Meet Afghanistan's Most Fearless BloggerTeaching journalists to write without fear, favor, or filter.

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So, Fekrat teaches his recruits what a pseudonym is, and émigrés from Afghanistan's mainstream press come to find out how they can write without fear or favor or filter.

Fekrat's relationship with mainstream media goes beyond furnishing a forum for its refugees—he often sees his work lifted from the Web and reprinted in newspapers. It's Afghanistan's take on syndication; copyright infringement is low on the list of law-enforcement concerns. The thievery is fine with Fekrat for the most part, since he has no particular interest in being credited with the work, and he can stomach the lack of compensation, but he beseeches editors to print the name of the blog they poached from so readers can go there for more.

Fekrat pays little attention to the warnings of his friends and disciples. He violates traditional codes of conduct in his writing and his behavior with the kind of devil-may-care disregard that compels those close to him to question his survival instinct. He has been imprisoned and had his Web site hacked and his life threatened for controversial postings. He treats these as shots across the bow. He'll duck down for a week or so, take his most incendiary postings offline, or just dial down the rhetoric. If need be, he'll go into hiding, dancing around so no one can find the source—a method he learned from the Taliban, which continued its radio broadcasts even after the U.S.-led coalition took the country, because no one knew where they originated.

And then he'll be back at it, enraging literate mullahs with musings on sexual subjects he finds in the Quran, waving his telephoto lens out of car windows while conservative women hit the deck like he's strafing bullets.

Fekrat leads a blogging workshop in BamiyanAt his most recent blogging workshop, held at the only Internet cafe in Bamiyan, a remote outpost in the highlands of central Afghanistan, Fekrat calls for order. There's no bathroom, just a dedicated space behind the building, and no power, so they've rigged the computers to a generator. Fekrat will pay for the generator's gas with $200 he raised in PayPal donations to his Web sites. "Sign up for a Gmail account," he yells, as the journalists crowd around the computers as if they've never seen one before. Fekrat had to turn people away at the door, but they're still above capacity. He's accustomed to working with limited resources, though, and in the past he has conducted classes with a single connected computer, so he knows how to make the most of the gathering. His mission is simple—get as many people signed up and inspired to write as he can.

When he opens the floor to questions, the president of the Bamiyan Journalists Association asks earnestly how blogging will overcome the underlying problems facing print media, principally, that people can't read. It's a limitation, Fekrat acknowledges. The beauty of blogging is that the barrier to entry is low, but access to a connected computer is a big enough obstacle for most people in Afghanistan. Many don't have the means to log on or know how to look for blogs; most don't have the inclination. So Fekrat is satisfied for now with rousing a noisy chorus of voices speaking truth to power, and that means the elite in his own country and the citizens of those that have a hand in Afghanistan's affairs.

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