It is a completely baffling decision that makes an already dangerous job even more difficult, and threatens to undermine the principles of society-building that allegedly began the entire NATO exercise.
Yesterday, the Afghan internal security services, the NDS, announced a ban on journalists filming – or reporting – insurgent attacks while the violence is ongoing.
And then, they added, without perhaps a thought towards the practicality of their idea, you will need NDS permission to film the aftermath.
Spokesman Saeed Ansari said: “Live coverage does not benefit the government, but benefits the enemies of Afghanistan,” which, I suppose, gloriously highlights the point.
This sort of reporting is pretty difficult to do anywhere bar Kabul, for most journalists, unless of course, they are embedded, in which case I suspect this rule does not restrict journalists working with NATO.
In practice, it gives police broad powers to stop reporting or filming at times they consider inconvenient. And it makes it much easier to suppress evidence of what actually happens during complex Taliban attacks, like the recent onslaught against a guest house, or the attack against a UN residence last year.
When it comes to filming the aftermath, you can be pretty sure that the NDS will be fairly busy in the hours just after an attack, and granting media permission to do their job won’t be their priority.
You can understand the motive: the attack on the UN guest house last year highlighted how easily several Taliban could slip into the heart of Kabul and lay siege to a residential compound for two hours.
The images of ex-pat workers being carried away from the scene, and of gunfire rocking the Kabul skyline fuelled the UN’s decision to withdraw all but their essential staff and laid one more layer of paranoia and worry down, dragging the capital’s foreign workers closer to a siege mentality.
But the ban – to be enforced by the right to detain journalists and confiscate their often expensive equipment – will not prevent this sort of reporting.
This sort of edict was tried before, just in advance of the first round of presidential elections: the government declared reporting of attacks illegal and said reporters would be expelled.
Foreign agencies and many local ones simply decided to carry on as normal. It may have been the broad chaos that is the backbone of Afghan law enforcement or the lack of any major attacks that day in Kabul, that stopped the issue coming to a head.
Several journalists, foreign and Afghan, were detained though, and there were reports of beatings.
What the ban will do is give carte blanche to the unscrupulous among police and security services to harass journalists.
It will permit security services to turn up at hotels and harangue the purveyors of footage or stories they consider unfavourable.
And it will further limit the occasions on which journalists feel they are actually getting untainted access to the conflict itself.
Embedded journalists go where the military will let you. Those who work with the Taliban do so under peril and their rules.
And now much basic reporting in Kabul, where insurgent attacks are often all that’s left to report outside of the medley of heavily orchestrated and secured press conferences, is technically off limits.
Thus far, NATO has remained silent on this issue. Its vision for the Afghanistan it hopes to leave behind has slipped: no longer do they expect it to look like Guildford.
Instead, a country that can govern and secure itself is enough. Their decision so far to not publicly challenge this edict now threatens to betray the sort of government they consider acceptable.