Contrary to assurances by the militants’ leaders, a Tolo journalist was recently beaten up, and his camera confiscated, by apparent Taliban soldiers
MILLIONS OF AFGHANS tuned in to Tolo, an Afghan television network, to watch an interview on August 20th with Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her women’s-rights activism after she was shot by the Pakistani Taliban. Soon afterwards a Taliban spokesman visited Tolo’s offices in Kabul for a two-hour discussion. But rather than complain or issue threats, he promised that the new government would respect the freedom of the press.
But their initial tolerance of Afghan television is part of a campaign to persuade the world that they haveIt is not surprising that the Taliban, like other Islamist groups, use social media effectively. The group’s head spokesman tweets some 50 times per day. Television is now entrenched in Afghan society, as it was not when the jihadists last took over. Far more people voted in the finals of “Afghan Star”, a music competition resembling “America’s Got Talent”, last year than in the national election. “There is nothing else to do,” says Saad Mohseni, the head of Tolo: “People all gather round the TV and discuss the shows for hours. It's like the US in the ’50s.
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