Reporters get the story - and threatened for their efforts.

The brutal murder by the Taliban of the young Afghan guide, translator and journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi warrants a brief time out from our investigation of the Kabul Airport scandal.

Thankfully, and instructively, the good faith and bravery displayed by Afghanistan’s new journalists stands in sharp contrast to the official corruption surrounding the struggle for control of airport policing. And in the most encouraging ways.

You see, these young Afghans really believe in what they’re doing. Namely serving their fellow countrymen and women. By pure force of belief and professional pride, they’ve made the country’s new news media arguably the most vibrant, best functioning institution in the country (see skyreporter.com’s previous media stories).

True, Ajmal’s loss is tragic. He was abducted with his Italian journalist employer and their driver last month. The driver was beheaded by their Taliban captors, but negotiations by the Karzai government, spurred on by Italy, resulted in the release of reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo in exchange for five senior imprisoned Talibs.

Somehow, Ajmal was left out of the deal. The Taliban wanted the release of more of its fighters. When the ransom demand wasn’t met, the Taliban’s military commander, Mullah Dadullah, evidently decided he could achieve two goals by taking Ajmal’s life:  first, to send a chill through the ranks of Afghanistan’s burgeoning news media, and second, to further embarrass President Karzai, who has been roundly criticised for negotiating any exchange at all.

But Ajmal’s sacrifice is not without meaning, too. Dadullah and the Taliban are revealed, once again, as the medieval cut throats, the alien throwbacks that the vast majority of Afghans know them to be. The Taliban have nothing to offer the citizenry but fear.

And on the subject of fear, the consequences of Ajmal’s killing could have even great consequences on another front, namely within the Karzai government itself. That’s because more than a few old warlords on that side of the conflict have their own reasons for instilling fear in the hearts and minds of reporters.

Certainly, Ajmal’s death constitutes a grim rallying cry for his colleagues not to bend to intimidation, from whatever quarter. Within just a few weeks, they’ll become the focus of just such a challenge:  President Karzai’s information minister will table a proposed media law in parliament. It’s clear that powerful – and backward – forces within the Western-sponsored government have every intention of bringing Afghanistan’s five-year long experiment with open media to a grinding halt.

Tellingly, Information Minister Karim Khurram is a former long-time confederate of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most hated of Afghanistan’s fugitive warlords, an ally of Osama bin Laden and a headliner on America’s most-wanted terrorist list. In this Khurram shares history with another former Hekmatyar aide, Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet, the official at the centre of the Kabul Airport scandal.

So, as we mourn the death of a colleague in the southwestern deserts of Afghanistan, we in the west should also alert our own governments to the anti-democratic schemes being stirred up not only in the Taliban’s hideouts in Pakistan, but in and around the Presidential Palace in Kabul.

Coming soon on skyreporter.com – how too many of our governments are aware of all of this, yet choose to look the other way.