As the United States supported Tolo TV in the hopes that market forces would, among other things, encourage greater female media participation, numerous smaller, nonprofit projects were put forth with this explicit goal. To a significant extent, the United States outsourced this aspect of the Afghan media sphere, building gaps into a system of small local radio stations to be filled by allied nations with projects geared specifically toward female empowerment. Although American policy papers written throughout the 2000s emphasize the importance of nonprofit, women-produced media, they also cede many logistic elements to the French and Canadian governments.28 This strategy makes a certain sense. America had overtly promised increased female access to the public sphere in the buildup to the war. However, once the invasion began, the realpolitik of post-Taliban Afghanistan provided ample incentive to create distance between the U.S. government and controversial media initiatives.
The most striking example of this danger is the story of Afghan Radio Peace, a single-room station broadcasting from Jabal Saraj in Parwan Province. Uniquely, the station’s origins predate September 11. In a meeting in France in March 2001, a group of French women’s rights leaders challenged Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Masoud in exactly the way Abirafeh argues postinvasion NATO forces could not challenge Afghan leaders.29 As the world focused on the evaporation of women’s rights under the Taliban, French leaders pressed Masoud on his position on women in the Afghan public sphere. Putting the famed military leader on the spot, the group offered to fund a radio station in Northern Alliance territory, provided a woman be made manager. Masoud accepted and Zakia Zaki, a controversial local advocate for women’s rights, took charge of Afghan Radio Peace. The French agreed to pay for a year of Zaki’s salary, oil for an electric generator, and fifteen days of basic radio training with French broadcasting professionals.
By the time the station opened in October 2001, much had changed. Masoud was assassinated on September 10, one day before America’s invasion of Afghanistan was made inevitable. However, operating in a semiautonomous space at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, Zaki’s small station was truly revolutionary. For six years, the station functioned on a combination of foreign money and local revenue strategies built primarily on classified-style hyperlocal advertising. As NATO and USAID took over rural radio broadcasting in Afghanistan, the French withdrew support, forcing the station to play American-funded public service programming to bring in the money necessary to remain on air. From 2005 to 2007, the station flourished under this model, airing foreign-produced material as well as a selection of local programs rarely focused specifically on women’s issues but steeped in the values that brought Zaki to anti-Taliban activism.
In 2007, however, tremendous changes took place. NGO support in Afghanistan began to falter from fatigue, and the Taliban began to reassert itself nationally, largely through increasingly daring suicide attacks. With these disruptions came a campaign specifically targeting female journalists and other public figures. On June 6, 2007, Zaki was murdered. Her death had a massive effect on both Afghan Radio Peace and female media participation throughout the country. In the years following Zaki’s assassination, little support has flowed to the station, with no foreign institution wishing to rebuild it to its previous place. Zaki’s husband, Abdul Ahad Ranjbar, has taken over what has become a quiet outlet broadcasting twelve hours a day, half of which is American-funded national programming for which the station receives a few hundred dollars to keep the gas generator running.30
If there is a figure who has picked up Zaki’s mantle, it is Farida Nekzad, whose career has run the gamut of Western-supported noncommercial media in Afghanistan. Nekzad began her media career as a refugee, working in Pakistan when the Taliban controlled Kabul. Inspired by a neighbor who worked for state media during the years of Soviet control, Nekzad received an education in journalism at Kabul University, before the Taliban banned female enrollment. In Pakistan, Nekzad found work with the BBC. When she returned to Kabul in 2002, Nekzad was a rare woman with the credentials necessary for managerial-level work with Western-funded media institutions. This experience allowed her to find employment with the Institute for Media, Policy and Society (IMPACS), a branch of the Canadian government encouraged by USAID to create three rural women-run stations in the relatively peaceful northern region of Afghanistan.
