July 28 (Bloomberg) -- A 25-year-old journalist condemned to death for blasphemy remains locked away while President Hamid Karzai struggles to hold onto power in Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 election. I have to wonder, “Is this any way to run a campaign?”

For most journalists around the world, danger lies in what they have the courage to report. The life of Parwez Kambakhsh, now 25, on the other hand, has been turned upside down for a crime he insists, quite credibly, he never committed. All because of Karzai’s determination to cozy up to the country’s religious fanatics.

Kambakhsh was a student at Balkh University and a reporter for the newspaper Jahan-e-Naw (New World) when he was arrested Oct. 27, 2007, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. According to the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, he was charged with “blasphemy and distribution of texts defamatory of Islam” for downloading and passing around an Internet article on Muslim women’s rights.

Pressured by the regional Council of Mullahs and local officials, Reporters Without Borders said at the time, the court sentenced him to death in a trial held behind closed doors and without a lawyer. Security forces tortured him to obtain a confession, which he quickly recanted, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Kambakhsh was sentenced to death in January 2008, prompting outcries from human rights and press-freedom groups around the world, including PEN and Human Rights Watch. Last spring, his sentence was changed to 20 years in prison.

Pardon Assurances

Longstanding government assurances that Kambakhsh will be freed have gone unfulfilled as Karzai fights what has unexpectedly become the political battle of his life.

The dapper president faces 40 opponents and has seen his popularity drop as the Taliban continues its return to power, I’m told by journalists in the country. Beyond Kabul, Karzai has had little success in asserting control of the country.

The London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a nonprofit group that trains journalists in political hotspots around the world, has been especially active in reporting on the case. Kambakhsh’s brother, Yaqub Ibrahimi, is a reporter for the IWPR whose stories about the increasing power of regional warlords are widely seen as a key factor in his brother’s arrest.

Ironically, Kambakhsh’s cause was also taken up by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. RAWA staged sit-downs in several large cities, including Kabul, to protest the conviction. On July 8, the United Nations released a report saying that Afghan women are targets of increasing violence and other human rights abuses, and accusing Karzai of doing little to stop it.

‘Kid Is in Limbo’

“The poor kid is in limbo,” Jean MacKenzie, who heads IWPR’s Afghanistan program, told me last week in a telephone interview from Kabul. “The order for pardon was signed months ago. Karzai has promised everyone that he will be released and we thought it was imminent.”

So what changed? I asked.

“The elections are holding it up,” said MacKenzie, who had just returned from the northern provinces. “We worried that if Karzai didn’t do it last year it would be harder as we got to the elections. Karzai has no solid support. Everyone hates him, and he might not be a shoo-in as was presumed early on, so he’s courting conservatives. Of course that didn’t stop him from pardoning five major drug dealers.”

First held in a nightmarish prison, Kambakhsh has been moved to less-fearsome quarters in the center of Kabul. He is allowed to pay guards to buy him food, his brother visits frequently, and he is allowed to speak with others, though always under guard, MacKenzie said.

Parwez Kambakhsh should not be held a moment longer. He’s being used as a pawn in an ugly game. This carrot of hope seems meager in the face of the whip of detainment -- a story all too often the case around the world. As Reporters Without Borders warned in its latest dispatch, the 20-year jail sentence for Kambakhsh is “evidence that press freedom is in serious crisis” in Afghanistan.

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor and critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 27, 2009 19:01 EDT