Afghanistan blocks anti-Karzai sites

KABUL — The Afghan government has blocked access to four Web sites with President Hamid Karzai's name in the address that are critical of the Afghan leader or have links to sites advertising locally taboo subjects such as online dating and mail-order brides.

The shutdown order comes ahead of the country's Aug. 20 presidential election. An Information Ministry spokesman initially said the original complaint about two of the sites came from the Karzai campaign.

Karzai's campaign spokesman agreed, but later called back to deny involvement.

Afghan coverage of the presidential race has been dominated by Karzai, while his 40 opponents complain they've received scant attention in state-run media, forcing them to campaign in person or on the Internet in a country where daily travel can be deadly and few have home computers.

The Information Ministry ordered the country's 25 Internet-service providers to shut down access to four Web sites bearing Karzai's name and one with the name of an Afghan Cabinet minister, the director of the Afghan Telecom Regulatory Authority said Saturday.

The four sites all bear the president's full or last name, but they clearly don't have Karzai's backing.

Hamidkarzai.com asks "Is Hamid Karzai anything more than a puppet?" in a blaring red headline. The site calls Karzai an "inefficient" politician and says he came into power because of his "long-standing ties with the CIA." The site is registered in Springfield, Va., according to the Web site whois.net, which publishes Internet-registration records.

Other banned sites with Karzai in the address show advertisements for online dating and mail-order brides — touchy subjects in conservative Afghanistan. Another links to a Chinese-language search engine.

The spokesman for Karzai's election campaign, Waheed Omar, first told The Associated Press that the shutdown of the sites was "on our request." Omar said he did not think that others had the right to operate sites such as hamidkarzai.com and write negative things about the president.

Omar said the campaign was launching a Web site, hamidkarzai.af, and it didn't want Web users to be confused by unofficial sites.

However, Omar later called AP back and said that he had been mistaken, and that after consulting with colleagues learned that the request had not come from the campaign office.

The order only applies to Afghanistan's 25 Internet Service Providers, and the sites remain available outside Afghanistan. Any Internet company that does not block the sites will be referred to the attorney general, said Zekria Hassan, the director of the Afghan Telecom Regulatory Authority.

The order comes on the heels of a July 9 report by the Independent Election Commission, which found that Karzai garners 60 percent of election coverage on state TV.

Karzai's presidential opponents have complained repeatedly that Karzai has a built-in campaign advantage by being able to use state media for campaign purposes.