On December 1, 2022, the Taliban issued a decree closing down the two local stations run by the BBC’s rivals: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to a Taliban spokesman, they were being silenced for their “non-compliance with journalistic principles and one-sided broadcasts”. Remarkably, though, the militants are happy to indulge their British counterpart, which broadcasts from Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto, while also hosting local variants of the BBC news website.

But while the Corporation clearly enjoys its unusual role, is editorial independence really maintained? For as UnHerd has discovered, BBC funds frequently end up Taliban coffers, channeled via organisations led by extremists at the very heart of government. More worrying still, these relationships seemingly shape the Corporations coverage in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that just two weeks before the Corporation’s rivals were banned, its South Asia bureau chief, Jacky Martens, met with Sirajuddin Haqqani: the Taliban’s deputy leader and Afghanistan’s interior minister. The notorious jihadi, proscribed on both sides of the Atlantic for terrorism, clearly enjoyed his encounter with Martens. According to a statement from Haqqani’s ministry, the BBC was “an important media outlet at the international level” and could rely on the Taliban’s “cooperation”. While others had been hostile when reporting the country’s “internal” issues, the BBC was “impartial”.

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How, then, to explain such enthusiasm?

One answer is likely financial. The BBC refuses to disclose exactly how much it pays the Taliban, but the Corporation sends considerable sums to Radio and Television of Afghanistan (RTA), the group’s propaganda network. As a BBC spokesperson confirmed, these figures cover items including the use of transmitters, power and maintenance: but also “security”. BBC Afghan service sources say this last service is provided by Taliban fighters, led by Haqqani from his office in Kabul.

As for BBC Media Action, the Corporation’s charitable wing, we have obtained a copy of a “memorandum of understanding” between the organisation and RTA covering health education projects worth $1.9 million. The organisation has also confirmed that Media Action has paid both “fees” demanded by the Taliban and income tax on staff salaries — money that feeds the Taliban’s exchequer. Until early February, when President Trump and Elon Musk effectively shut down USAID, the agency was one of BBC Media Action’s biggest sources of income, financing its scheme to train Afghan journalists.

And if that chimes with other foreign organizations in Afghanistan — which pay levies as high as 60% of a project’s total budget to secure the Taliban’s blessing — the BBC’s situation is complicated further by who, exactly, its money goes to.

Aside from his avowed extremism, Haqqani is also the former head of the so-called Haqqani Network, a group responsible for kidnapping American citizens and conducting deadly suicide bombings. Since Haqqani remains on Britain’s sanctions list, it is a criminal offense under UK law to have any financial dealings with him. Qari Mohammad Yousef Ahmadi, head of RTA, is on the sanctions list too, not least for writing articles glorifying attacks on Western troops.

When asked about these links, the BBC said the Corporation is sure its dealings with Ahmadi and Haqqani don’t breach UK law, citing FCDO guidance that suggest that “a public body in which a designated person holds a leadership position is not automatically subject to sanctions”. 

For its part, BBC Media Action also insisted it wasn’t in breach of sanctions, stating that “we have no reason to believe that any benefit has been provided to any person or entity who or which has been sanctioned” and that the FCDO was “fully sighted” on all Media Action’s work. 

But a London-based sanctions expert we spoke to was less convinced. The risk sanctions had been breached would be considerable if it could be shown that Haqqani or Ahmadi exercised a “high degree of control” over the bodies that deal with the BBC or its charity — and derived direct benefit from their funding.

To listen in, you might think that the BBC has paid a high price for the privilege of remaining in Afghanistan. For one thing, it no longer broadcasts programs showcasing Western music, nor the once-popular songs of local pop stars. Condemned by the Taliban as un-Islamic, they used to be mainstays of the BBC’s Afghan schedule. Asked about this, the BBC said it had recently used part of a track by an Afghan female singer to accompany a news story, and that it sometimes broadcast “traditional” Afghan music. 

Anti-Taliban stories found elsewhere on the BBC are also absent from the Afghan service — and sometimes aren’t broadcast at all. One example was a powerful TV report on the collapse of female education under the Islamists. Covering Afghanistan’s last female schools, it showed students wearing burkas and reciting the Quran. These places were starkly contrasted with shots of the now-empty schools that thrived before 2021, when girls were taught a full secular curriculum. 

In the end, though, the BBC decided not to run the film. Staff who worked on it were told by their editors that it was “too sensitive” to broadcast. 

