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.
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.