Coverage of Afghan “Women and Girls” Is Media Propaganda
Corporate media has turned one group of oppressed women into worthy victims—but what about the others?
If you have started to pay attention to the stunning events unfolding in Afghanistan as the U.S. shifts its combat presence there, you have probably noticed a torrent of coverage and reactions about one particular group of people. This group is the Afghan women and girls.
At this point, they are practically a dark meme. On the front pages of the web we see them: monolithically afraid of the Taliban’s brand of ultra-conservatism, worrying fitfully about lost education and career opportunities, gripped firmly by foreboding toward Joe Biden’s announced redeployment of 2500 U.S. troops.
The amount of coverage of these women is not just tremendous. It actually serves an important function, and it reveals unintentionally how Western “independent media” disseminates propaganda narratives just as efficiently, if not more efficiently, than media outlets which are official or de facto organs of a national government.
In other words, the coverage of Afghan women and girls is itself a form of propaganda, but in order to understand the effect this coverage has, some comparison must be made to other groups who suffer under comparable forms of oppression. The comparison lets us see that stories about Afghan women and girls follow a propaganda model — which was outlined by Edward Hesse and Noam Chomsky — basically to the letter.
The media treats the women and girls of Afghanistan as worthy victims in order to make the Taliban a worthy enemy. The amount and tone of coverage are not based on the degree of oppression or violence suffered, but rather on the attitudes of the U.S. security state vis-à-vis the the actors involved. By design, the worthy victim narrative reinforces belief that any hostile stance from the security state toward any Taliban-affiliated regime is justified.
At the same time, oppressed people in U.S. ally and client state areas — sometimes in the same geographic location — are unworthy victims: they are subject to much less media scrutiny, and sometimes even presented as scarcely victims at all.
Media Coverage = Victim Worth
At first glance, incessant coverage of Afghan women and girls probably seems reasonable enough. Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul and virtually all of the country’s territory have recently fallen to the Taliban; the U.S.-backed president of the country, Ashraf Ghani, has fled to the United Arab Emirates; and recently, Kabul’s international airport has flooded with evacuees who would, to any reasonable observer, seem gripped with fear.
However, the elite consensus in the media on all of these events had begun to build before the events unfolded.
In the days and weeks leading up to Afghanistan’s collapse, officials projected it would take some months for a Taliban conquest to occur. This was a time in which most believed a peace and power-sharing deal might still be brokered between Ashraf Ghani’s regime and the Taliban.
But it was also the time in which it became clear that the media had already picked out the two major areas of its propaganda line: 1) we are putting our allies in the country at risk by withdrawing troops and 2) Afghan women and girls are now afraid, because the Taliban is oppressive to women.
Of the two, the latter provides a much better window into the workings of the propaganda model that, as Hesse and Chomsky once argued, informs the operations of much Western corporate media. In their book “Manufacturing Consent” (1988; 2002), the authors discussed how cross-topic comparisons reveal systemic media biases in favor of security state interests:
A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own [client states] will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation.
The process in which “Afghan women and girls” and “Afghan women’s education” became stock phrases in the media lexicon, employed widely in articles and Twitter feeds, showed attention and indignation in spades. The treatment contrasts sharply with that found for similar victims in U.S.-approved regimes.
The Worthy Victims: Afghan Women and Girls
Mere days after President Biden announced his new plan for a drawdown in Afghanistan, news outlets began to ruminate on the far-from-guaranteed consequences for Afghan women and their educations. Articles appeared — sans explanation of how 2,500 U.S. soldiers could protect women’s rights in a country of nearly 40 million — that spelled out how freedom for Afghan women had been put in fresh danger.
“U.S. withdrawal puts freedoms for Afghan women in peril” ran one headline in CBS News on April 30.
CBS author Charlie D’Agata elaborated: “the Taliban is poised to extend its reach across the country, reversing the gains of women in Afghanistan.”
As evidence for the imminent reversal of gains, D’Agata described how a woman had recently been “brutally beaten by the Taliban: forty lashes over accusations of adultery.”
Then came an emotionally charged interview with Zarifa Ghafari, described as the 27-year-old mayor of Maidan Shar. Ghafari, wrote D’Agata,
knows the Taliban’s cruel methods all too well. Her father was gunned down outside his home in Kabul. “I never kissed him. I never hugged him. It was so hard,” she told CBS News, wiping a tear from her eye.