Such compromises predictably frustrate the Corporation’s female staff. One BBC Afghan service journalist, speaking anonymously, says it was “incredibly difficult” to persuade editors to cover women’s rights and freedom of speech. She continues: “People call and beg us to play more music on air, but we don’t — because if we do, our operations inside Afghanistan could be shut down.” Women themselves are being purged too. There used to be several female presenters on the BBC station broadcasting in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Now only one remains. On its sister Pashto station, women presenters are totally absent. 

The same journalist adds that Taliban complaints have sometimes led to internal investigations of BBC staff — as Ali Hamedani, the co-author of this article, learnt first-hand. 

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An experienced BBC journalist, Hamedani is gay and had often reported on anti-LGBT discrimination in Afghanistan. In October 2022, the month before Martens met Haqqani, Hamedani covered the killing of a local gay student. Forces answerable to Haqqani detained Hamed Sabour at a Kabul checkpoint, before torturing and shooting him dead. His killers then made a video of Sabour’s execution and sent it to his family.

Before broadcasting his story, Hamedani interviewed Sabouri’s relatives and friends. Yet after the Taliban submitted a complaint, he was forced to undergo an internal disciplinary investigation that lasted almost a year, requiring him to prove his story was accurate — including providing a photograph of the murder victim’s body. He was only cleared 11 months after his initial report.

Yet, it seems that not everyone at the BBC was up to speed, for when we asked last week why Hamedani had been investigated, its spokesperson said his report “contained an image of a living man who wasn’t Hamed Sabouri. It therefore did not comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines.” This is simply false: Hamedani’s report, though made for TV and radio, clearly contained no images of the victim. The incorrect photo appeared in The Guardian, which later acknowledged its mistake, and on a BBC Instagram feed — for which Hamedani had no responsibility. 

Despite all this, the BBC has defended its work in Afghanistan. The Corporation says it’s proud to be “the only international news media organization still broadcasting” in the country. Media Action defends its actions too, stating it “plays a critical role supporting local journalists to provide life-saving information on matters including health, nutrition and food security”. It’s also “proud of our work with local radio stations to support some of the last remaining women journalists working in radio in the country”. 

Yet perhaps the most telling statement comes from the Taliban itself. “The BBC is a credible source of news for Afghanistan,” says its official government spokesperson. “[The Corporation] collaborates constructively with the Islamic Emirate.” With praise like that, it’s hard to see how the Corporation can truly wave the flag for journalistic impartiality.

As seen and heard from abroad, that essentially means the BBC World Service. Given its impressive figures, any government, not just one facing the uncertainties of Brexit, would see the potential.

The BBC World Service currently broadcasts in more than 40 languages to a global audience — across radio, television and internet — now estimated at 426 million a week, with a target of 500 million. But the television audience for English-language programmes has overtaken the English-language radio audience worldwide, and — along with digital — it is growing faster. So far as international broadcasting is concerned, the present and the future are television.

But how well equipped is BBC World Service television — now, after various name changes, officially called BBC World News — to spearhead a UK “soft power” offensive? Having regularly viewed both the BBC and its competition during frequent travels in recent months, I would sadly submit: not very.

With its global reach, its glorious history, and the advantage that the UK is home to the English language, the broadcaster is lauded as unique to “brand” Britain. Times have changed, though, since the BBC World Service (then radio only) ruled the airwaves, and the now 30-year old BBC World Service television looks distinctly unimpressive from abroad.

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So why did the BBC’s global television service lose its edge? A more pertinent question would perhaps be whether it was ever the world-beater it claimed to be in the first place. Since its creation, in 1991, it is probably fair to say that a large part of its reputation was borrowed: it was automatically identified with the BBC World Service radio and allowed to bask, to an extent, in reflected glory.

But there were always big differences between the radio and television services. Where the radio had a long and distinguished history, and was funded until recently by a grand-in-aid from the Foreign Office (while running itself editorially), the TV arm was denied either government or licence-payer funding. It was set up, instead, as a commercial proposition, relying largely on advertising and subscriptions.

Because it uses many of the same correspondents and resources and benefits from the BBC brand, it has generally been treated with the same respect as the BBC World Service radio. But this respect hasn’t always been warranted. There have been questions, for example, about sponsored programming. But it has bred a certain complacency about the competition. For years, BBC World Service TV has been comparing itself favourably with American international broadcasters, such as CNN — which is not hard to do; the bar is not high —  while ignoring the growing appeal of European stations.

From what I’ve seen, the chief competition to the BBC today comes not from the US, but from the two premier European services: France 24 and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. While not a national broadcaster, the Lyon-based Euronews is up there, too.

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All three broadcast internationally in English (often with native English-speaking presenters) as well as in other languages. France 24 has French, Arabic and Spanish, and a combined audience of 61 million; DW has Arabic as well as German, and a combined audience of 135 million (compared with 101 million for BBC World Service television which broadcasts only in English). Both are growing fast.

