All week long we've been talking with some of our favorite guests from the past year about their hopes and predictions for 2011. Today we have a conversation with Saad Mohseni. Saad is director of the Moby Group, the largest media organization in Afghanistan. Moby Group includes radio and television channels, as well as print and online news outlets. Mohseni is back with us today to talk about how he and his country are feeling on the dawn of a new year, and as they anticipate the beginning of U.S. military withdrawal.
Can a fictional show about Afghanistan police inspire real support for law enforcement in that country? That's what creators of "Eagle Four" are hoping. The television program, bankrolled by the U.S., follows a fictional squad of highly-trained officers as they foil suicide bomb plots and protect the innocent. But with actors who have received mysterious death threats and a country that often reflects the action show explosions, will the show be successful in changing hearts and minds?
Monday was one of the deadliest for American forces since the war in Afghanistan began. Two separate helicopter crashes killed 14 Americans. One collision killed three U.S. drug enforcement agents in addition to seven troops. The Taliban were quick to say they shot down the U.S. helicopter, but a spokesman for the NATO-led forces denied any insurgent involvement.
We look at how Afghans make sense of these competing versions of events with Saad Mohseni, director of TOLO TV, a popular private TV channel in Afghanistan, and Lt. Col. Shawn Stroud, former director of strategic communication at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center.
"The new strategy....was to take the focus off the farmers and to put it on the drug traffickers. There are thousands and thousands of people growing poppy and they're actually at the low-end of the totem pole in the drugs trade. They are actually the victims of it: in many cases forced to grow it or they have no alternatives. The drug traffickers are really the bad guys."
—Gretchen Peters, author of "Seeds of Terror," on shifting the focus to the drug traffickers supporting the Afghan drug trade