Abstract
We were full of sympathy for journalists who fled their country as the Taliban returned to power. Now many of them are being sent home
Journalists from Afghanistan who fled to Pakistan to escape detainment, imprisonment, torture, and worse by the totalitarian Taliban regime are living with the fear that they may be deported, as Pakistani authorities round up Afghans to send back over the border.
Hundreds of journalists were forced into hiding when the anti-freedom Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021. Many who fled across the eastern border to Pakistan have been living in increasingly desperate conditions. They’ve mostly been unable to work, and so housing, healthcare for their families, education for their children, and visas that would enable them to stay have become unaffordable.
The almost unbearable stress of destitution, homelessness and the high chance of imprisonment if caught in regular police sweeps with expired documentation is now compounded by concerns that – in common with former rights advocates, defence forces and police personnel, political activists and women – they might be sent back to the very dangers they fled in the first place. For some, that nightmare has already come true.
Pakistan announced months ago that 1.7 million undocumented people from Afghanistan, some of whom have been living in the country for decades, would be sent back over the border for the Taliban to deal with. Deportations began on November 1, and around half a million have reportedly already been expelled since then, amid reports that they’ve been strictly limited in the amount of money and personal property they can take with them.
It’s happening on the other side of the country, too, where Afghans arrive back every day, deported from Iran. Both Tehran and Islamabad appear to have exhausted their patience with the intransigence of the Taliban, who, since they regained power, have violently suppressed the Afghan population while terrorising many of the neighbouring countries with their support for anti-state jihadist and listed terrorist groups.
Pakistan has borne the brunt of this venality. The Taliban have encouraged their affiliate, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or the TTP, to escalate attacks on Pakistani military and police targets, effectively creating an existential crisis for the already-beleaguered Islamabad government. Taliban leaders deny involvement while offering to mediate – an ironic mirror of Pakistan’s own duplicity throughout the 20-year war against the insurgent Taliban, when leaders lived safely in Pakistani cities, and gunmen were armed and funded by the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
As what goes around comes around to Pakistan, the most indigent and vulnerable have become pawns in a nasty political game as the Pakistani authorities seek to punish the Taliban for their failure to play the role that the ISI had planned for them: a puppet government that would help thwart India’s ambitions for regional domination (as I reported for Foreign Policy magazine in November 2023). Among the deportees are a small number of journalists, who have gone into hiding since returning.
A 30-year-old journalist who spent 12 years working mostly in radio, who will not be identified for his own safety, said he couldn’t afford to renew his Pakistan visa after it expired last August. “Consequently,” he wrote to me via WhatsApp, on November 8, “I was forcibly deported to Afghanistan at the Torkham gate without any opportunity to even access the belongings in my house, as the Pakistani authorities denied me entry. Now I find myself secretly residing in Afghanistan, facing severe economic difficulties.”
Like many of his colleagues, he said he’d been forced out of his job by the Taliban soon after they came to power. Even after he was sacked, “the threats from the Taliban did not cease. In order to ensure my safety, I had no choice but to live in hiding for a gruelling six months, enduring dire conditions. Subsequently, on August 20, 2022, I made the difficult decision to relocate to Peshawar, Pakistan”.
Some high-profile international support organisations, such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Freedom Network, have belatedly stepped up to call on Pakistan’s government to spare journalists from their crackdown. RSF only recently set up a six-month project to lobby the Pakistani authorities to extend visas and work permits to Afghan journalists, according to Iqbal Khattak, executive director of Freedom Network and RSF’s representative in Pakistan. He said RSF had also been helping journalists get out of Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover.
Pakistan’s National Press Club set up the Pakistan-Afghanistan International Forum of Journalists in mid-2022. It has verified the identity of hundreds of Afghan journalists, issued them with ID cards, bailed them out of police detention, found housing and sourced free healthcare, interceded with international agencies and governments, and facilitated visa applications.
Pakistani journalist Qamar Yousufzai, who runs the forum, has had some financial support from London’s Frontline Club and the Birmingham Press Club, but otherwise has spent thousands of pounds out of his own pocket to help the Afghan journalists who are members of the group. Campaigns in the UK to raise funds were soon overshadowed by the crises in Ukraine and, now, Gaza.
So much promise, until the Taliban came back
It’s all a long way from the days of the Afghan republic, which lasted 20 years with the support of the United States and its allies, including the UK. Part of that support was the development of a free and independent media sector, with a US$1 billion injection from Washington that funded newspapers and magazines, television and radio stations, and media support groups across the country, employing thousands of journalists and support staff, turning some entrepreneurs into wealthy “media moguls”. Most importantly, a generation of reporters were empowered to hold authority to account. Which they did until the very end.
Since then, according to experts who monitor the situation, around 600 journalists have fled to Pakistan, half of whom are still there. Others have obtained visas for third countries and left. They fled their country under threat, as the Taliban rounded up journalists, singling many out for detention. One former media owner, who fled for his life in August 2021, said “most of the journalists who flee Afghanistan have experienced at least one time in detention by the Taliban intelligence agency”.