Taking these stations as the competition, then, BBC World News falls down on a host of comparisons, starting with the absolute basic: timely and worldwide news coverage. BBC World News boasts that it breaks more stories from more places than any other channel. How much of a recommendation that is, however, depends on what those stories are and how they are treated.

Travelling in Italy over Christmas, and in East and Central Europe during the autumn, I found the BBC to be slower on fresh news than the competition, and to have less hard news in the overall output than soft-ish and often repeated features. If I wanted to switch on and know what was happening, France 24 was a much better bet.

A specific example was coverage of the Russia-Ukraine end-of-year prisoner exchange, which on the BBC lagged far behind the actual news and was given little context. US shootings took precedence – even though the service was billed BBC World News Europe.

There was a qualitative difference, too, in the content and tone of features. The ratio of relatively timeless features to news seemed greater, sometimes much greater, on the BBC than on the other channels. A striking proportion of the BBC’s output also seemed too focused on aid projects of various kinds, with a fairly obvious, but unspoken, didactic streak. Even more striking, compared with France24 and DW, was the paucity of features about life in Britain. Both European stations gave substantial glimpses of how life is lived in their countries and looked — sometimes critically — in the mirror.

To be fair, BBC World News did relay some of the crucial parliamentary sessions live, during the Brexit debates. Then again, so did most other international stations, as events in the UK were seen as having global significance. It was a pity, then, that BBC World News did not make a bigger effort to interpret what was happening for the benefit of non-UK viewers.

There are two other points that might be more important for viewers abroad than BBC HQ in London might think. First, quite a few of the presenters and reporters could do with smartening up. Some look downright scruffy, compared with their French and German counterparts. You may object on the grounds that sartorial negligence never harmed anyone. But when you switch from DW to BBC World News and the BBC guy’s shirt is unironed and the trousers don’t fit, I’m sorry, but authority is lost.

Which leaves my final point. The service doesn’t capitalise sufficiently on what could and should be one of the BBC’s greatest strengths vis-a-vis the competition: a wealth of native speakers to choose from. If you watch the BBC abroad, you might expect presenters and reporters to speak comprehensible English. Of course not demanding that everyone should speak the Queen’s English c. 1930, old Etonian or extreme RP. Nor am I saying that English shouldn’t be accented. But the presenter should be understandable. Someone who isn’t shouldn’t be reporting in the name of the BBC.

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Both France 24 and Deutsche Welle employ fluent English speakers for their English-language channels. So why can’t the BBC, with all the advantages that come from being the home side linguistically, do the same?

Perhaps, then, the top brass should set aside a few hours to view the competition in real time (I wonder if they ever have). That should focus minds.

But tweaks to the programming and a decent wardrobe consultant alone will not do it. These are pretty cosmetic fixes. BBC World Service television is not going to be an effective instrument of “soft power” unless there some rather more fundamental changes.

The first would be to bring World Service radio and televison under the same funding structure and editorial direction, so that it functions as one. At the moment, they are separate, with the radio and its foreign language services funded by the licence-fee and World Service television a commercial entity, funded by advertising and subscription, as it was when it was first set up.

The argument against bringing World Service television in-house was always the cost. But this could be changing. Five years ago, the then Government agreed to a BBC request for more money for its international services — to the tune of £89 million a year — to be spread across World Service radio, television and digital. This would suggest that World Service television is not quite as separate or self-sufficient as it was. With a government that is loosening the purse-strings generally, the time could be ripe for this change.

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The second would be to define the mission of this new unified service more clearly – as entailing the projection of a distinct view, or views, from London. This would have to be handled carefully, as it could encounter staff resistance.

While France 24 and Deutsche Welle are both directly state-owned and their staff well understand that they work for a state broadcaster, I suspect many BBC World Service staff — and I say this as a World Service staff member myself long ago — do not see themselves in the same way. I suspect, too, that they would take a dim view of the idea that the prime purpose of the BBC’s international services was to promote UK “soft power” as a potential threat to their much prized independence.

This could be an obstacle, but it is not insurmountable. The BBC is both aware of, and takes a certain pride in, being seen as a flagship of the UK’s “soft power”. But it regards this as a product of its quality and editorial standards, rather than the reason for its existence. There is no reason to alter this. What could and should be changed is to ensure that those standards are coonsistently upheld across all its international services — radio, television and digital — and that the voice of the BBC abroad is one that comes identifiably from the UK.

International broadcasting, especially television, is highly, and increasingly, competitive. The UK, through the reputation of the BBC World Service had a head start. It cannot afford to rest on its laurels.