By Saanvi Agarwal

Introduction: Beyond the Taliban

For much of the world, Afghanistan is often reduced to a single word: Taliban. But Afghanistan is so much more than just the Taliban. It’s a country with its own rich culture, tradition, and a vast history. Considering Afghanistan equivalent to the Taliban is like ignoring the centuries of history and the background in which the conflicts arose. But unfortunately, the media narrative has completely blindsided everyone. The media propaganda has been so powerful that even questioning it is seen as anti-human rights or anti-women’s rights. There is no critical analysis of the situation in Afghanistan anymore. The worst aspect of this situation is how significantly media propaganda has influenced international geopolitics. This narrative has not only delayed many Western nations from formally recognizing the Taliban government but has also helped justify large cuts in U.S. aid that triggered a humanitarian crisis marked by hospital closures and soaring hunger across the country (Noack, 2025). “The real effective map of the world that is to say operational map of the world is drawn by the reporter and the editor, not by the cartographer” (Shabir, Ali and Iqbal, 2011, p.88). What started as a “war on terrorism” post 9/11 has now transformed into a “war on truth”. This biased coverage of Afghanistan has had devastating effects on the country. In this paper, I argue that the media has been the most important tool in justifying the violence in Afghanistan.

The Weaponisation of Women’s Narratives

The first attack on Afghanistan’s image was the portrayal of Afghan women. “According to any objective standards, life in Afghanistan was harsh beyond comprehension. Yet until Afghan women proved rhetorically useful, their tragic circumstances merited little coverage in the mainstream media” (Stabile and Kumar, 2005, p.771). Stabile and Kumar (2005, p.772) noted in their paper that from 12 September 2001 to 1 January 2002, 93 newspaper articles about Afghan women were published. This figure was three times the number of articles that were published in 1999 and six times the number that were published in the 18 months before 11 September 2001 (Stabile and Kumar, 2005, p.772). While these numbers show how quickly Afghan women’s struggles became mainstream news, these statistics need to be looked at within Afghanistan’s internal political context. Under Taliban rule, women faced severe restrictions on education, employment, and public life. But until 9/11, these conditions got limited attention in the international media. The sudden increase in coverage after 9/11 is clear proof of selective amplification. Afghan women’s plight was strategically spotlighted to justify U.S. intervention. In other words, the tragedy was genuine, but the timing and framing of its coverage shows how women’s oppression was used as a tool in the broader “war on terror” narrative. Even now, global media coverage is solely focused on the plight and oppression of women under the Taliban regime and rightly so, given the severe restrictions imposed since the group’s return in 2021. But what about Afghan women’s own resistance, such as underground education movements or grassroots activism? What about Western policies making the situation worse? The media hardly talks about these “nuances”. In this sense, the problem is not the attention itself, but the selective and instrumental way that attention is framed.

The “Saviour Complex”

“Protecting” women has become a justification for countries bombing Afghanistan. As Abu-Lughod (2002, p.784) has argued, the post 9/11 American narrative “enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the ‘War on Terrorism’”. This narrative was facilitated by global media outlets like CNN and BBC, which showed images of women in burqas, often without giving context about cultural practices or the diversity of Afghan women’s experiences. In Afghanistan, the burqa has multiple meanings (Masty, 2011). But these diverse experiences were given a single interpretation: oppression. The media erased the agency of Afghan women and presented Islam itself as inherently patriarchal and repressive. This narrative is inherently rooted in imperialistic and orientalist ideology. When the West talks about saving Afghan women, it makes itself a saviour, effectively putting itself in a superior position to the East. Now this does not sound new, does it? This practice has been in use for hundreds of years. Most significantly, this ideology was used to justify colonisation and imperialist expansion. A 2025 UN report noted that Afghanistan has the second-worst gender gap globally (United Nations Women, 2025). But the media rarely covers this issue holistically. It completely ignores women’s grassroots activism, such as underground schools or home-based businesses, in favour of images of oppression. This selective coverage is rooted in what Hirschkind and Mahmood (2002) term as “feminist orientalism”. Feminist Orientalism portrays Afghan society as deeply patriarchal and hence establishes the narrative that Afghan women need Western salvation. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men.

