The Big Idea with Anand Gopal

"I was with these militiamen and they took me to a place where I could get email. The message from my editor was like. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” I was crestfallen."

The Pitch: The Other Afghan Women

The Publication: The New Yorker

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The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a devastating milestone for Afghan women. At least, that’s the case in large cities, where women have had a dramatic expansion of rights and education in recent years. 

But in the Sept. 13, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, Anand Gopal published “The Other Afghan Women,” a 10,000-word narrative of the past 40 years in rural Helmand province, as seen through the eyes of Shakira, a mother of eight who has suffered through decades of violence and strife. 

Since the late 1970s, rural Afghans have been buffeted by Communists, Soviets, mujahadeen, government collapse, civil war, lawless militias, the Taliban and American occupation. Each has brought its own forms of oppression and danger — including the U.S. 

Anand Gopal told her story — and those of countless other Afghan women—through persistent, exhaustive, on-the-ground reporting. Gopal has had an unusual career trajectory; he transitioned from graduate work in physics to being an international correspondent in Afghanistan. His book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Today, he’s an assistant research professor at Arizona State University, assists international public-health initiatives, and writes about one feature a year. He chatted with Study Hall about his past, how he found Shakira, and how he pitches The New Yorker.  

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Study Hall: Your LinkedIn profile picks up in 2008, when you were an Afghanistan Correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. It seems safe to assume that wasn’t the start of your journalism career. 

Anand Gopal: Actually, it kind of is. Basically my background is that I switched careers to be a journalist. I used to do physics — I was more of a math and physics person. I was doing a PhD and knew I wanted to take a break at some point. The long story short is that I lived near the Twin Towers when 9/11 happened and was interested in foreign wars after that. Eventually I decided to take some time off and go to Afghanistan. That was in 2008. 

SH: That was a tremendous move. 

AG: I didn’t really plan it out in that way. I thought I would take a semester off and teach English. But when I got to Kabul, I realized the website I had signed up with was a sham. I was stuck there on the ground, I didn’t speak the language and I didn’t know anybody. I had two or three thousand dollars or something. I was like, OK, I’ve got to make it work here. 

I eventually got a motorcycle and went around the country and started reporting as a freelancer — first for Inter Press Service, which is this really small wire service, then for The Christian Science Monitor. Then I became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, so I did that for, like, a year. Then I left the Journal because I wanted to write a book. The book was based on stories I collected in the countryside when I was on my motorcycle. I spent the next three or four years writing the book. 

Then basically from 2011, the Arab Spring started. I kind of shifted and had been focused on the Arab world. I went and did a PhD in the meantime. Now I’m mostly focusing on Syria — I’m writing a book on Syria — and Iraq. I hadn’t really focused on Afghanistan until this spring, when Biden announced they were going to withdraw. I decided to come back for one last hurrah. 

SH: How did you go from studying advanced physics to knowing how to be a journalist? 

AG: Well, just trial and error. I think journalism is like a trade, you know? It’s something you kind of learn on the job—or you can learn better on the job. It helped that I had a lot of support in terms of the Monitor, the Journal. Especially when I was writing for the Journal, that was 2009, after Obama had announced the surge and Afghanistan was the biggest international story, so we were often on the front page. It was a good way to learn how to report because something would happen, a bombing, and we’d have to write that up and report it out in six or seven hours. Then you’d get feedback from, like, 10 different people. It was very trial by fire. 

I stopped doing that daily news coverage around 2011. Since then I’ve only been doing longform writing. But the skills, I got them in my early days. I think of a phrase one of my Journal colleagues used: flipping newsburgers. 

SH: Do you think you got opportunities you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been in that place at that time?  

AG: It was the right place, right time for a couple of reasons. I got to Afghanistan in 2008; a lot of reporters ended up coming in 2009, when it was clear that there was a focus from Obama. But I had already been on the ground for a year. I had learned the language. I had a leg up. 

