Anand Gopal


Anand Gopal is a journalist and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 Helen Bernstein Award. 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."
Gopal is notable for his reporting in Afghanistan and the Middle East. 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. In 2014 he reported for Harper's on a murderous U.S.-backed police chief in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
He has reported for The New York Times, The Atlantic and Harpers and other outlets. Gopal's views on the Taliban have been quoted in several books. From 2012–2014, Gopal was a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.
In January 2010 Gopal published a story about secret prisons in Afghanistan, run by JSOC Joint Special Operations Command.
Gopal was one of the experts on Afghanistan chosen to appear in the documentary Rethink Afghanistan.
Gopal conducted a rare interview with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the reclusive leader of one of the Taliban's most important allies.
Gopal was a resident of Manhattan when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.