Afghan Officials, Voicing Security Fears on Facebook, Are Fired for Their Trouble

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/asia/helmand-afghanistan-taliban.html

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KABUL, Afghanistan — As the fate of Helmand Province hung in the balance last month during a withering Taliban offensive, the province’s deputy governor, Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar, found his urgent pleas for help from the central government going unheeded. So he did what millions of other people do every day: He ranted on Facebook.

Mr. Rasoolyar posted an open letter to President Ashraf Ghani’s government on the social media site, in which he deplored the precarious state of the military and police forces in Sangin District, who were short of food and ammunition and encircled by Taliban fighters. Without immediate aid, he said, Sangin, as well as the provincial capital and perhaps the entire province, would probably fall.

In one sense, Mr. Rasoolyar’s plea worked: His Facebook post drew wide attention from the news media, adding pressure on the government to speed up reinforcements to Helmand. The Taliban offensive has been slowed by the Afghan security forces with help from American Special Operations forces and airstrikes.

In another sense, successful social media activism can look a lot like insubordination: The government fired Mr. Rasoolyar for his trouble.

Abdul Malik Sediqqi, an official with the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, which oversees the administration of the country’s 34 provinces, announced this month that the Afghan National Security Council considered the Facebook postings of Mr. Rasoolyar and another official, the deputy governor of Ghazni Province, Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, to be “irresponsible” and “intolerable.”

In an order dismissing the two officials, Mr. Sediqqi cited the security council as saying that “using social media for expressing disapproval of any government decisions or policies can in no way be tolerated,” and that violations of the policy would result in “serious action.”

Of course, government and corporate officials everywhere are grappling with the challenges of social media. In the Afghan government’s case, though, officials struggling to address war and an economic crisis seem to have decided that they cannot bear being second-guessed.

Mr. Ahmadi was fired after he went online with his concerns about a reported influx of Qaeda fighters to his province, and the kidnapping and beheading of travelers by fighters from the upstart local Islamic State affiliate.

“I did comment about those issues, and I also posted comments on my Facebook showing concerns,” he said, adding that it had not helped his case that relatives of the people kidnapped and killed by the Islamic State had made a high-profile protest march to Kabul, bearing the bodies of seven of the victims. “I couldn’t stop the people from doing what they were determined to do. So they accused me of making irresponsible comments about government policies.”

Mr. Ahmadi said the fact that the objections originated with the National Security Council, which is headed by Mr. Ghani, indicated a political decision at the highest levels of the state.

“I believe the order to sack me came from the president himself,” he said.

The officials’ firings were “a plain violation of freedom of speech and undermining the media law,” said Asif Ashna, a political activist who previously served as a deputy spokesman for the Afghan chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, and who has since become a prominent critic of Mr. Ghani’s government. “If it is not stopped here, I am afraid the restrictions on speech will increase,” he said.

Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi, a political analyst who formerly served as governor of both Kunar and Herat Provinces, said the decision to fire the two officials “was absolutely wrong.”

He said that Mr. Rasoolyar’s Facebook post was widely credited with having persuaded the government to take action in Helmand, and that the deputy governors had done the right thing. “The officials were acting within their official prerogative to share information with the media,” he said. “They are assigned by law to disclose confirmed information.”

Like others who saw something larger at work, Mr. Wahidi suggested that politics of another order might have played a role, as government officials “try to find excuses to fire those people who didn’t work for them during the presidential election campaigns, to replace them with their own people who worked in their campaign teams.”

“This is a trick they use to get rid of those they dislike,” he added.

Sayed Zafar Hashemi, a spokesman for the government, rejected the idea that Mr. Rasoolyar’s post on Facebook had a significant effect on the military’s response in Helmand, noting that Mr. Ghani had begun monitoring the fighting long before.

“The decision was never because they posted on Facebook, but rather because they broke a disciplinary rule that jeopardizes morale of the Afghan security forces,” Mr. Hashemi said in an email. In video teleconferences and other meetings, he said, “they did not raise those ‘concerns’ while communicating with the president and leadership of the government.”

“The president and his government fully respect and believe in freedom of speech, and we strive to protect it as an invaluable achievement of the Afghan people,” he said.

Afghan officials’ use of social media has, at times, invited intense public ridicule. After a devastating landslide in Badakhshan Province two years ago, for instance, senior government officials sent to monitor aid delivery wore big smiles as they posed for photos that ended up on Facebook.

When Gen. Baz Mohammad Jawhari, a deputy defense minister, was recently fired after 13 years on the job, he immediately turned to Facebook, posting two pictures of what he said was “the moment the letter of my removal arrived.” In one photo, his hands are stretched skyward in a gesture of prayer in what he described as a sense of relief. In another, his fists are in the air. “We are triumphant” is scrawled in blue letters on the picture.

In any case, it is tempting for officials who think they are being ignored to reach out in any way they can.

Hamdullah Danishi, the acting governor of embattled Kunduz Province, where the provincial capital

was overrun by the Taliban in September, expressed his support for the two fired provincial officials, saying it was essential that the voices of people with direct knowledge of crucial situations be heard in the capital.

The situation in Kunduz remains critical, Mr. Danishi said, with the Taliban biding their time and hoping to put captured weapons to use in recapturing the provincial capital.

“If I don’t show concern now to keep my position, when the Taliban enter the city I will lose it anyway,” he said.

Mr. Rasoolyar, the former Helmand deputy governor, remains unrepentant.

“What I did was my duty, in order to save the lives of our soldiers on the battlefield and to protect Helmand,” he said in an interview. “I had no choice if I was to get the government’s attention, and I achieved that goal.”