AFGHANISTAN'S SMALL band of independent-minded media outlets is a little smaller with the demise of Kabul Weekly, a lively newspaper that claims it has been put out of business after daring to criticise Hamid Karzai.
On Wednesday staff met with editor, Muhammad Faheem Dashty, for the last time after producing the final edition of a newspaper that has been a regular sight on the streets of Kabul since 2002.
Mr Dashty said he had no choice but to shut down after more than a year of losses in a media market where most publications are simply bankrolled by warlords.
“To preserve our independence we tried to rely on the normal revenue streams of newspapers around the world, advertising and subscriptions, but in Afghanistan everything is political,” he said.
After years of modest profitability, things went awry during the 2009 presidential election when Kabul Weeklyearned the ire of Mr Karzai's presidential campaign with a front-page article claiming the president was looking weak after allegedly losing the support of Afghanistan's western backers.
Mr Karzai’s campaign manager, who now serves as his official spokesman, promptly dropped the political ads it had been running in the paper.
But more serious was the drying up of advertising from the country’s biggest companies, including banks and airlines, although Mr Dashty won’t say which ones. “All these companies were financing the presidential campaign so they could make back their money through legal and illegal contracts after he won,” he said.
“This one is paid for by the Iranians, this one the Americans,” Mr Dashty says as he tosses a pile of the day’s papers, which he claims are bankrolled by foreign intelligence services, across his desk in his central Kabul office. “This one is a daily with a print run of 10,000, no adverts and it is not sold anywhere. How do they pay for that?”
He denies any bias, pointing to the paper's habit of "criticising almost everyone", including his father, a former government official. "There is no such thing as total independence," he says. "But we did our best." – ( Guardian service)