Author: William Safire
Publication: The New york Times
Date: September 20, 2001
WASHINGTON -- The primary source
of information for the average Afghan is the radio, often a transistor
made 30 years ago. The 20 transmitting towers of the Taliban's Radio
Shariat (meaning "Islamic law") are spewing out hatred of America
all the time.
Why is there no Radio Free Afghanistan
broadcasting the truth about the consequences of harboring the
headquarters of terrorism?
Why are Afghans not told that their
rulers' decision to hide Osama bin Laden is the direct cause of the
withdrawal of U.N. relief and the starvation that they now face?
Why are the voices of revered, mainstream
Muslim clerics not broadcast denouncing the perversion of Islam
by the terrorists, and reminding the faithful that murder by suicide
will lead not to heaven but to eternal damnation?
Before a single bomb is dropped
on a suspected training camp, the U.S. should be doing what it
knows best how to do: using psychological warfare to weaken the grip
of the terrorists on the local population.
We are failing to make life more
difficult for the terrorists in their caves because the Bush war
planners have not thought of it yet. The chairman of the Broadcasting
Board of Governors, overseer of our several official overseas broadcasters,
is an amiable Gore fund- raiser long awaiting replacement. The Voice of
America leadership is even more vacant.
Which U.S. government broadcaster
should be charged with stirring anger among Afghans at rulers eager
to bring further devastation to their country? That mission of
countering Radio Shariat's propaganda should go to RFE/ RL, the "radio
free" outfit experienced in acting as a surrogate free press in repressive
nations like Iran, Iraq and China.
But evenhanded journalists at the
V.O.A., backed by political holdovers on the Broadcasting Board,
don't want those hard-sell types invading their turf. The V.O.A.
broadcasts to Afghanistan with fine impartiality in the Dari, Pashto,
Urdu and Arabic languages, and yesterday stepped up its time on the
air; RFE/RL broadcasts only in Turkmen and Uzbek, understood in
Afghanistan's north, where our problem is not.
In the squabble over a measly $15
million in expansion money, here is why the V.O.A. is the wrong voice
in this area in wartime:
On the day after the twin towers
catastrophe, a V.O.A. reporter in London broadcast an account of
two interviews. One was with a cleric who "warns that no accusations
against Islamists or Arab groups should be made before knowing the
full truth." This was "balanced" by an interview with Yasir al Serri,
identified only as "a leader of Egypt's largest Islamist group, the
Gama'a Islamiyya, which has worked to overthrow the Egyptian
government."
Listeners were not informed that
this terrorist group killed 58 foreign tourists and 4 Egyptians four
years ago. The reporter said that al Serri "warns that retaliation
by Washington will only lead to more violence. He lays the blame
for the unprecedented assault on the U.S. financial and military
policy in the Middle East."
Stung by criticism of this broadcast,
Andre de Nesnera, the V.O.A.'s news director, admitted that the extremist
was improperly identified, but argued that for the agency to remain
"a credible news organization," such interviews with terrorists "will
be part of our balanced, accurate, objective and comprehensive
reporting, providing our listeners with both sides of the story."
After a call from Jesse Helms's
office protesting "equal time for Hitler," the bureaucrat warming
the vacant V.O.A. director's seat issued a belated guideline
that "we will not give a platform to terrorists or extremist groups."
The nation is on a kind of war footing.
Even in peacetime, news credibility does not flow from splitting
the moral difference between good and evil. In the climate of today's
undeclared war, private media in democracies are free to take either
or neither side, but U.S. taxpayer-supported broadcasting is
supposed to be on our side.
That's why we need an American signal
in Afghanistan's five languages with a clear, truthful message: Bin
Laden and his gang are the cause of present and future misery, and
the suicides who murder innocents are eternally punished by Allah.
And for the Pentagon's choosers
of "targets of value": consider, in the first strike, the score of
towers and mobile transmitters of Radio Shariat.