Ghafari’s remarks and emotional state then brought the article to a close. “Like many women,” it reads, “Ghafari dreads what’s to come: ‘[The Taliban] are not changed. Trusting them will once again be a big mistake.’”
The news site Time chimed in in July with the flamboyantly titled piece “The U.S. Is Leaving Afghanistan, the Taliban Is Growing in Power, and Education for Girls and Women Is Already at Risk.”
An ominous photo — the broken glass windows of a classroom overlooking gloomy rows of empty desk seats — begins the coverage.
In text, the article describes a series of threats received by women working and learning in schools in contested Afghan territory. All of the menacing actors behind the threats are described as “insurgents;” they are presumed at face value to be Taliban affiliated, carrying out the singular mission of a group motivated by, seemingly, an extreme distaste for female knowledge.
The Time article outlines in detail the reinstitution of policies under which women must be accompanied by a mahram, a type of guardian that is customarily a male adult relative. And much scrutiny is given to the Taliban’s education manual. The authors note that only two of over 100 chapters on education address “women and girls,” and they observe how a Taliban spokesperson advocated “separation between girls and boys, women and men, in universities, schools, or madrassas” in one interview.
By August, the stream of similar articles had swelled to a deluge. Thematically, much of the writing focused heavily on intimate conversations with Afghan women who expressed — or were described as feeling — intensely negative emotional reactions to the prospect of a yet-to-be-completed Taliban takeover.
U.K. outlet The Guardian probably takes the top prize for coverage of this sort. At least four extensive articles with profiles of Afghan women were published within just two days. The tone from July into August approached tabloid levels of emotional saturation. Headlines read as follows:
Afghan women’s defiance and despair: ‘I never thought I'd have to wear a burqa. My identity will be lost’
‘We see silence filled with fear’: female Afghan journalists plead for help
[Women’s rights activist] Malala Yousafzai ‘deeply worried’ as Taliban take control in Afghanistan
An Afghan woman in Kabul: ‘Now I have to burn everything I achieved’
‘Nowhere to go’: divorced Afghan women in peril as the Taliban close in
‘I worry my daughters will never know peace’: women flee the Taliban – again
And this is just a selection. Others joined in, for example CNN:
‘I'm really scared’: CNN obtains audio from Afghan woman fearing for life
The Taliban have been in charge of Kabul for 48 hours. Women have already disappeared from the streets
The Taliban knocked on her door 3 times. The fourth time, they killed her
These Afghan girls only receive religious education
Our Muslim allies must step up to protect the women of Afghanistan
On GPS: What will happen to Afghan women?
Exacting attention is paid to symbols of oppression such as the burqa, a full-body garment that covers the face, head, torso, and legs of the woman wearing it.
“. . . dozens and dozens of blue burqas hang like spectres from hooks on the wall,” read one report. A woman known as Miriam weighed in on the prospect of wearing a burqa under Taliban rule:
“My husband asked me to change the type of clothes I wear, and to start wearing the burqa so that the Taliban will pay less attention to me if I am outside,” she said, unhappy with the developments.
In none of the coverage whatsoever do we get even the whiff of a civilian opinion expressing optimism that the Taliban might preserve some of the women’s recent gains in education — even though 1) the Taliban’s spokesman has expressed desire to do just that, and 2) the Taliban’s written policies emphasize the importance of girls’ education, at least to a certain point.
Much less do we get anything resembling a positive sentiment toward the Taliban, even though its takeover of Afghanistan was so effortless that it seems the group must enjoy at least some popular support there (if not overwhelming support).
The supposedly dispassionate media has clearly invested substantial time and resources in order to produce so much material about Afghan women and girls that it caused Google search trends to skyrocket — and yet the media could not seem to find anyone with even an ambivalent opinion about the Taliban’s takeover where women and girls are concerned.
The coverage was profuse and one sided. But most importantly, it came to look different in the extreme from our coverage of economic allies.
Unworthy Victims I: The Women of Saudi Arabia
The country of Saudi Arabia is, by most accounts, the most prolific sponsor of terrorism in the world. Leaked Obama-era documents reveal U.S. knowledge that Saudi funds have been a lifeline for “al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups.”
