In the finest traditions of space-age reporting: ahem, the mighty rocket carrying the slender satellite into the Florida night sky left a fiery comet-like streak visible for more than 160 km. Using digital compression, the 3,558 kg satellite, with its 30-metre-long electricity-generating solar wings, can now splatter half the planet with over 150 television channels.

Gee whiz, I guess. But what's most startling is that the Atlas 2A rocket - the one with the fiery comet-like streak - started life in the 1950s as an intercontinental ballistic missile. Once a carrier of death, now a carrier of Friends, the Atlas rocket's new role could be mistaken as another sign of the defence deficit, a modern example of a sword that's been beaten into a ploughshare.

It doesn't signal anything of the sort, of course. Military analysts predict that at a tactical level future wars are expected to involve 'information warfare' as much as battles over territory or resources.

New military technologies mean that an enemy can be disabled by the destruction of its computing, financial, telecoms or air-traffic control systems. These technologies include satellite global positioning systems (GPS), which allows precise navigation; radar-evading 'stealth' capabilities; and computer processing of battlefield information.

In Bosnia, the Americans have already deployed JSTARS, a ground-surveilance system: using information beamed down by satellites, a single screen can display the position and type of every vehicle within a 200 km square area.

The day after the satellite launch, the Afghan Taliban made a decisive countermove in their culture struggle with the West. Probably recognising the old media studies maxim that information is power, the Department for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice cited the Sharia (the Islamic legal code) and banned news agencies and television crews from filming "living bodies".

According to a German television crew, Amir Khan Mutaqi, Minister of Information, said: "It is permissible to film empty buildings and landscapes as long as there are no people or animals in view."

The Taliban's argument is that the depiction of living forms is forbidden under Islamic law. In line with this, it also banned the import and export of video cassettes and recorders. Public hangings of television sets have been taking place in Kandahar, its southern power-base.

Is executing television sets ludicrous? Mediaeval even? Not really.

Given their priorities, what the Taliban are doing is perfectly reasonable. The theological debate over icons in Islam may be a tortuous one. But, on a practical level, the Taliban see that power and culture are two sides of the same equation. Culture follows power; power is reinforced by the values that culture smuggles in.

Let in MTV and you let in individualism, market economics and political democracy. Which might sound fine, but you join a game in which the dice are loaded against you, which you can't possibly win. If you try to leave, the West will force you to stay.

In other words, one day you're watching the satellite; the next, you find you are one.