What these media outlets fail to talk about is how, many times, Western policies worsen women’s difficulties. Policies like cuts in humanitarian aid significantly exacerbate women’s plight. Similarly, in 2025, Al Jazeera (2025) reported that 85% of Afghans live on less than $1 a day. But the Western media hides how this is connected to the freezing of Afghan assets by the U.S. or reduced aid following the Taliban’s 2021 takeover. The U.S. withdrawal in 2021 and the subsequent economic collapse were underreported in favour of stories blaming the Taliban, despite Western policies contributing significantly to the crisis (United Nations Development Programme, 2025). This kind of selective coverage is meant to erase any doubt regarding the Western-instigated violence and instability.

Media as a Tool of Propaganda

Each news story is carefully crafted to serve a purpose and ingrain a bias in the reader’s mind. It is a tool that serves a particular propaganda. As several studies have proved, American mainstream media has been one of the important instruments of foreign policy makers, the White House, and the Pentagon (Shabir et al, 2011, p.89). A 2011 study analysed two magazines, Newsweek and Time, and it found that “the magazines have been deliberately engaged in the propaganda campaign of building misconception distorting images and creating hatred in the minds of US citizens about Islam and Muslim world” (Shabir et al, 2011, p.98). The study analysed the content of eleven years and noted that while the magazines did not even cover the development and the positive activities of Islamic nations, they unnecessarily played up the negative aspects of politics and the economy (Shabir et al, 2011, p.99). These negative issues were given the maximum coverage as compared to no coverage of the positive issues. “The magazines have given maximum coverage to such topics or issues which developed negative image of Muslim countries in the readers” (Shabir et al, 2011, p.99). This project of a negative image construction has been a constant theme in American mainstream media. For example, in 2001, a New York Times article referred to Afghanistan as a “breeding ground for global terrorism” (Tyler, 2001). A study by Nohrstedt and Ottosen (2014) talked about how media framing post-9/11 constructed “enemy images” of Afghanistan, effectively portraying it as a threat to global security. Again, this selective framing often did not report the human cost of U.S. military interventions. Civilian casualties were underreported as compared to the news stories of American heroism or Taliban atrocities. This narrative has put a blindfold on people’s eyes and made them support America’s “war on terror”. It is extremely important that people make informed decisions. But that becomes impossible when so much of the information is either biased or filtered out.

Narrative Engineering After 2001

In 2008, the US Institute of Peace published a report named “Media and Conflict: Afghanistan as a Relative Success Story”. This report said that “With so many countries invested and interested in Afghanistan, the voice of official Kabul was of crucial importance to the success of the post-conflict reconstruction mission” (Bajraktari and Parajon, 2008, p.5). This report further noted that RFA and the BBC had “helped reconstruction by providing information to every corner of Afghanistan” (Bajraktari and Parajon, 2008, p.6).  And so “there was little danger that these international broadcasters would incite violence or derail the reconstruction process” (Bajraktari and Parajon, 2008, p.6). Why is this report relevant? Before the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Afghanistan had only one radio station and the news media had negligible development. Post-American control, news media developed significantly. But what is interesting about this development is that almost all media outlets were funded by the U.S.A. and consequently, the media coverage was in favour of the U.S.A. The report published by the US Institute of Peace termed the American media development project as “relatively successful”. Clearly, America was again trying to control the narrative. According to the U.S.A., the development of media gave a “voice” to Kabul when all it did was justify America’s bombing of Afghanistan.

Conclusion: Removing the Blindfold

From the onset, it has been abundantly clear that what America called “liberation” was just self-interest in disguise. But this narrative did not make it to the mainstream media because coverage was shaped by American influence. The Afghan story became narrowly centered on images of veiled women, underdevelopment, and the Taliban. But Afghanistan cannot be reduced to these images alone. To truly understand Afghanistan is to look beyond propaganda and acknowledge the complexity of its people and their lived experiences. The country’s history and culture demand that people remove their blindfolds and look at the various layers of the nation.

The American narrative is perhaps one of the reasons the “war on terrorism” sustained for two decades. Reducing the nation to the Taliban is not only a grave injustice to Afghans, but it is also a dangerous erasure that allows cycles of intervention and exploitation to repeat unchecked.

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