8.2: Rightful Suspicions
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- Matt Sienkiewicz
- University of California Press
If any element of recent Western foreign policy ought to be eyed with suspicion, it is the unique confluence of gender rights discourse and media assistance that has occurred in Afghanistan since 2001. Although understood largely as separate issues, both relate directly to the post–September 11 moment, in which the United States desperately attempted to articulate a worldview in which military and cultural intervention in Afghanistan would offer a sense of increased American security. As early as September 20, President George W. Bush offered the American people a picture of an Afghanistan plagued by the dual cultural blind spots of patriarchy and media deficiency. Detailing the need to destroy the Taliban and its support for Al Qaeda, Bush noted that in Afghanistan “women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television.” 3 Unable to offer much in the way of concrete objectives for America’s military intervention, Bush bolstered his moral standing by positioning the Taliban’s Afghanistan as a perfectly inverted version of America’s idealized neoliberal self-image.
Immediately, American politicians and media outlets began to construct a discourse in which foreign intervention was required both to avoid future terrorist attacks and to save Afghan women from Afghan men. In a striking example, CNN aired the BBC documentary Beneath the Veil multiple times in the months leading up to war, offering what Lynn Spigel describes as a chance for U.S. viewers “to make easy equivocations between the kind of the oppression the women of Afghanistan faced and the loss of innocent life on American soil on September 11.” 4 Stabile and Kumar go farther in their analysis of American media coverage of Afghan women in the period following September 11, arguing that “women’s liberation” amounted to “little more than a cynical ploy” used to “sell the war to the US public.” 5 American media, in their analysis, offered a decidedly selective vision of Afghan history in which the Taliban played the role of the dark villain and the United States was portrayed as the white knight rushing to save Oriental damsels in distress. Effaced from this account is the uneven, hard-fought struggle of Afghan women’s groups, such as RAWA, as well as the significant women’s rights violations committed by the United States and local allies like the Northern Alliance. 6 Most provocatively, Stabile and Kumar go on to accuse the United States of using women as a tool through which to justify “imperialist domination,” rendering the West just as guilty of erasing Afghan women’s agency as the Taliban government against which it fought.
In a book-length study of the extensive aid aimed at improving the lives of women in postinvasion Afghanistan, Lina Abirafeh argues that willful blind spots produced by Western media had a direct impact on the sorts of programs that received funding and support in the country. 7 In particular, stereotypical images of oppressed chaddari-clad Afghan woman seem to have dominated the mindset of NGO and Western government decision makers, much as they had captivated American readers of best-selling nonfiction, such as Zoya’s Story 8 and My Forbidden Face . 9 Official American voices emphasized the importance of undoing the drastic restrictions on women’s liberty enforced by the Taliban beginning in 1990, with little attention paid to the diverse history of women’s experiences in Afghanistan. Abirafeh identifies an overtly “top-down” orientation to women’s rights programming, much of it embedded with a sense that Afghan women are “unable to empower themselves.” 10 Echoing Islah Jad’s work on the “NGO-isation” of global women’s movements, 11 Abirafeh notes that Western feminism, with its emphasis on individual, often economic rights, blinded the Western aid apparatus to the traditional strengths of the Afghan women’s movement. 12 In this sense, the NGO world can be understood as being in line with the emphasis on free agency and mobility that marks the landscape of globalized labor markets and contributes to the sense of precariousness that plagues media workers in every subfield. Perhaps most damningly, however, Abirafeh declares that in the rush to provide them with a dramatic and politically popular salvation, the West “forgot to consult Afghan women at all.” 13
Scholarly accounts of Western media assistance—defined here as the provision of Western funding and training to local media workers—to Afghanistan, though sparse, are hardly kinder than the critiques of gender aid. This pattern of suspicion follows a broader critical concern with media assistance, a field that remains steeped in the work of post-WWII modernization theorists, particularly Daniel Lerner. 14 James Miller usefully summarizes this critique, noting that media assistance is “fundamentally about universalizing the local and assuming an unjustifiably near causal relationship between media . . . and self governance.” 15 Turning a blind eye to the idiosyncrasies of Western media and Western democracy, media assistance advocates tend to assume that the two are inherently good and fundamentally intertwined entities.
