Post 9/11, enabled by a new configuration of sources from the international donor community, as well as local economies, Afghanistan is experiencing a surge in new media creation with dozens of new television and radio stations, hundreds of publications, a fledgling internet infrastructure, and mobile telephone companies. Debates about women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam are part of the fabric of local and international development efforts to “nation-build”. The medium at the heart of the most public and politically charged of these debates, instigating often violent cultural contestations and clashes between “Islamists”, “moderates”, and others, is television. Diverse televisual representations, visual signs, and/or expressions of gender and sexuality in popular imported and locally produced dramatic serials, music videos, and reality TV are particularly contentious. In a number of cases of alleged honor killings, visibility itself has proven to be deadly for women working on screen as actors, hosts, broadcasters, or contestants. Afghan television producers face a range of constraints, violence, and regimes of censorship for providing this platform for debate. Like the people of Afghanistan, they are caught between warring ideologies and political economies that range from “Islamist” to commercial to “developmentalist.” In this paper, I will explore the culture contestations that are generated in terms of what constitutes as Afghan and/or Muslim content and therefore deemed as acceptable and what constitutes as “foreign” cultural codes and therefore deemed as inappropriate and dangerous. As such I will also analyze the complex ways that religion and religious experience are understood and practiced in Afghanistan.