Anand Gopal

Anand Gopal is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes,^[1][2][3] which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has won many major journalism prizes, including the National Magazine Award, for his writing on conflict and the Middle East.

Anand Gopal
Gopal in 2022
Occupation	Journalist
Known for	Coverage of the Middle East

Career

Gopal is notable for his writing on conflict and revolutions. In 2017, writing for The New York Times Magazine, he helped expose the vast number of civilians killed by US aerial campaigns in Iraq and Syria.^[4] He has reported extensively from those countries, including a feature on the crimes of anti-ISIS militias for The Atlantic, which won a George Polk Award.^[5]

He is believed to be one of the few Western journalists to have embedded with the Taliban, an experience that forms part of the basis of No Good Men Among the Living, In 2012 Gopal reported for Harper's Magazine on the town of Taftanaz in Syria, which suffered a massacre at the hands of the regime of Bashar al-Assad.^[6] In 2014 he reported for Harper's on a murderous US-backed police chief in Kandahar, Afghanistan.^[7] In January 2010, Gopal published a story about secret prisons in Afghanistan run by US Joint Special Operations Command.^[8] That same year, Gopal also conducted a rare interview via email with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the reclusive leader of one of the Taliban's most important allies.^[9]

Gopal was a resident of Manhattan when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.^[10]

Awards

His book was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the 2015 Helen Bernstein Award.^[1][10] It was awarded the 2015 Ridenhour Prize for demonstrating "why the United States' emphasis on counterterrorism at the expense of nation-building and reconciliation inadvertently led to the Taliban's resurgence after 2001."^[11]

Bibliography

Books

• No Good Men Among the Living : America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes. New York: Metropolitan Books. 2014.

Essays and reporting

• "Clean hands : in Raqqa, U.S. bombs killed many Syrians. No Americans died. Is this moral?". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 96 (41): 74–77. December 21, 2020.^[a]
• "The Other Afghan Women". A Reporter at Large. The New Yorker. 97 (28): 34–47. September 13, 2021.

Notes

1. Online version is titled "America's war on Syrian civilians".