A more subtle assumption built into media assistance work is an emphasis on the individual journalist or producer as the fundamental unit of a successful mediasphere. Although money is certainly devoted to institutional capacity building in international media projects, the trend toward contract, mobile labor found throughout the American media industry inevitably affects the training that aid recipients encounter. Furthermore, as Rao and Wasserman note, this preoccupation with individualism serves as a linchpin between the economic logic of the media business and hegemonic Western understandings of media ethics, which downplay communal interests in evaluating media quality. 16 Miller suggests that such assumptions may be exacerbated by the well-meaning individuals on the frontlines of media assistance projects in places such as Afghanistan. The Western journalists and NGO workers who enact the on-the-ground aspects of media assistance often embrace the sort of precarious labor conditions with which this volume is concerned. 17 Moving from place to place to provide training, these individuals bring with them the sense that media work is an independent endeavor often in direct tension with geographical and financial stability. Though this ought not impugn the intentions of Western NGO workers and media trainers, it is impossible to ignore the tension that exists between the radical individualism that might encourage someone to move from a European capital to war-torn Afghanistan and the more communal goals of local institutions.
This emphasis on market-oriented, entrepreneurial media systems is fully apparent in the reality of postinvasion Afghan media. Alongside the military onslaught of late 2001 that brought down the Taliban regime in Kabul came a concerted and highly coordinated effort to supply Afghans with a new, ostensibly independent media system. In addition to commandeering the state radio system, American forces, through USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), underwrote the production of a remarkably broad and diverse Afghan mediasphere. Within five years, a once broadcast-free rural Afghanistan was dotted with local radio stations surviving on a combination of foreign largesse and local advertising revenue. In addition to playing programming aimed at articulating the intentions of NATO forces and “rural transition teams,” these stations offered a mix of locally produced shows and foreign-funded public service material.
Kabul quickly emerged as a true media capital, as the vacuum produced by the Taliban’s near-total elimination of broadcasting gave way to a chaotic landscape in which outlets run by NGOs, warlords, and entrepreneurs competed for economic footholds and political influence. Security circumstances aligned with the “logic of accumulation” identified by Curtin in the development process of media capitals, bringing thousands of young aspiring professionals home to Kabul after years of exile in Iran, Pakistan, and the West. 18 The first great success in this new environment was Arman FM, a purely commercial radio station that nonetheless received a large initial investment from USAID’s OTI. The relationship between USAID and Arman’s owners, the Australian-Afghan Mohseni brothers, would continue and grow, with the United States eventually providing over $2 million in grants to Mohseni’s Tolo TV, a commercial station that now dominates the crowded field of Afghan television through a mix of programming tilted heavily toward Western-style game shows and dramas. Perhaps predictably, in popular accounts of Afghan’s new mediasphere, Tolo president Saad Mohseni is positioned as the protagonist of a story that emphasizes the individual entrepreneur over the realities of communal and government cooperation that make his station possible.
The unabashedly capitalist orientation of this project has drawn the ire of numerous critics, most notably Mark J. Barker, who argues that the newly oligarchic orientation of the Afghan mediasphere confirms American desires to foster a friendly “polyarchy” in the country, as opposed to a true democracy geared toward expressing the will of the people. To Barker, such a tactic emerges from the same strategy that led to the overtly deceitful content produced by the American-run Iraq Media Network in the wake of the fall of Baghdad. In each case, he argues, the United States took the steps it deemed necessary to ensure friendly leadership in occupied spaces, always at the expense of democracy and social justice. 19 The Mohseni family, in this telling, represents an oligarchic regime that the United States supports due to its willingness to engage fully in the system of global capitalism. The local NGO elites favored by America play a similar rule, inculcating Western conventional thinking and contributing to the production of a mediasphere that embraces the values underpinning the neoliberal order. I will not evaluate this broader claim here. It does, however, offer a useful starting point from which to inquire into the relationship between media assistance and egalitarianism at the level of gender in Afghanistan.