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In 2002, just months after the fall of the Taliban regime, Saad Mohseni launched Radio Free Afghanistan, a fledgling attempt to bring a free press to his country after years of authoritarian rule. More than two decades later, Mohseni’s venture has grown into one of the largest news networks in the country; as the chairman and CEO of Moby Group, he presides over a media conglomerate that includes TOLOnews, a leading news and current affairs channel.
The Taliban, however, is now back in power, and Mohseni and his team are constantly embattled. The regime has raided their offices, detained and arrested employees, and heightened censorship. (Reporters Without Borders now ranks Afghanistan the third lowest out of the 180 countries on its World Press Freedom Index.) Soaps and music shows have been taken off air, and the network’s revenue model has taken a huge hit. Mohseni himself is based in London and has not been back to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over in 2021.
But amid everything, Mohseni’s news operation has survived. The number of women working within it has increased despite the ever-increasing restrictions placed on women by the Taliban. At times, his journalists have found ways to register their displeasure with the regime’s repressive diktats live on air. Now Mohseni is out with a book—coauthored with the journalist Jenna Krajeski and titled Radio Free Afghanistan: A Twenty-Year Odyssey for an Independent Voice in Kabul—in which Mohseni traces the challenges that he, his company, and the Afghan press have faced. Recently, I spoke with him about treading the line between acquiescence and rebellion, the role of women in his newsroom, and why he hasn’t been back to Afghanistan. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MB: One thing I found really interesting about your book is the depth you go into about your negotiations with the Taliban. I’m wondering if you could take us through that process. Surely there’s a spectrum between rebelling against the Taliban and completely acquiescing to them; how have you and your team decided where to fall on that spectrum? In 2022, for instance, journalists at your organization protested visually against Taliban rules: male presenters wore black surgical masks on air and made the guests wear them, too. How did that whole situation play out?
SM: Initially, the Taliban had a very laissez-faire approach to what the media was doing. And then, of course, it became more restrictive. First, they canceled soap operas. We stopped the music shows ourselves. We knew that they were not going to approve. And then further restrictions were imposed by banning women’s faces on television, so our female employees started wearing these surgical masks. When you’re operating in any environment, you have to abide by the rules. It may be the Taliban, it may be a democratic government, but basically, the state determines the rules of the game.
These directives in relation to covering one’s face were a difficult thing for the team to stomach, yet they were powerless. To highlight how unhappy they were with this decision, they started wearing masks as well, which lasted five days. During one of the political talk shows that we have in the evenings, one of the presenters handed a mask to an official from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue and said, “Would you like to put this on?” [The official] said it was difficult to breathe, which was exactly the point. After the show, our employee was threatened; [the official] said, I’m gonna take you away right now, to teach you a lesson for humiliating me on television. These guys, even to this day, are pushing the boundaries—or, some would argue, pushing their luck. It’s a very difficult environment, but all these actions and gestures are important because they highlight—not just to the viewers, but to the authorities—that this is not something we’re completely comfortable with.
It’s been a few days since your book launched. I’m curious if there’s been any reaction from Taliban officials. Have there been repercussions for publishing the book and going into so much detail about the ways in which they’ve pressured the media?
Not yet, but I think we’re pretty open about these things—when they put pressure on us, we talk about it on television. I would never intend for my people to come under pressure, but these are facts and we can’t lie about what’s transpiring today. And it’s important for people to know. I consulted with my colleagues for some of the key chapters in this book to see if it was okay with them, and they were all in agreement. Some of the key people who are mentioned in the book—especially about the time when there was a raid [by the Taliban] that resulted in my colleagues being arrested—continue to live in Kabul and they work for us. But they were completely comfortable with that chapter.
You haven’t been back to Afghanistan since July 2021, and the Taliban took over shortly after that. Why haven’t you gone back?
When Afghans who are well-known return, it’s an opportunity for Taliban officials to sit with them and have their photos taken, and then that’s further amplified on social media. I’m not saying that’s going to happen with me, but just given what’s going on—given their policies relating to women, girls’ education, and what an exclusionary government it is—I thought it would be very difficult for me to meet with them, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I was endorsing their policies in any way. Obviously, we need to communicate with them; they’re the people running the country. But I thought maybe going there and seeing them in person is probably a little too much at this stage. It’s painful as an Afghan. I’m a prisoner outside my own country.
How do you view the state of press freedom in Afghanistan?
Most news stories, we report on; for example, if the Human Rights Commission comes out with a report criticizing the Taliban, we report on that. If ISIS detonates a bomb that kills Taliban officials, we report on that. But can we cover a story with a great deal of fanfare, have a roundtable on it, have a chat show on it? I think there’s a degree of self-censorship—we’re careful in terms of not pushing our luck. So, yes, we report on things. It’s probably more measured than it should be. But I think our team, to their credit, feel comfortable reporting on anything now.