The country has distinct legal and education systems for men and women. It forbids the mixing of sexes in most public places, and it metes out public beheadings for such offenses as disavowing the religion of Islam. The country lifted the world’s only national ban on women automobile drivers in 2018; women are typically forbidden from testifying in trials and received the right to vote in some elections in 2015.
None of this, however, generates very much coverage or outrage for most of the press.
For example, the story of a Saudi woman getting divorced, fined, and sentenced to 70 lashes for offending her husband in a WhatsApp status got almost no traction in either the U.K. or U.S. press. The major liberal outlets were virtually silent. Only The New York Post, CBS News, and The Huffington Post gave the story some coverage.
What’s more, the measured tone of these outlets was almost unsettling. Emotional details were sparse, even though the story was actually quite remarkable. Here’s some reporting from a site called Daily Sabah:
The instant messaging app for smartphones, WhatsApp Messenger, has been cited as the reason for a divorce in Saudi Arabia . . .
The husband filed for a divorce, saying his wife had written a WhatsApp status message as “I pray to be patient enough to put up with you,” followed by his initials. Upon reading the message, the husband was reportedly “embarrassed,” and felt his reputation was being “tarnished.”
The couple’s relationship was already suffering, according to the husband, but the status message was the last straw. . . .
According to various media reports, the wife has been sentenced to 70 lashes, and will also have to pay 20,000 Saudi Riyal ($5,332) for the so-called ‘insult’ to the husband.
Notice that the woman’s punishment, a beating with 70 lashes, is nearly twice as severe as what we find described as a “brutal beating” from the Taliban in a CBS News story (the Afghan woman received 40 lashes for an accusation of adultery).
Nevertheless, CBS News devoted a grand total of 186 words to the story from Saudi Arabia. The punished woman’s perspective was summarized, without emotion, as “The woman did admit insulting the man, but also refuted the guilty verdict.”
The story in CBS had no byline, but its typist described the woman’s violent punishment in a single sentence and used the passive voice: “A 32-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia was given 70 lashes for allegedly insulting a man on the private messaging service WhatsApp.”
The question of who did the lashing seemed to bear no significance to either CBS News or the Huffington Post. The latter cited a “legal expert” who chastised not the regime, but the woman’s husband, feebly:
“The husband should have had a conversation with the wife to understand her motives,” Khalid Al-Halibi concluded.
Not only does the press provide nearly zero emotional critique of Saudi female repression; the relatively meager group of critical articles is also counterbalanced by glowing accounts of the regime’s advances on women’s rights.
To be sure, some recent Saudi reforms have been commendable, and most articles do highlight some room for improvement. Still, a strong proportion — perhaps a majority — of the emotional coverage on Saudi Arabia and women leans positive, even though the nation is undoubtedly one of the harshest places in the world for women to live.
A piece in The Conversation, for example, admitted that women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia faced jail for their activism while fighting to gain some social rights (rights to which the article devoted lavish praise). But stunningly, an activist who was detained — and allegedly tortured — for her activism was quoted in a manner that underlined her respect for her country:
“I was never but a good citizen that loved her country, a loving daughter and a hardworking student and a devoted worker,” wrote the Saudi activist Nouf Abdulaziz in a letter posted online after her arrest in June 2018.
Even facing jail, she “wished the best for” Saudi Arabia.
If Abdulaziz had anything negative to say about her captivity or corporal punishment, the article did not deem it fit to print (nor was the alleged torture even mentioned).
Another example: compared to coverage on the Taliban, CNN had a remarkably fair and balanced approach when it came to Saudi women receiving the right to drive. Journalists in Saudi Arabia seemed to gain an ability to find and interview civilians who approved of Islamic ultra-conservatism. This meant that they were getting substantive quotes from women who did not want women to drive:
“This is not an achievement,” one woman, who gave her name only as Yasmin, told CNN in Jeddah. “An achievement is something you worked and fought hard for, like being the first ambassador or minister or astronaut. That would be something worth celebrating.”
Overall, articles that can be filled with positive quotes and accounts of women in Saudi Arabia — such those elated by driving and education privileges — are much longer and more detailed than those containing just negative news.