The other reason it was the right time is it was before the news industry was fundamentally transformed. I think in those days you could still make a living freelancing for a place like The Christian Science Monitor. So I would write, like one story a week probably and they’d pay me $200 or $350 a story. Actually, I think it was $500 a story — and it was enough at that point to have a subsistence living. Today I think if you wanted to do that, it wouldn’t really be possible.

SH: Do I have this right? You decide to leave your life and go to Afghanistan, and a year later you’re a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Then you write a book about the country and it’s a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize? 

AG: It sounds very Forrest Gumpian. It was, again, because I came through that non-traditional route. I couldn’t afford a translator or a fixer. The average cost of a fixer at that time was $250 a day. You’d typically take three or four days to report a story, and you get paid $400 for a story.  So you’d be coming out in the red. It just wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t have connections to the bureaus or anything. Everybody I knew didn’t speak English. That helped me learn the language pretty quickly. With these kinds of friends — which were not the kinds of friends that most reporters were making — I would go to parts of the country that were usually not well trodden. The war in Afghanistan was fought in half the country. I was really interested in that — who’s behind the conflict, what’s happening in these war zones. I was able to go places because of that non-traditional route. I was hearing narratives that were different. It was telling a very different story of the war than I think was being told at the time. 

SH: But still — it was your first book. 

AG: I didn’t know what I was doing. It took me three years to write it, and I probably wrote and rewrote it many times. I was just lucky because I had really great editors and other people I was close to who could read drafts and give me feedback and tell me when what I wrote was terrible — which happened often by the way. I would proudly send in a part of my manuscript. And he would be like, this is so terrible I can’t even edit it. 

SH: You were able to transcend that, though. 

AG: I remember I was in Afghanistan when I’d sent an excerpt to my editor. I was out in the countryside at the time, and it takes days to get to a place where you can get internet. I was with these militiamen and they took me to a place where I could get email. The message from my editor was like, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” I was crestfallen. I felt like, forget this, it’s hopeless. I’m not cut out for this. And there was no way I could explain to these militiamen why I was so despondent. I would take a break for a couple of months and eventually I’d come back to it. If you have the right support from people, anyone can write a book, I guess. 

 SH: How did you make the leap into longform? 

AG: I knew it was the kind of reporting I wanted to do. I was able to get a couple of assignments from The Nation. The reason for that, by the way, is that at some point earlier I had applied for an internship at The Nation and gotten rejected. Rightly so, since I had no experience. But after I got rejected I emailed the editor who had interviewed me. I said, “Thanks so much for interviewing me. I would like to take you out to coffee and learn about how I can be better.” It helped that he was a really sweet guy. That conversation led us to have a connection. Later on I pitched him. That’s how I first got into it. 

My first piece was 3,000 words. It was the longest I’d ever written. From there, I started writing for Harper’s Magazine, and then from Harper’s to The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine and, for the last few years, The New Yorker. 

SH: Were you pitching all those outlets? 

AG: I was keen to get into Harper’s. The Nation is primarily a journal of opinion, while Harper’s is doing more narrative longform. I think I pitched them a couple of times. The first story I did was from Syria. This was 2012, it was in the middle of the war, and I had just been in this town that had been massacred by the Assad regime. I had gone through this town and seen…terrible things. Just after coming out of Syria, I wrote up the pitch and sent it. Because I’d just seen this massacre, it was hard for them to say no. 

SH: When you pitch The New Yorker, is it more casual or are you writing up a detailed proposal? 

AG: Mostly the former, at this point. Because I have a good relationship with them and I have a good relationship with my editor there, it’s much more informal. But in general, I don’t like to pitch a story unless I’ve reported a large portion of it. I don’t want to overpromise. 

I only write one story a year, typically. I think I’m just looking for certain elements. I’m personally interested in stories that challenge the status quo a little bit, or get people thinking differently about the status quo. The other really important part for me is I want to have a compelling vehicle, or character, for telling that story. I have many other stories I want to tell, but I haven’t found the right person, so I haven’t pitched them. Once I find that person, and know that they’re amenable to being interviewed multiple times, being fact checked, then I’ll send a pitch, or have a phone call. 

SH: Did you do a lot of reporting to pitch this piece? 