The Taliban have imposed some additional rules recently about current-affairs programs and whether you can air them live or not. And that’s because of some of our programs, where people have come on live and they’ve been very critical of various things. So they tend to place restrictions, and we find ways of working within those restrictions which we still believe reflect our philosophy of informing and educating and challenging and speaking truth to power. Even within these limited confines, we’re still continuing to do our work. Now the question is, will it get more restrictive? I’m not sure. The trend lines are not good. Since 2021, when they took over, the environment has become more restricted. Although, when it comes to implementation, it doesn’t usually match the directives issued from the leadership. But that could be a temporary reprieve.
Do women feature in decision-making in your organization and in roles that involve going out and reporting the news? What’s happened to the number of women working in your organization?
The number of women in total is about a hundred, and we have a workforce of about four hundred, so it’s between 20 and 25 percent. Women join us and then often they get to leave the country, because being a media worker qualifies them to secure visas. So it’s a double-edged sword. We employ them; that employment then allows them to leave. Which is fine; they’re entitled to leave.
Were the numbers higher pre-Taliban?
I think in percentage terms, they were slightly higher. We have perhaps three or four key positions in the company. And one of those individuals is a woman who manages our entire human resources and she is also the acting head of sales, so she has two out of the four important positions in the company. On the news side, we’ve actually increased the number of women working for us, from eight in 2021 to twenty—and they include presenters, producers, researchers, people behind the camera and in front of the camera. [The newsroom employs around ninety people in total.] And yes, we do have female journalists who go and cover stories. They travel less in the rural areas, more in the urban centers. I’ve told this story in the book about a particular female journalist who was being ignored by a ministry, and the minister refused to see her. Despite all those challenges—some Taliban officials refuse to engage—these women are continuing to work hard and attempting to engage with the Taliban.
On the revenue front, you made money from airing soaps and music shows and things like that. When that got restricted, did it affect how you’re able to fund the news?
Advertising has dropped; it’s 70 percent less than what it was, give or take, in 2021. So what we have had to do is reduce costs. When we lost people, certain positions were not filled. But because the international community is still helping on the humanitarian side, there are still campaigns, public service announcements, and so forth that we’re beneficiaries of; these NGOs need to promote or amplify their messaging via existing media companies, so that helps in some ways. But it’s difficult. We had a significant loss in 2022; in 2023, we just barely broke even, and 2024 may not be dissimilar to 2023. It’s been a difficult three or four years, but our intention right now is to survive—and to not just inform and educate and entertain, but more importantly, to also report on facts to the outside world. Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of journalists covering Afghanistan. But today, there’s only a handful. Our presence on the ground also helps in terms of getting news out of Afghanistan.
But working in a challenging environment isn’t new for your organization, even before the Taliban returned to power. What’s made you keep going?
If I go back to 2003, our challenges were a lack of expertise in terms of running a media company. We brought in people from Australia and so forth to teach us, not just in terms of technical know-how, but also how to manage a radio station, how a DJ should speak behind a microphone, how the news guys should gather and put together the news packages on a daily basis, initially with radio and eventually television. Also, free media was completely new in the country. As much as the law supported us, we still had to deal with individuals and institutions that were not accustomed to freedom of expression and free media. I tell people that we’re like a startup that has never stopped being a startup, twenty-two years on.
Did you ever think it was time to pull the shutters down and wrap this up?
I feel like that quite often, actually. The question we always ask ourselves is, Where are the red lines? We have some red lines which, internally, we’ve discussed. But these are very difficult decisions, because, firstly, we’ve built an institution that continues to provide a great service. Our extraordinary education programs, which we’ve designed and we disseminate by our terrestrial networks across the country, have literally millions of viewers, and they help young girls and young boys to learn, especially girls who can’t go to high school or middle school. And our news continues to be the most credible and most popular news operation in the country. We’re proud of it. Our verification process and the hard work of people on the ground is important, because I think a lot of Afghans in 2024 face a lot of different news stories from multiple platforms, of which many are completely fake.
Was there a particular moment when you felt you were closest to calling it quits?
In 2022, when they imposed that diktat on girls covering their faces. That to me was a sickening reversal of gains. But we consulted with our female employees, and they said, No, we want to continue. My brothers and I own the business, but any decision we make is made in consultation with people on the ground. We don’t give ourselves the right to make any decision on their behalf, given that they are on the front lines. We’re here for now. We’re trying our best. And tomorrow is another day.
Meghnad Bose is a Delacorte fellow at CJR.