There are, of course, some exceptions. But they are few and far between, especially compared to the much more plentiful balanced and positive coverage. What’s more, even the negative articles do not directly use words such as “brutal,” “cruel,” “repressive,” or “violent” about the Saudi regime — let alone concepts such as “terrorist harboring” or “terrorist sponsoring.” Almost nothing critical about the Saudi state or individual officials gets published in the mainstream media with regard to female violence. U.S. enemies such as the Taliban and Hamas, in contrast, are directly called “terrorist” and implicated incessantly in anti-female oppression.
All of this will sound familiar to readers of Hesse and Chomsky. The coverage conforms exactly to their propaganda model (all emphasis mine):
Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of worth based on utility, and dichotomous attention based on the same criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. . . .
We would expect different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends. What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other. We would also expect great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one’s own and friendly states. . . .
The quality of coverage should also be displayed more directly and crudely in placement, headlining, word usage, and other modes of mobilizing interest and outrage. . . . Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.
Unworthy Victims II: Afghan Child Slaves
The mujahideen were a group of Islamist insurgents who chafed under Marxist rule of Afghanistan, which began in 1978. Their name for themselves translates to “jihadists” — and Western security agencies believed they would make ideal anti-communist allies.
Organizations such as CIA and MI6 funneled arms, wealth, and resources worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars to the mujahideen over a 10-year period, 1979-1989. Their experiment was a success: in the sense that it led to the ouster of Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed communist regime. But the victory cost 12 years of war, and the mujahideen’s new government proved weak. It fell within 4 years to a new insurgency, the Taliban.
The Taliban were autocratic, violent, and ultra-conservative. But a seldom-discussed factor in their rise was their wish to exterminate a practice that flourished after the mujahideen won the country — an open and systematic institution of child sex slavery.
Once the U.S. deposed the Taliban in its bloody invasion of Afghanistan, a practice known as bacha bazi experienced a resurgence. In 2013, Foreign Policy called bacha bazi “a widespread subculture of pedophilia” that “constitutes one of the most egregious ongoing violations of human rights in the world.”
The practice literally means “boy play,” and it involves the purchase or kidnapping of young and adolescent boys by older male masters. Masters demand services, such as drag dances at gatherings, from the boys they own. The boys form part of a retinue that enhances the master’s reputation. And finally, these boys “are expected to engage in sexual acts with much older suitors, often remaining a man’s or group’s sexual underling for a protracted period.”
The ex-muhajideen warlords, commanders, and government officials propped up by the U.S. and NATO enshrined the practice of bacha bazi throughout much of rural and poor Afghanistan.
This was well known — a former commander of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance told PBS in 2010, “I had a boy because every commander had one. There’s competition amongst the commanders. If I didn’t have a boy, I couldn’t compete with the others.”
In the harrowing PBS documentary “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan,” boys owned by powerful men in the country described how their owners frequently beat and even killed boys who refused orders. One frequent attendee of bacha bazi parties claimed to have been entertained by two or three thousand boy slaves in his adult life. Left unrevealed in the tape was intimate U.S. involvement in this process. The men behind these parties had been direct and indirect beneficiaries of more than 30 years of U.S. public funding and nearly a decade of NATO warfare. Some of them even shared barracks with U.S. Marines — with their retinues of enslaved boys! Virtually all of these men, of course, were our supposed allies, men for whom American soldiers were sent to fight and die.
Later coverage would make these connections apparent. But these stories received far less media scrutiny than one might expect: boys brutalized and enslaved for bacha bazi were unworthy victims.
I have been able to find a total of eight articles from The New York Times that even mention bacha bazi over roughly two decades of war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post had seven, CNN three. CBS News: zero. ABC News: two.
The same outlets that individually managed to produce handfuls — and in some cases dozens — of articles about yet-to-occur Taliban repression of women, in under a week, produced probably less than half a dozen articles, in the aggregate, with any mention of a bombshell story showing close ties between the U.S. military and bacha bazi.
An article published by the New York Times in 2015
cited the suspicious death of Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr., a United States Marine who was killed at a checkpoint where he was stationed with a notorious commander who had a retinue of bacha bazi boys. Corporal Buckley had complained about that commander and was killed, along with two other Marines, by one of the commander’s boys. [Emphasis mine.]
