Now, with the Taliban gone, everyone’s openly buying televisions. More than 150 cottage-industry satellite-dish shops have mushroomed all over the city (there used to be just five). Their newly hand-made parabolas line entire Kabul streets, luring would-be buyers. The sight is especially exotic given that the dishes are fabricated out of beer-can metal already stamped with multi-colored logos such as “Coors” and “Molson Ice.”
We–that is, NEWSWEEK’s five correspondents and photographers in Kabul–have our own reasons for wanting a piece of this small cultural revolution. After moving into a sparsely furnished house in Kabul, we spent the first few days grappling with power outages, clogged toilets, computers going haywire, personnel dramas among sundry interpreters, drivers, watchmen and NEWSWEEK camp followers–not to mention trying to do a bit of reporting. Now we all needed a news fix–and bad. My colleague Rod Nordland was organized enough to bring his radio, and we all had access to e-mail via satellite phone. But we figured we’d have to join the scrum of eager TV customers if we really wanted to stay on top of things.
First stop: a vendor named Mohamad Taleb who had dared to sell televisions clandestinely during the Taliban era. “I was the only secret TV salesman in Kabul who never got caught,” boasted Taleb, who said other shopkeepers had been arrested, beaten and jailed for up to four months. In the beginning, the Taliban also destroyed all the stock of vendors they caught selling TV’s, though in later years the militia simply confiscated the inventory and sold it themselves.
Taleb said customers began coming to him to buy new TVs the very morning the Taliban left Kabul. In the midst of this run on Taleb’s stock, I managed to snare a 14" Chinese-made TV before he sold out his entire inventory of 40-some sets. Customers also gobbled up his entire stock of videotapes. The only erstwhile contraband he had left in stock was a plastic sack full of foreign film DVD’s–all apparently counterfeits–which someone had smuggled over the border from Pakistan just the night before.
I peeked inside. This had to be heady stuff for conservative Muslims compelled to adopt a cloistered, almost medieval lifestyle for half a decade. Inside the sack was some sort of soft-core S&M flick, Hollywood standards “Desparado” and “Crouching Tiger,” a heavy dose of Bruce Lee kung-fu classics, and an Indian action thriller titled “Mission: Kashmir.” As I chatted with Taleb, an Afghan man hurriedly bought a pirated DVD of something titled “Rage” starring Gary Daniels. The buyer–an engineer named Abdul Hasan–seemed highly pleased with his find. Hasan said he’d watched TV secretly all throughout Taliban rule, shielding his four-foot sat dish behind curtains in his yard. He was still watching a television set he’d bought secretly five years ago–and was thrilled to have beaten the current crush. “The demand for televisions has skyrocketed since the Taliban fled,” he said. “Prices are double what they used to be.”
Swept up in the speculative fever, I quickly bought two DVD’s for the equivalent of $1.70 each to bring back to the entertainment starved NEWSWEEK house. “Charlie’s Angels” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” weren’t exactly the sorts of flicks I expected to find in a city where women had until very recently been forbidden to show their faces; both DVD’s came packaged in dust jackets revealing not only lots of female faces but plenty of other body parts as well. Taleb assured me that “Afghans really like movies with women characters. Both men and women like to watch.”
For the moment however all we really needed to watch was news. I bought the receiver from yet another vendor. At first he wanted us to purchase a super-duper receiver “that receives 161 channels–it’s the best,” as he put it. But it turned out none of the 161 channels were in English. We settled for a less upscale model with only a handful of channels–one of them the BBC.
The dizzying demand for sat dishes is even more dramatic than the television boom. Bulzar Jamil, now 70, used to fabricate TV satellite dishes clandestinely during the Taliban era. In the bad old days he sold about 50 or 60 a month “to private people, not to Taliban.” His clients’ subversive viewing took place at night, when residents could erect the dishes under the cover of darkness, then dismantle and hide them during the day.
Now Afghans are reveling in their freedom to watch television without fear of a midnight knock on the door. Many are tuning into Indian TV stations (“because they like the music, singing and dancing,” said Jamil). They receive a number of Chinese channels as well. Viewers who can afford the pricier 161-channel receivers take their pick of everything from Bulgarian to Japanese to Turkish fare.
Jamil has sold more than 200 dishes since the Taliban withdrew from Kabul–about quadruple his previous turnover–and he’s raked in $1,000 in profits. He’s hired seven more workers in addition to his original eight “engineers.” The greasemonkey crew was hard at work, overflowing from their dingy workshop out onto the sidewalk, frenetically constructing 4.5-foot and 6-foot dishes with primitive cutting and filing tools and a cacophony of clanging.
Jamil’s dishes are made of 80-cm-square sheets of metal stamped with various beer and soft-drink logos. " Jamil said the metal sheets were American but he had no idea where they’d come from (beer and other alcoholic spirits were banned by the Taliban). He simply purchases the sheets in the bazaar for less than $2 each. What’s so good about beer-can metal? “It’s good quality–and it receives all the channels,” he beamed. Our dish–made largely of the “Coors Light”-grade metal–picked up the BBC brilliantly. Nordland thought reception was even better than at his home near London. There were glitches: if anyone turned off our television or tried to change channels, it required a lot of hassling with the two clickers to get the BBC back on again. As a result, we decided to simply leave it on all the time, turning down the volume at night. The TV was a great hit in the house. At one point I found several Afghans sitting mesmerized in front of the tube, wrapped in blankets against the Kabul chill, staring at a Brit warbling on about time travel and worm holes. Unfortunately, after several days of nonstop viewing, the receiver apparently overheated and just a few hours ago it abruptly conked out.
But never mind. One of the translators quickly spirited the malfunctioning receiver out of the house to get it fixed or exchanged first thing in the morning. And just this afternoon we had accepted delivery of an upgrade–an even bigger satellite dish, this one made of more beer-can metal which, Jamil, promises “100 percent” will receive CNN. Considering that not even the CNN correspondents staying at the Intercontinental Hotel–supposedly Kabul’s best–can receive CNN, this would be quite a treat.