According to Sarah Kamal, a scholar who worked at the IMPACS station in Mazar I Sharif, the project fell into many of the unreflective patterns so often seen in Western approaches to women’s development. In addition to early difficulties in recruiting women to work at the station due to local cultural resistance, the outlet was plagued by a disconnect between the needs of listeners and the expectations of international organizations. Foreign funders and local religious leaders required all programming be preapproved and “pressed the radio station towards adopting a scripted and more formal radio voice over spontaneous conversational dialogue in its programming.”31 Ultimately, the station failed to reach its intended female audience, as Western ideas of individualism and journalistic professionalism created a growing gap between the voices on the air and those listening.32
However, this professionalized, Westernized understanding of how to run a radio station has had one significant side effect: it has produced numerous female journalists prepared to succeed in Westernized organizations, often at better pay. The station’s current director, Mobina Khairandish, describes the outlet’s function as much in terms of training women producers as reaching the sort of audience envisioned by IMPACS when it made the original investment in 2005. Now financially stable, though reliant on occasional contracted projects for NGOs, the station has become a training ground for local women wishing to gain a foothold in the world of media. Despite ongoing difficulties with local groups who question the appropriateness of women on the radio, recruitment issues have more or less disappeared, with small but consistent numbers of young women arriving at the station to work each year.33
Although critics like Kamal question the station’s ability to truly engage with large numbers of local listeners, it is undeniable that journalists trained at the station have moved on to jobs both within Afghanistan and abroad. In a creative maneuver, the outlet has taken young women whose families discouraged them from taking on public roles and positioned them as journalistic trainers. For example, local offices of Nai Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan, an Internews-funded institution for media education, now feature alumna from the Mazar I Sharif station. Other former employees work across the globe, primarily in media assistance organizations whose goals model the idealized, arguably disconnected, approach to journalism put forth by IMPACS. Although IMPACS perhaps failed in its attempt to train producers capable of connecting to a local audience, it succeeded in training Afghan women for a world of precarious labor in the overlapping fields of media production and media assistance. A project originally intended to suture community bonds may ultimately serve as a training ground for individuals entering an era of transitory and inconsistent labor conditions.
Farida Nekzad became the IMPACS project’s greatest local success, leveraging her time with the Canadian organization to procure a position as the codirector of Pahjwok News. Set up as an independent NGO, Pahjwok—funded by Internews (and thus USAID) and based in Kabul—serves as the main domestic wire service in Afghanistan. While at Pahjwok, Nekzad oversaw tremendous changes in Kabul’s journalistic landscape, particularly with regard to women. As universities began producing the first generation of post-Taliban journalism graduates, a number of women sought work at organizations like Pahjwok.
Nekzad, in a unique position of power, made a number of policy changes that have had a significant impact. Most obviously, she instituted a hiring quota for women, arguing that the increase in female journalism graduates required a change on the part of the organization. Remarkably, for a brief period in 2006, Pahjwok employed more female than male journalists. More subtly, Nekzad fundamentally changed local newsroom culture, temporarily suspending the traditional practice of separating men and women at company lunches. In Nekzad’s view, lunchtime gender segregation, which remains prevalent throughout Afghan business, government, and NGO culture, represented a significant stumbling block to gender equality. “They make big decisions over lunch,” she notes. “People think that men are funny and women are quiet because they are in the other room.”34
The ugly events of 2007, however, forever changed Nekzad’s career and undid a number of the changes she had instituted. After Zaki’s death, Nekzad began to receive increasingly violent threats, followed by multiple attempts on her life. Women no longer applied for positions at Pahjwok at the same rate, for fear of reprisals. When Nekzad became pregnant, she quit the organization for America to safely raise her child. Upon returning in 2010, she found a very different landscape. Pahjwok was once again dominated by men, with lunches resegregated and only men in managerial positions.
In response, she took over a fledging competitor, Wakht News. Housed in a three-room apartment off of a main street in Kabul, Wakht currently operates a frequently updated web site that is routinely cited by mainstream Afghan media. Nekzad has attempted to restaff the organization with women but has found the task nearly impossible. As Western NGOs have fled Kabul over the past five years, little grant money is available for anything but well-established, typically male-dominated institutions. As a result, Nekzad was forced to pare back her budget. Although women can sometimes be hired for lower salaries, their presence adds to a company’s expenses. While traveling in the city is dangerous to anyone, men are able to ride public transportation and hire taxis when they are unable to walk. For women, this is too dangerous, adding significant private transportation costs to employer budgets. Nekzad’s new organization thus faces a familiar conundrum in public service Afghan media. Those organizations that are big enough to maintain a large, diverse staff are deeply entrenched in traditional modes of office culture that work to the disadvantage of female workers. Those that might be willing to challenge these norms, however, are unlikely to receive enough funding to successfully hire women, given the significant additional expense.