Let’s review — and forgive my tone — but a U.S. Marine was murdered, along with two others, by a boy sex slave who lived with the Marine on base; and the biggest U.S. papers covered the story with just a few unemotional articles in the mid 2010s and a back-page article by the Times that referenced it casually a few years later. There were no mentions of the story in CBS, which never covered the slavery at all, but the outlet managed to produce the headlines “Taliban hangs Afghan Boy, 7, for spying” and “Afghan boy who fought Taliban killed on way to school.”
ABC News did not mention the murder either, but it did offer the Department of Defense ample opportunity to explain its wish to “reinforce the importance of training on human rights abuse reporting, including suspected child sexual assault.”
CNN did mention the murder, but did not cover its connection to bacha bazi. Elsewhere, the outlet did offer something that could almost count as an indictment of the practice: “. . . after a decade of training with U.S. forces, it seems some Afghan commanders are continuing the abuse [of children] unchecked.”
The Washington Post was similar to CNN. The Post later called the boy slave “the police chief’s servant.”
Multiple accounts have confirmed that the practice of bacha bazi was widespread, and some experts — including the researcher Rabia Akhtar — have argued that the war in Afghanistan was a major factor in its ubiquity.
One report, internal to the U.S., claimed that “DOD’s continuing to provide assistance to units for which the department has credible information of a gross violation of human rights undermines efforts by U.S. government officials to engage with the Afghan government on the importance of respect for human rights and rule of law.”
It makes sense, then, that another bacha bazi story broke in the Times that counted for about half of its coverage of the topic. Multiple soldiers, including Dan Quinn and Charles Martland, were removed from the military for beating up bacha bazi masters who allegedly had intercourse with their slaves. The soldiers alleged that they were “instructed not to intervene in the abuse of Afghan boys by U.S. allies, even in some cases in which it’s taken place on military bases.”
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” Quinn told The Times. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did.”
Although Quinn was able to provide the media with a couple quotes, there were no incensed opinion pieces in the biggest outlets about U.S. public money being spent on the sexual enslavement of children: “a U.S.-backed Afghan militia leader . . . had been spending his wages on ‘dancing boys,’ even keeping a young boy chained to his bed as a sex slave.” Nor were there any op-eds at all about the U.S. soldiers killed by enslaved boys.
Accounts from boys themselves did appear in PBS and Newsweek — both of which heavily underplayed the U.S. government’s role in the practice — but no one else in the mainstream press published accounts from boys or their family members or even from human rights activists who study and oppose such practices.
It is not as though such voices were unavailable. Some articles on bacha bazi have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. What happened instead was that emotional accounts were systematically downplayed about a practice and set of circumstances that could have, if pursued, produced countless lurid and attention-grabbing headlines.
(As just one example, the U.S. government’s watchdog in Afghanistan admitted that “DOD and State only began efforts to address this issue [i.e., the child slavery] after it was raised by The New York Times,” well over a decade after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.)
The sparse instances in which emotional comments were voiced in the press about U.S. complicity in bacha bazi — roughly one article total in the liberal press — allowed the media to function as a form of extremely controlled opposition. The media kept the story covered — technically — but in a loose, minimal, and measured fashion, keeping subsequent outrage contained and dispersed.
I would need far more time to quantify things fully, but measured by the amount of coverage, it would seem that the fear and livelihood of an Afghan boy slave is worth, conservatively, about 50 to 100 times less to the media than the fear felt by an Afghan woman apprehensive about the Taliban. And when the tone of the coverage is factored in, the orders of magnitude increase still further. It is clear that in 2021, the media still acts much the same as Hesse and Chomsky described more than two decades ago:
It is well recognized . . . that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint. [Various aspects of the media] all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts. The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.
We would do well to remember these facts the next time we see yet another splashy piece about Afghan women and girls. The Taliban is our official enemy, and therefore covered much differently than everyone else. We would also do well to remember that historically low trust in the corporate press is well earned.
To support this work, please share or subscribe to this newsletter using the buttons below. And for more perspective on Afghanistan, see my previous analysis.
Note: an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Ashraf Ghani fled to Uzbekistan, based on early rumors. Later reports confirmed his destination was ultimately UAE.