Pashto radio, television and press: from Pakhtun and Anis to Mashaal and Lemar

At a glance

• The first paper to treat Pashto as a national language was Siraj al-Akhbar, which Mahmud Tarzi edited in Kabul from 1911. It was printed in Persian, and Tarzi argued in it for Pashto as "the Afghan language". [6]

• Anis, begun in Kabul in 1927, was written in Pashto, and Gregorian calls it in that sense the first national paper. [6] In British India the Pashto weekly that mattered was Pakhtun (پښتون), which Abdul Ghaffar Khan started in 1928. [8, 9]

• Radio reached the Pashtun lands from two capitals at once. Peshawar had a transmitter in 1935 and a station inaugurated in 1936. [11] Kabul had a small transmitter in 1925 and a larger one in 1933. [12] After 1955 Pakistan used Radio Peshawar to broadcast in Pashto against the Pashtunistan demand, and the radio and press war between Kabul and Islamabad peaked in 1961 to 1963. [7]

• Foreign Pashto radio came late: BBC Pashto in the early 1980s, VOA Deewa in 2006 and Radio Mashaal in 2010. Mashaal stopped broadcasting on 31 March 2026. [1–3, 17]

• Private Pashto television began with AVT Khyber, which started test transmission on 1 July 2004, and with Afghan channels such as Lemar (2006) and Shamshad. [5, 21, 22, 24]

• Reporters in the Pashtun lands have been killed, abducted and threatened by militants, intelligence officers and unknown gunmen. Since August 2021 the Taliban authorities have shut or restricted much of the Afghan media, and on 13 October 2026 they took BBC Pashto off FM. [27–30, 32, 33]

Siraj al-Akhbar and the first Kabul papers

Afghanistan's first newspaper, in Dupree's account, was Shams-i-Nahar, "Morning Sun", which Sher Ali Khan's government published in 1873. [7] The first one that lasted was Siraj al-Akhbar Afghaniyah, "The Lamp of the News of Afghanistan". Vartan Gregorian, who wrote the standard history of Afghan modernisation, says it was published every two weeks from October 1911 to January 1919 under Amir Habibullah, and that its editor and chief writer was Mahmud Tarzi. [6] Tarzi lithographed the first year himself, and presses from France and Turkey arrived afterwards. [7]

The paper was in Persian. [6] It still mattered for Pashto, because Tarzi argued in it that Pashto, which he and his circle called "the Afghan language" or "Afghani", should have its status raised, in contrast to Persian, the official language, and be taught to every group in the country as a true national language. [6] Tarzi made the argument for Pashto in Persian.

The press that grew up under Amanullah (1919 to 1929) was also mostly Persian. Gregorian lists Aman-i-Afghan, which took over from Siraj al-Akhbar in 1919, Ittihad-i-Mashriqi at Jalalabad in 1920, and Tulu-e-Afghan at Kandahar in 1921. He says those four papers, in Kabul, Jalalabad and Herat, were written in Persian, though they carried occasional articles and poems in Pashto. [6] Then came Haqiqat in 1923 and Anis in 1927, and of Anis Gregorian writes that it "was written in Pashto and was, in this sense, the first national paper". [6] Dupree adds that Anis ceased to be a free paper in 1931 and emerged as a government paper that is still published. [7]

Under Habibullah Kalakani the press that had blossomed under Amanullah all but disappeared, leaving one paper in Kabul, and Nadir Shah's government rebuilt it. [6] Anis returned and later became a bilingual daily, a new Pashto journal appeared, and the semi-official Islah became a daily. [6] The state now backed Pashto openly. Gregorian quotes Hashim Khan saying that by 1938 Pashto would be "the language of our officials, doing away with Persian". [6] In 1930 the question became a public quarrel: the Calcutta paper Habl-ul-Matin warned the Afghan government against "an artificial national language" and said Pashto was spoken by a minority in Afghanistan. [6] Gregorian reports that the question had become a debate between the Persian and the Afghan press, and that the new Pashto Tolana, the academy, pursued the study and promotion of Pashto. [6] Two men who worked in these papers have their own articles: Gul Pacha Ulfat, who joined the staff of Anis in the 1930s, and Qiyamuddin Khadim, listed in Adamec's Who's Who as editor of Hewad.

