends about half his time there, and he and his siblings work within shouting distance of one another. On the whiteboard across from the desk in his small glassed-in office are the words “Yemen,” “Pakistan,” “Jordan,” “Iraq,” “U.A.E.,” “Palestine,” “Sudan,” “Somalia,” “Uzbekistan,” and “U.S. Muslims.” Asked to explain their meaning, Mohseni said that he sees some of the world’s most troubled places as good media investments. “In our part of the world, old media still works,” he said. “Despite the dangers, if you have enough diversity it’s a good business to be in.” If Moby can have TV platforms in seven or eight countries, he said, it can reduce its programming costs by running the same content translated into the local language.

“The Arab markets are a virgin market” for local television, Mohseni said. “There are no viable TV stations in these countries—Yemen, Iraq, Jordan.” He sees advertising spending doubling every five years in some of these countries. Like Afghanistan, all have populations bursting with young people. In five years, he predicted, Iraq will become the second-largest oil producer in the Middle East, creating a vast consumer marketplace. Jordan, he said, is a two-hundred-million-dollar ad market, with little of this money going to television. And, because these countries will be at the forefront of international “hearts and minds” efforts in coming years, N.G.O. and government spending will also rise. In Afghanistan, Mohseni estimates that U.S. spending for media development, training, advertising, and programming will be a hundred and forty million dollars over the next three years.

Mohseni acknowledged that there is “a glut of Arab-language channels delivered by satellite,” but he thinks that most lose money and overspend for programming; he is betting that the sheikhs who bankroll them will lose interest. Although Farsi1 is less than a year old, he hopes that it will soon turn a profit. Oprah Winfrey, a friend of Tom Freston, has verbally agreed to air some of her daily programs on the network.