Reaching His Prime Time in Afghanistan

It's a high-stakes, high-risk market, but lately, Mohseni has been wrestling with a more prosaic problem: How do you schedule your prime-time programming around Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that began yesterday and requires the faithful to fast until sundown each day?

"You wouldn't want to get between an Afghan and the dinner table after fasting," Mohseni joked. Consequently, to hold on to viewership, he is moving back his nightly news broadcast several minutes past sundown during Ramadan.

In a country as war-torn and sparsely modernized as Afghanistan, it is impossible to know exactly how many people watch television. Mohseni said his research shows that almost everyone can see it who wants to, but not necessarily at home. TV watching is more of a community experience, he said, with groups gathering in public spaces. Tolo can now be seen in 15 Afghan cities.

Like many expatriate Afghans with a plan, Mohseni came to Kabul after the U.S.-led invasion loosened the Taliban's turn-back-the-clock grip on Afghanistan's business, technological and cultural life.

Mohseni is the son of an Afghan diplomat who was stationed in Tokyo when the Russians invaded his country in 1979. His father resigned his post, moved his family to Melbourne, Australia, (coincidentally, Murdoch's hometown) and settled down.

Mohseni dropped out of college and sped to the business world, becoming first an investment banker in Australia. When that proved too tame, he moved to Uzbekistan in the mid-'90s, as that country was flexing its capitalistic muscles after decades of Soviet control, and became a commodities trader.

After a few years in Central Asia, and a cultural reconnection with other expat Afghans there, Mohseni headed back to Australia looking for opportunity. It came in the wake of the U.S. military response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks . With no media background, Mohseni was not specifically looking to start a media business when he hit the ground in Kabul, but that's where he found the market gap.

By March 2003, Mohseni and his two brothers had launched Afghanistan's first privately run radio station, Arman FM, with their own money and a $228,000 grant from USAID. When Mohseni started Tolo in 2004, USAID kicked in another $2.1 million. The Mohseni brothers say they have so far invested more than $6 million of their own money.

The Afghan media market is rapidly growing and increasingly competitive, with plenty of start-ups like Mohseni's seeking the country's undertapped media consumers.

Aside from a lack of disposable income, Afghanistan has a demo Western advertisers would kill for. Sixty percent of the nation's 32 million residents are less than 20 years old. Illiteracy is widespread, so video and music have little competition from print for consumers' entertainment time and money. And there are more than 3 million cellphone customers in the country; users can vote for their favorite Afghan idol by text message and send video of themselves performing.

"Talk about market opportunities -- he's got the first TV and radio stations in a country where they had banned TV and radio," said Tom Freston, the former Viacom chief executive who has befriended Mohseni and introduced him to Western media moguls, including Murdoch.

Before he helped invent MTV in the early 1980s, Freston ran clothing businesses in Afghanistan and India and lived in the countries. When Mohseni's girlfriend (now his wife) wanted to open a clothing business in Afghanistan after the Taliban left, she tracked Freston down -- and also introduced him to her boyfriend.

Tolo TV "reminds me of MTV in the early days," said Freston, who has not invested in Mohseni's company. "Everyone there is under 25 years old, there's a lot of energy. The people who work for Saad are really motivated and emblematic of what a new Afghanistan could be. It's probably one of the only success stories since the fall of the Taliban."

Special correspondent Qudratullah Haidarzai in Kabul and staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this article.