The source, who asked not to be identified, said: “Many other journalists flee due to threats from the Taliban forces and some due to fear of detention. That’s why, while the Taliban have been able to suppress media and ensure that detentions of journalists are not revealed, journalists continue to flee Afghanistan due to wide-ranging detentions.”
He said at least two journalists recently deported from Iran were detained on their return – one was held for four days before being released; the second remains in custody. Afghanistan’s “media ecosystem” has collapsed, he said, “and the media outlets that are still up and running continue with foreign funding and limited domestic revenue”. Some of the big names in Afghan media, including television broadcasters and production houses, continue to receive funding from international donors, which is funnelled through UN agencies, despite the fact that they are now nothing more than conduits for pro-Taliban propaganda.
“They have survived solely because they accept all the Taliban directives and have self-censored big time,” he told me.
Those directives are far-reaching, designed to ensure that, like media in China, Iran, Russia and, increasingly, Pakistan, Afghanistan’s news outlets are regime mouthpieces. Replacing the republic’s constitutional guarantees of media freedoms and protections, they include a ban on women working in radio and TV; a ban on covering protests; an obligation to refer to the Taliban as the “government”, though it is not recognised as such by any country in the world; a ban on music; and mandates for women journalists to cover their faces, among many other breathtakingly repressive strictures.
The Afghanistan Journalist Centre (AFJC), one of a number of internationally funded non-government organisations promoting press freedom in Afghanistan, monitors abuses, detentions and other heinous treatment of journalists by the Taliban. Its 2023 annual report, released on December 29, revealed “at least 168 instances of violations of journalists’ rights… including one journalist death, 19 injuries, 87 threats, and 61 arrests”. The number of incidents was lower than the 260 of the year before, more likely a reflection of growing control of information than any easing of violent suppression.
“The intensified pressure on media and journalists through the implementation of these guidelines has resulted in reduced freedom, compromised independence, increased self-censorship, and a shift in media coverage towards humanitarian and educational events,” the AFJC report states. “Of the total events recorded in 2023, eight media bans were imposed – five of which were temporary for weeks, while three outlets, including two news websites and a radio station, remain prohibited from operating.”
The Taliban is an extremist, nationalist organisation that uses a unique interpretation of Islam to justify its existence. It came back to power thanks to a bilateral deal struck with the administration of former US president Donald Trump. The so-called Doha deal committed the United States to a complete withdrawal to end an unpopular war. President Joe Biden stuck with the flawed arrangement, and has since said, by way of justification, that the Taliban have eradicated major terrorist threats such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group. Neither of these assertions is supported by independent analysis; the UN Security (UNSC) regularly reports on the Taliban’s transnational jihadist ambitions and close ties to Al Qaeda and dozens of other prohibited groups.
Many of the Taliban’s leaders are UNSC-sanctioned terrorists. Among the first to congratulate them on their return to power were the leaders of Al Qaeda and Hamas, as well as the then-prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan. While there is no official diplomatic recognition, many countries in the region are doing business with the Taliban, including China, which provides surveillance expertise in return for mining deals. China, where around a million Muslim Uighurs are cruelly incarcerated, is Big Brother for the Taliban’s control of information and manipulation of religion to entrench its power.
Heroin, speed, guns and kidnap for ransom
The Taliban is also one of the world’s biggest organised crime cartels, with well-established global smuggling routes for heroin, methamphetamine, weapons and people. It steals international aid and cash that flow into Afghanistan to alleviate hunger and poverty. It forces charities, including UN agencies, to pay millions of dollars for security. It also continues with hostage-taking as a policy tool, holding an unknown number of foreign citizens, including several Americans, for leverage. Four British men were released last October after being held without charge for most of 2023; it is not known what the deal was, though one of the released men hinted at the transfer of millions of pounds in aid. An American released in 2022 was exchanged for a high-profile drug dealer who had financed the Taliban insurgency.
The United States and its allies, including Britain, are largely ignoring the fact that a crime gang led by terrorists is controlling a strategically-important country – and, by the way, imprisoning and otherwise abusing the female half of the population of 38 million. There is no coherent Western policy on how to deal with a country that absorbed billions of pounds and cost the lives of thousands of American, British and Nato soldiers. The Taliban are, literally, getting away with murder.
So far, France appears to be the only country responding to help Afghan journalists, issuing “tens of visas to Afghan journalists in the past two months”, said the media owner source living in exile in Europe. He is confident that more voices, more concern, more pressure will have an impact. Even Pakistan, he said, has quietly decided against deporting journalists. Islamabad’s foreign and information ministries did not respond to requests to clarify policy.
“Many journalists and rights organisations in the EU and the United States have been active in efforts to prevent deportation of journalists from Pakistan, and these pressures seem to work, so it is important that other countries expedite the process of issuing visas to Afghan journalists, too,” he said.
