An Afghan Media Mogul’s “Strange Dance” With The Taliban

Saad Mohseni wants more female faces on his Afghan TV channel. He hopes he might get a deal with the Taliban for him to air a historical drama – in which all the women have been through the menopause.

“If a woman menstruates, [the showing of an uncovered female face] is haram [forbidden], right?” Mohseni said. “But as soon as they go through, you know, menopause, then you can have them uncovered. It’s ridiculous, it’s so offensive. So now we try to negotiate with [the Taliban] to do a soap opera that’s going to have these women over the age of 50. We have to try.”

Mohseni, 58, described as Afghanistan’s first media mogul or the ‘Afghan Rupert Murdoch’ is the chief executive of Moby Group.

Founded by Mohseni and his siblings – Afghan emigres who returned to their childhood home from Australia after the removal of the Taliban in 2001 – Moby was the country’s largest media conglomerate until the Taliban returned to Kabul nearly four years ago.

What has been established since 2021 is a hardline Islamic emirate shunned by much of the world. Political and media freedoms have deteriorated sharply but, most glaringly, the rights of women have been swept away. Women have been erased from nearly every aspect of public life: schools, universities and most workplaces.

It might have been thought that such a regime would be the end of a media company in which Rupert Murdoch once had a stake and which lost seven members of staff in a suicide bombing in 2016 after being cited by the Taliban as a “military target”.

Yet the company remains, not just hanging on, but a dominant player in the Afghan market, producing TV and radio entertainment shows and a 24-hour news channel that employs about 400 people.

The result is an odd co-existence with the Taliban – a “strange dance”, as Mohseni put it – that offers an insight into the complicated politics in the country.

Mohseni was on a trip out of the country at the time of the chaotic and sudden withdrawal of the US in summer 2021, an event about which he says he had given the former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani repeated warnings. “I was very angry, and I’m still very angry about his arrogance,” he said of the president, who fled Kabul as his administration collapsed.

Mohseni has not been back to Afghanistan since, partly because he does not want to be seen to be endorsing the new regime. “The other [reason] is that there’s always the risk of them saying, ‘You can’t leave, you know, you’ve got important media assets, you’ll be our guest’”, Mohseni said.

Instead, he oversees affairs from his homes in Dubai and London. It was not clear at first whether he would have any affairs in Afghanistan to look after.

He wrote a memoir, Radio Free Afghanistan, after being locked out of his country, believing the empire he had built was dead in the water. But Moby has survived – albeit within tight confines.

The current rules are there is to be no criticism of the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, he says.

Men and women cannot share the same space. A curtain separates the two sexes in Moby’s offices. A split screen is used to facilitate conversation during a show on his Tolo TV network. Female news presenters must have their hair and faces covered.

The first show to be canceled was Afghan Star, the popular music reality show based on American Idol and the X Factor, which was taken off air in 2021 following the Taliban’s ban on music.

“You know, women performing on stage and people voting for them … They are the enemies of fun, right?” Mohseni said. “It was understood that we would not be able to continue with that. With the [ending of] soap operas and so forth it was gradual.”

There has been more latitude given to Moby’s news operation.

“I’m not saying they have an appreciation for free press, but I think there’s an understanding of how important media is,” he said. “I think they need to have their announcements or whatever amplified, echoed. People need to understand. They need to be able to sell their narrative to the public.”

Mohseni’s journalists have been able to push to a degree, at one point confronting ministers over the extra judicial killings of opposition figures.

The male presenters also wore masks in solidarity with their female colleagues for a week and even persuaded a minister to try it out, before he complained that it was too difficult to breathe. “Afterwards, he threatened to lock my guy up,” Mohseni said.

There is, nevertheless, just enough space for the journalists to do their work to make it worthwhile, he said.

The news channel has heavily covered criticism of the Taliban’s ban of secondary education for girls. The regime had initially said the move was a temporary pause to allow it to reorganise the system.

As a result, Unesco reported about 1.4 million girls over the age of 12 have been deliberately deprived of schooling, with that number exceeding 2.5 million when taking into account those already kept out of education by their families.

“In 2024, we counted, we’ve done like two and a half or three thousand stories on girls education: town hall meetings, discussion, current affairs, programs, individual news stories,” Mohseni said. “It’s not just about like [former US secretary of state] Anthony Blinken says, ‘Girls need to go to school’. More importantly it was about Afghan voices and amplifying those voices, Taliban voices, religious voices, saying we need to allow our girls to go back to school.”

They also run educational programs on its Tolo TV network, supported by Unicef, that provides help to boys attending classes and the girls at home with mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry.

“Not even the Taliban will reinvent mathematics,” Mohseni said of the programmes which follow the national curriculum.

“It’s not an alternative to real education,” he added. “It’s sort of a band aid solution between when schools are banned and when they reopen. Whenever that may be, it’s a bridge. It may be a long bridge, but it’s a bridge.”

He is under no illusion the small freedoms could disappear, and that “on this trajectory, eventually, the country is going to become more conservative, more radical”. But there is still time to try to engage with the more reform-minded within the Taliban, he said.

“The movement itself is not monolithic,” Mohseni said. “You have different characters who view things, you know, sometimes more moderately or more pragmatically. And they all have ambitions.”

The country is nevertheless gripped by what Naheed Farid, a former member of the parliament of Afghanistan, has described as a system of “gender apartheid”. Mohseni worries that the lack of international engagement will only exacerbate a trend towards ever greater repression. “You ignore Afghanistan at your peril,” he said.