The Taliban have allegedly purchased satellite jammers from Iran to disrupt the last remaining independent television channel reporting on the regime’s brutal crackdown on human rights.
Iran’s assistance helped the Taliban leaders acquire orbital jammers for the satellite stations of the Afghanistan International Television and shut down broadcast for more than a week, AITV’s executive editor Harun Najafizada told The Independent.
The channel is popular among Afghans for their critical coverage of the country’s hardline Islamist regime.
Taliban officials reportedly sent disruptive signals from a ground station within Afghanistan to the satellite, interfering with its broadcast. Hundreds of people in Afghanistan saw a blank screen from 5 September to 13 September before the channel shifted to a different satellite frequency.
I think we are in agreement on almost everything here.
The middle class can do nothing in the face of a regional offensive by Islamist warlords. When it gets to that point it’s already too late.
My argument is in agreement with what you have said: a strong middle class is a bulwark against the formation and expansion of warlords.
As for the second issue, I fear my words were unclear here- when I referred to “two decades-long invasions” I was speaking of two separate invasions, each decades long. Namely the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the American invasion in 2001. The 2001 invasion was brutal and unjustified, but we can agree it was not the root cause of Afghanistan’s problems.
One issue we may find disagreement on is the attempts at creating a firm national government. I am not aware of any serious attempts at such a thing since the 70s. Each government has been either a puppet government set up to suit foreign interests, or a reactionary warlord. It may be true that the peculiar circumstances of Afghanistan prevent it from having a firm national government, but that hypothesis goes untested in the face of overwhelming foreign meddling.
Oh, in that case, yeah, we are mostly in agreement. I would argue that both the Sovs and the Americans attempted to form a firm national government, that both the monarchy and the Afghan Republic preceding them also attempted it, and the Taliban has (twice now) in their own grotesque way attempted the same. The Mujahideen were more interested in just not falling apart into civil war again, a very ‘symptomatic’ government of the ‘leave the locals to their affairs’ attitude that Afghanistan governments struggle to fight.
I don’t think I would say it’s impossible or prevented completely, but I would say that it’s… definitely not something that any one factor can fix or resolve. Whatever route Afghanistan takes to modernity, it will take… considerable overhaul, and that’s something only the people of the region itself can make progress on.