AG: I had to go there. The way this story emerged was when Biden announced the withdrawal — in April, I think it was — and he said that in September we’re going to be gone, I thought, ok, this is going to be in the news in September. This is going to be a moment when people care about Afghanistan; this is an opportunity to say something that might be useful.

To me, the most important question was the question of women’s rights. I think most Americans on one level or another are just tired of this unending warfare and are kind of cynical about it. On the other hand, there’s the idea that pulling troops out of the war would be a nightmare for women. I wanted to explore that paradox a little bit and reveal a bit of a false dichotomy. I called up my editor at the New Yorker and kind of described that to him. He said, “Yeah, that sounds good. Just let me know when you’re going to go.” And that was it. 

I went in June. Between April and June what I was doing was making sure that from the Taliban side that I would be able to enter their territory safely. And that I wouldn’t have a minder or anybody else with me. If that was the case I wouldn’t be getting truthful answers from anybody. I met them in Dubai and talked it through with them. I didn’t tell them what I was reporting about. I told them that I wanted to go into their territory and report on what it’s going to look like when the U.S. leaves. 

SH: You met with the Taliban in Dubai? 

AG: It was some people I’d known for a while. Some had even read my book. I went in late June and crossed into their territory. I stayed there for about three weeks. 

SH: How long did it take to find Shakira, who is at the center of the story? 

AG: I started looking for people in April, and I was mostly doing that over the phone, Skype or Whatsapp. But I didn’t find her until I came to Afghanistan. I ended up meeting maybe a couple dozen women. And I did, like, days-long interviews with each of them. The way that the story tells that whole life story of Shakira, I have the life stories of 20 other women. After I left, I continued reporting over Skype. Once I had all 20 or 25 interviews, I was able to figure out who’s the right person to tell the story. 

SH: So you didn’t have a light bulb moment when you met Shakira? 

AG: There was a moment when I felt like she was the one. Her story really moved me. But there’s always the nagging feeling that there might be someone else. The thing with her was, she was really good at details. Some people have amazing stories but aren’t great storytellers. Or they’ll gloss over major things and you have to work with them to bring it out. She gave me more information than I needed. She described things that happened, with anchoring details that I could use to verify them by talking to other people who had seen them. There was a time when she set fire to a military vehicle. It was important for me to find out when that happened, the details, so I could go and verify it with other people. 

SH: How do you stay safe while reporting in these volatile places? 

AG: There’s a lot of prep work involved. I’m not a big risk-taker. I’m actually being honest here. People are surprised when I say that. For me, having the quality of the contacts you’re leveraging to get to places is key. So for this current New Yorker story, I was in Taliban-controlled territory. But that was the result of contacts I had made over a decade ago and maintained over the years. I didn’t go until I had gotten a whole series of guarantees. 

I’ve been reporting from Syria for nine years now. Knock on wood, I haven’t had any problems. It’s making sure you build networks of trust and know the areas you’re going into. You try to develop a kind of ethnographic, anthropological understanding of the places you’re going to. I think the dangers are much greater for short-form writers, because there’s a real need to kind of get the story. And I think a lot of the people who ended up getting kidnapped in Syria were facing the pressure to get the story. Doing things quickly can be a recipe for disaster. By the way, I’ve been arrested, I’ve been detained in multiple countries. That’s part of doing this job. 

SH: How does one build trust with Taliban fighters? 

AG: It’s like any relationship — you want to not treat it like you’re just there to get something from them. But you’re interested in learning as much about them as possible. In the beginning when I went to interview Taliban members, it was when they were in prison. I would just ask them questions like, “Why are you fighting?” or “Why do you want to wage jihad?” But if you ask boilerplate questions, you get boilerplate answers. Later, I started  asking about their lives. Tell me about your village. Describe it to me. People started opening up a bit more. Afterwards I just tried to maintain contact. I did small things, like on Eid or other holidays I would send them a note, wish them happy holidays. I’d ask how their families are doing. I think it’s not that different from trying to build trust in any sphere. Obviously it’s a consistent investment in time to maintain these connections with people, but they can pay off. 

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