The Taliban had taken over 6 months earlier in August 2021.

 

Playing and listening to music had been banned under the first Taliban regime. 

 

Within 3 months, despite much negotiation and resistance, nearly half of Afghanistan’s media outlets shut down.

 

We scrambled to balance our mission with the reality of the new government, continuing to run our reporting but looking over our shoulder, wondering what the next day would look like.

 

For 2 decades, the Taliban’s plan for how to deal with media companies like Moby had been violence.

 

There had been only one successful targeted attack against us, in 2016, when a suicide bomber in a car exploded himself beside a bus carrying three dozen Moby staffers, killing seven of them.

 

My personal story involves many moves to many different continents, some of them in a rush, at least one in a panic, and several encounters with violence. But in the context of my country, what happened to me is ordinary, even enviable. We were only one family in an entire generation of Afghans forced to leave, and we were lucky; we didn’t become refugees, like the millions of Afghans who crossed the eastern border and eked out a living while stuck in camps and urban slums in Pakistan, but relatively privileged political asylees, with two educated, working parents and a welcoming Australian community to cushion our fall.

 

As connected as we felt to our country, the longer we stayed off Afghan soil, the less claim it seemed we had to our Afghan identity. And losing that felt like a slow death.

 

Only 3 countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s lawful government; the rest of the world almost completely disengaged, out of disgust, or disinterest.

 

Justice can prevail, but you have to be prepared to fight for it. Sometimes, in that fight, you have to get creative.

 

In Afghanistan, everyone has a cousin, everyone is a cousin, friends who become so close that the word “friend” hardly seems sufficient become uncles, sisters, brothers, aunts.

 

In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan had been a major exporter of nuts and dried fruits, mostly to the Indian subcontinent. Even after the economy tanked following the Soviet invasion, the ensuing civil war, and the Taliban takeover, agriculture remained Afghanistan’s most important sector.

 

It’s not that we wanted the international community to stay forever; Afghans are famously a fiercely independent people. But we knew that before the internationals left, there needed to be huge changes within the Afghan government and its security forces for stability to take hold and last.

 

The Americans has created an enemy, lost to that enemy, and then left. Once the Americans decided it was over, most other countries also quickly fell in line.

 

Haven’t we learned, time and time again, that disengagement with a totalitarian regime only punishes the people who live under that regime?

 

Unlike their original iteration in the 1990s, this new cadre of Taliban are much more media savvy; they, too, are part of the Internet generation.

 

The International community cannot simply lecture, they cannot only threaten and punish or pull away and expect the Taliban to behave differently as a result. The Taliban were not vanquished by NATO forces, and twenty years after being routed from Kabul, they prevailed again. They see themselves as the ultimate survivors.

 

Rather than making education an Afghan project, we let foreigners with their own agendas take victory laps around our schoolyards.

 

Their view of themselves as real Afghans responding to oppressive regimes or foreign influence can be traced back to their origin, emerging in the wake of the decade-long Soviet occupation that left the country ravaged, and during the disorder and brutality of the 1990s civil war, when ordinary Afghans suffered daily abuse, theft, and corruption. Many of the fighters then were young men who’d been indoctrinated in madrassas while growing up as refugees in Pakistan. They saw themselves as a righteous movement, and after disarming the warring militias and bringing much of the countryside and Kabul under their control, the Taliban compelled all Afghans to live under their puritanical interpretation of Sharia. It was in this harsh fashion that they brought law and order, and what might have looked to many like something resembling a relative peace to much of the country.

 

Millions of dollars had been spent over two decades – by both the US and the former Afghan governments – trying to fracture and weaken the movement, to no avail, and now that they had won, the Taliban leaders were certainly not going to lost their standing by infighting. And engagement, in my view, is the only way to make life better for the Afghans who live under them.

 

Afghanistan is a place where, contrary to what outsiders may think, people feel free.

 

Maybe because so many of our stories were being written about us rather than by us, those feelings were simply going unreported.

 

In addition to foreign journalists, Kabul was overrun with foreign consultants, usually funded by the US government and offering their expertise to Afghan start-ups in all fields under the sun.

 

Certainly, by now we know that protecting and promoting women’s rights was hardly the reason behind the American-led war; at best, it provided moral cover for the invasion, as it did for extending the occupation. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been a worthy goal unto itself.

 

Social change is inevitable, but it happens in an irreversible manner only when it’s accepted by the public.

 

Afghan’s are informed. We have to be. But by 8:30pm., everyone deserves a little escape. 

 

Afghanistan is a country of distinct groups separated by ethnicity and language, religious practice, and appearance. Each group, no matter who you are, has some kind of grievance to work through, with other groups, with the state, with the international community, with neighbours and families, grievances that go back days, or weeks or generations.

 

Those is power, whether Afghan or foreigners, have exploited this diversity as a way to maintain control over the population. They have inflamed tensions and distrust between communities, highlighted the differences, and then nurtured those differences with their policies or acts of violence.

 

When the leaders avoided transparency and it became clear that they were motivated by their own group’s interests, it only exacerbated a lack of trust in the political establishment. Afghans became prone to conspiracy theories. As is, we’ve also somewhat been in awe of foreign powers – the British colonizers, the Soviets, and then the Americans and their allies – who invested so many of their resources into trying to get something from our country. After a certain point, it can be hard for many Afghans to believe that not everything, from elections to coups to natural disasters, happens by foreign design.

​

Anyone, regardless of wealth or status or nationality or connections, could find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

Being an Afghan requires, on a good day, accepting that you live a fractured, at times contradictory, existence. When most of what the world knows about your country is violence, you might have to pause to remind yourself that the life you live each day in Afghanistan includes your friends and family beside you, that the joy of being home is real, that you do laugh and watch dumb television and get married and work hard at interesting jobs and that none of that is erased by the reports of bomb blasts.

 

Rupert Murdoch, who in 2009 had partnered with me to bring uncensored and entertainment-oriented television programming via satellite from Dubai into Iran, and invested some money in Moby, which would help us expand into six countries, including India and Ethiopia.

 

Afghanistan has always been, and will always be, a nation of music lovers, even if some of the more conservative among us would spend a great deal of time and energy pretending otherwise.

 

If Afghanistan is a nation of traumatised people, why were we all so eager to return to the scene of the primal wound?