Two later episodes show how thin the freedom was. In 1951 and 1952, under the "Liberal Parliament", independent papers appeared overnight. Dupree names Watan, Nida-yi-Khalq and Angar, the last a Persian and Pashto biweekly published by the Kandahari Faiz Mohammad Angar, each with a circulation of about 1,500. [7] Amin Tarzi, writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, says that experiment ended in 1953 when Mohammad Daoud, as prime minister, closed the independent papers. [10] The next opening came with the 1964 constitution and the press law of 1965, which kept broadcasting in the state's hands while independent papers multiplied; it ended with Daoud's coup of 1973. [10] The library collections that survive from these decades are mostly of the state papers: Princeton's Afghan Central Press collection presents Anis, Hewad (هيواد, "Homeland") and Islah as its Pushto publications, beside the English-language Kabul Times. [13]

Pakhtun, the paper of Charsadda

On the Indian side of the Durand Line there was no Pashto political paper until 1928. [8] Abdul Ghaffar Khan, later Bacha Khan, decided to start one. In Tendulkar's biography he is quoted saying the Pashtuns had no love for their own language, that educated men asked "What is there in Pakhtu worth reading and learning?", and that mullahs told people Pashto was the language of hell. [8] The magazine he started, Pakhtun, became popular, he said, "not only in the land of Pakhtuns but all over the world where a Pakhtun lived", and the Pashtuns in America gave the largest help in circulating and financing it. [8]

An editorial in the paper said that Pashtuns "including those in Afghanistan, form one nation" and regretted that Afghanistan had no Pashto journal, since its state language was Persian. [8] The issues carried articles on the threat to tribal territory, the boycott of the Simon Commission and Amanullah's tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, notes on hygiene, and verses sent by readers, men, women and schoolchildren. [8] Tariq Rahman adds that the paper raised the question of language planning, and that in August and September 1929 Abdul Ghaffar Khan wrote that British schooling alienated the people and that Pashto should be the medium of instruction in primary school. A contributor asked the government for a Pashto Academy with a yearly grant of 40,000 rupees. [9]

The British banned it in April 1930, when its founder went to jail. It came out again a year later, was banned again in 1931, and appeared three times a month when he re-entered the province in 1937. It stopped in October 1942 at his arrest, returned after his release in 1945, and in Tendulkar's account was banned by the Pakistan government in August 1947, with the surviving issues destroyed. [8] Tendulkar thought no library or person held the full file, and that Kabul's library might hold some issues. [8] The paper also reached Kabul. Abdul Ghaffar Khan said it led to a Pashto paper there, Pakhtun Zhagh, under royal patronage, of which nine issues appeared before Amanullah fell. [8] Rahman names two smaller Frontier papers of the time, Sarhad (1925, in Urdu with twelve Pashto pages) and the fortnightly Angar, which had more Pashto than Urdu. [9] The poets who wrote for Pakhtun are in Poets of the Khudai Khidmatgar, and the movement is in Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Radio Peshawar and Radio Kabul

The dates for Peshawar's station differ by source. The Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation's own chronology says the North-West Frontier government set up a 250-watt transmitter at Peshawar in January 1935 "for community listening", that a station was inaugurated at Peshawar on 16 July 1936, and that the Government of India took it over on 1 April 1937. [11] The chronology also records that the station became a relay station in March 1939 and that it was formally inaugurated again, in a proper broadcasting house, on 16 July 1942. [11] Dawn, reporting the station's 82nd anniversary in 2017, quotes its regional director dating its start to 6 March 1935, and says it relayed programmes in Pashto, Hindko, Chitrali and Persian. [14] Singers describe what it did for Pashto music. Khial Mohammad said he sang his first song on it in 1958 and was paid 15 rupees, and Gul Meena Bibi said women could not sing live in public but could through the microphone. [14]

