Anand Gopal

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Anand Gopal
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Anand Gopal
OccupationJournalist
Known forCoverage of the Middle East

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. A staunch supporter of NATO and US-backed regime-change operations in Syria and Ukraine, he has won many major journalism prizes, including the National Magazine Award, for his magazine writing on armed conflict resulting from American military interventions.

Contents

Career

Gopal is notable for his writing on conflict and revolutions. He is a staunch supporter of NATO and American-backed regime-change operations in Syria [4] and Ukraine [5] , but also a critic of how such operations have been carried out at times. 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. [6] 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. [7]

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, a book notable for its glowing portrait of Hamid Karzai. Gopal has said that the US invasion of the country in 2001 and subsequent NATO occupation resulted in "a revitalized urban Afghanistan, one that has witnessed a boom in education, basic infrastructure, health, and other services." He added that "It has improved the lives of millions of girls, particularly in cities like Kabul." [8] 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, whose downfall in 2024 at the hands of Israeli- and American-backed operatives Gopal celebrated. [9] In 2014 he reported for Harper's on a murderous US-backed police chief in Kandahar, Afghanistan. [10] In January 2010, Gopal published a story about secret prisons in Afghanistan run by US Joint Special Operations Command. [11] 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. [12]

Gopal was a resident of Manhattan when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. [13]

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] [13] 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." [14]

Bibliography

Books

Essays and reporting

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

References

  1. 1 2 Meredith Turits (2014-09-17). "2014 National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction Released, and Roz Chast Is an Awesome Pick". Bustle.com . Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  2. ↑ Kim Barker (2014-04-25). "Hostile Climate: 'No Good Men Among the Living,' by Anand Gopal". The New York Times . p. BR18. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  3. ↑ Laura King (2014-05-01). "Review: The war correspondents' view from Afghanistan". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  4. ↑ https://jacobin.com/2024/12/syrian-revolution-assad-hts-democracy
  5. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B7S_q2sD2E
  6. ↑ Anand Gopal (November 2017). "The Uncounted". New York Times Magazine . Retrieved 2015-03-08.
  7. ↑ Anand Gopal (May 2016). "The Hell After ISIS". The Atlantic . Retrieved 2015-03-08.
  8. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20140628055319/http://islamicommentary.org/2014/06/no-good-men-among-the-living-america-the-taliban-and-the-war-through-afghan-eyes-book-q-a/
  9. ↑ Anand Gopal (April 2012). "Welcome to Free Syria: Meeting the rebel government of an embattled country". Harper's Magazine . Retrieved 2015-03-08. Traveling with me from the Turkish border to Taftanaz was Wassim Omar, an acquaintance of Malek's whom I would see several times during the week I spent in Syria.
  10. ↑ Anand Gopal (September 2014). "Kandahar's Mystery Executions: Are the Afghan police using torture to achieve peace?". Harper's Magazine . Retrieved 2015-03-08.
  11. ↑ Anand Gopal (2009-04-07). "Audiocast: A Conversation with Anand Gopal on America's Secret Afghan Prisons". The Nation . Archived from the original on 2010-02-04.
  12. ↑ Anand Gopal (2010-06-09). "Interview with Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: Can peace talks succeed?". The Christian Science Monitor . Archived from the original on 2010-11-14.
  13. 1 2 Joseph Richard Preville (2014-06-24). "No Good Men Among the Living : America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes (Book Q & A)". Islamicommentary. Archived from the original on 2014-06-28. Retrieved 2015-03-08. Gopal, currently a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, covered the War in Afghanistan from 2008-2012 primarily for The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. He was living in Manhattan on 9/11, and the shocking experience jolted him to investigate America's response to the terrorist attack "on a strange and distant battlefield."
  14. ↑ "Ridenhour Book Prize 2015". The Ridenhour Prizes. 2015-03-23. Archived from the original on 2015-05-08. Retrieved 2015-04-09.
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