A plan to use mobile phones to combat Taleban propaganda in Afghanistan is being considered by the UK Government.

Mobile phones would be distributed by non-governmental organisations to Afghans so that they could make and share their own videos to contradict the prevailing Taleban message, according to a BBC report.

Anti-Western films already circulate on Afghanistan's estimated six million mobiles and are spread among the country's half a million internet users.

The new media plan, said to be devised by an outside consultant to the Foreign Office, envisages having up to 100 short films made by Afghans ready in time for a film festival next summer according to the BBC.

Whitehall officials say the aim is to deprive the Taleban of its virtual monopoly on propaganda using new media, the BBC says.

The coalition's reputation has been damaged by the spread of mobile footage such as the film distributed after a US-led raid in August that showed rows of bodies of children and babies in a makeshift morgue.

A spokesman for the Department for International Development (DfID) said today : “An external consultant has proposed a scheme but absolutely no decision has been made and it would be wrong to suggest that DfID will fund it.”

Mobile phone networks are sometimes the only means of communication in a country devastated by war and are some of the biggest investors in Afghanistan. But the expanding industry still faces power cuts and attacks on telecom masts by Taleban who say international forces use cellphones to track them down.

Four mobile phone operators, three of them foreign firms, with an estimated investment of several hundred million dollars have sprung up in Afghanistan. They are led by Roshan, owned by an international consortium formed by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, the Monaco Telecom International and TeliaSonera, which reaches more than half the population. The top two operators have more than two million subscribers each.

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