Kabul's radio is also dated two ways. A Radio Heritage Foundation history, taken from a Ministry of Information brochure of 1967, says a small long-wave transmitter was imported from Russia in 1925, installed in the king's palace, and destroyed in the unrest of 1929, with a German Siemens transmitter installed at Yakatut in 1933. [12] Khaama Press says Radio Kabul began in 1926, stopped, resumed in 1941 and was renamed Radio Afghanistan in 1963. [15]

By the 1950s both stations were fighting through Pashto. In Dupree's account, after the flag-raising ceremonies at the embassies and consulates in September 1955, Pakistan stepped up its anti-Pashtunistan propaganda on both sides of the Durand Line, and over Radio Peshawar broadcast in Pashto to the Afghan side. [7] Dupree says Afghan and Pakistani radio and press propaganda seldom again reached the pitch of 1961 to 1963. [7] Dupree adds that during the border closure the Afghan press and radio repeated over and over that the Pakistanis had closed it. [7] Radio also carried news of state. On 9 March 1963 Radio Afghanistan announced that Mohammad Daoud had resigned as prime minister, and Dupree prints the text. [7] Radio Afghanistan was also an early place for women's voices: Dupree says that a year or two before 1959 it tested female singers and announcers, and several women then joined its staff. [7] Hamza Shinwari, who wrote for radio, and the other poets who worked with it have their own articles, for example Hamza Shinwari.

BBC Pashto, Deewa and Mashaal

BBC Pashto's own page says the service began in August 1982 and soon found large audiences in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf, with news and political analysis first, then weekly programmes for young people and women and on sport, science, literature and music. [1] Some English-language accounts give 1981. The BBC page is the one read here, and Pashtuns today uses its date. The BBC said in 2016 that its Dari programmes joined the Pashto service for Afghan audiences in 2003, and that its Pashto website began in a small way in 1996. [1]

The United States opened two Pashto stations aimed at the border region. VOA Deewa ("Light") launched its first full news hour in September 2006, on FM 100.5 in some cities and on shortwave, with plans to grow to six hours a day. [2] Radio Mashaal ("Torch"), run by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from Prague with a bureau in Pakistan, began on 15 January 2010 to offer "an alternative to the growing number of Islamic extremist radio stations" in the tribal areas, and shared a frequency with Deewa. [3] Its first-year programmes included a call-in show, War Stories, on which a Swat widow told of a 14-hour Taliban attack on her house, and a weekly series on tribal elders killed by the Taliban. [4] The poet Abdul Bari Jahani worked for the Voice of America.

Pakistan's government ordered Mashaal's Islamabad office closed on 19 January 2018 on the recommendation of the ISI, whose report said the station's programmes portrayed Pakistan as a hub of terrorism and presented Pashtuns as disenchanted with the state. [16] That is the state's description. Mashaal called itself "the voice of the voiceless". [17] In 2025 the American government moved to end funding for RFE/RL, and a federal judge in March blocked the cut for a time. [18] VOA staff were laid off in the same year, among them about 100 Pakistanis who worked for its Urdu and Pashto services. [19] In March 2026 a US judge ordered VOA restored. [20] Mashaal itself shut its radio, website and social pages from 31 March 2026, "citing severe financial difficulties". [17]

Pashto television

The first Pashto satellite channel was AVT Khyber. Dawn reported on 3 July 2004 that it had started test transmission on Thursday from its offices in Islamabad, through the AsiaSat satellite "beamed also for Afghanistan, Middle East and other countries", and that its director of news called it "a great moment for the 70 million Pakhtuns to have got their own channel". [21]

In Afghanistan the Taliban had banned television, and their radio, the Voice of Sharia, carried religious programmes. [26] After 2001 private stations grew quickly. The Moby Group, run by the Mohseni family, started with Arman FM in 2003 and then moved into television, with US aid money behind it. [25] Its Pashto channel, Lemar, launched in 2006 and by Moby's own account dominates the south and south-east, covering Helmand, Khost, Paktika, Paktia, Uruzgan and Zabul. [5] Shamshad TV is the other Pashto channel that comes up in the reports. Reporters Without Borders says it launched in 2004, and the Afghanistan Journalists Center says it was established in Kabul in 2006. [22, 24] The Islamic State claimed an attack on its Kabul offices on 7 November 2017; Dawn quotes the interior ministry as saying two guards were killed and five people wounded, and the attackers held the building for about three hours. [23] In 2008 the Ulema Council asked the government to stop Tolo TV and fifteen other private channels from showing Indian serials. [26]

Journalists killed in the Pashtun lands

The Committee to Protect Journalists records the killings that follow, and in several of them nobody was convicted.

Hayatullah Khan filed photographs from Miran Shah in December 2005 that contradicted the official account of how an al-Qaeda commander, Hamza Rabia, died. The next day, 5 December 2005, five gunmen ran his car off the road and took him as his brother watched. His body was dumped in the Miran Shah market on 16 June 2006. His brother Ihsanullah said a military intelligence major had warned Hayatullah to leave his profession or Waziristan or accept the government's politics, and that Hayatullah had told his tribe the government agencies would be responsible if he vanished. An inquiry by a High Court judge was completed but not made public. [27]

Musa Khankhel, a Geo reporter from Swat, was killed in February 2009 while covering a peace march led by Sufi Muhammad, during the first violation of a truce. No group claimed it. His brother told the BBC he was taken at gunpoint, and his hands and feet were bound when his body was found. He had told his bosses that the army was punishing him for his coverage of the Swat offensive and, on the day he died, that he believed the ISI meant to kill him. [28]

Mukarram Khan Aatif, who reported for Dunya News and VOA Deewa, was shot in a mosque near Peshawar on 17 January 2012 after moving from Mohmand because of threats. The Pakistani Taliban's spokesman took responsibility and said he had been warned to stop "anti-Taliban reporting". [29] Khalil Jibran, a long-time correspondent of Khyber News and a former president of the Landi Kotal press club, was pulled from his car near his home and shot dead on the night of 18 June 2024. Police said he had received threats from militants before. [30]

Since August 2021

CPJ says that after the Taliban took Kabul on 15 August 2021 they began at once to bar female journalists from the public broadcaster and to beat reporters covering protests. [34] Human Rights Watch reported in October 2025 that the intelligence service monitors content, that the morality ministry inspects newsrooms, and that media workers were detained for broadcasting women's voices or playing music. [33] CPJ adds that women's voices were banned from radio and television in Helmand, that women must cover their faces on television, and that in 2024 live political broadcasts were banned and interviews limited to a list of 68 approved analysts. [34] The 2024 vice and virtue law treats images of living beings as un-Islamic, and by KabulNow's account has shut dozens of television stations or forced them to run as radio only; the same report cites a 2024 count by the Afghanistan Journalist's Support Organization in which 68 of 248 television channels still operated. [24] In October 2025 the authorities closed Shamshad Radio and TV, which the Afghanistan Journalists Center said had failed to "defend Taliban positions" in its coverage of the border fighting with Pakistan. [24]

Foreign broadcasters lost their local outlets. In March 2022 BBC television bulletins in Pashto, Persian and Uzbek were taken off Afghan partner stations, and on 1 December 2022 VOA and RFE/RL were removed from Afghan AM and FM. [31, 32] On 13 October 2026 the Taliban suspended BBC World Service from Afghan FM, which took in its Pashto service. The BBC said it would continue by shortwave, medium wave, satellite and online. [32] HRW found that Hazara journalists faced harsher treatment, and quoted an intelligence official telling one that if he spoke Pashto his crimes would have been less. [33] The wider events are in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.