Matthieu Aikins is a journalist and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine who has been reporting on the ground from Afghanistan since 2008. In his 2022 book, The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees, he follows his friend, Omar, on his journey through Asia and Europe to find refuge in another country. Aikins goes undercover and disguises himself as a migrant named Habib in order to accurately report on the refugee journey and challenges at the border. Recently, Aikins and his team won two Emmy Awards for their groundbreaking reporting on a drone strike in Afghanistan that the U.S. government claimed was targeting an ISIS affiliate. Aikins’ investigation revealed that the drone strike had destroyed the home of a family and killed ten people, including seven children. In 2022, this reporting helped make Aikins part of the team at the Times that won the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting.
What was it like to go undercover and leave behind your passport and the protections it gave you in order to take on the identity of Habib? Why did you want to do it?
The journey that I made for my book as Habib was to witness firsthand what was happening on the border with smugglers, in detention centers, or refugees being kidnapped or arrested. The only way I could do that was to go undercover as a refugee myself. To choose to go undercover is a big decision. It’s ethically fraught because it involves an act of deception and even breaking the law. Of course, there is a tradition of undercover journalism in the United States, and it’s justified when it’s the only way to get a story. The violence that was happening at the borders during the migration crisis was vitally important to shed light on.
So much of your journalism involves groundbreaking investigatory work. We are curious about your process in making these revelations — how do you uncover stories?
It’s obviously very difficult to figure out what the unknown revelation is in advance by its very nature. For the most part, it’s been surprising to me as well. For me, it’s always been important to go there and observe firsthand, and when you notice a discrepancy between the official narrative or what’s publicly understood and what people are telling you on the ground, then that’s usually a good indication that something’s up and there could be a story there. That was certainly the case with the drone strike. Last summer, the morning after the explosion, my roommate and photographer Jim Huylebroek and I rode there on our motorcycles, and it was immediately apparent because it was a house with a family in it. People were crying and showing us pictures of little children who were killed in the explosion.
How do you authenticate some of those experiences or stories? You are speaking to people about deeply personal and traumatic events, but it’s also your responsibility to ensure that you are reporting the truth. How does that process of verification come about?
As a journalist, it is our duty to provide a verifiable account of events. We have to fact-check people even if they are talking about really terrible things. We want to do that sensitively. But if we can’t do it that way, or if we can’t do it at all, then I don’t think that those are necessarily appropriate materials for journalism. Our job is to find accounts and experiences that we can verify. It’s important to be sensitive while doing that, but that’s not really an excuse, I think, to let our standards fall when it comes to writing the truth.
Since you traveled with a fleeing Afghan family, you were involved in their personal lives for an extended period of time. How did you separate your personal emotions from the work that you were producing?
Well, I don’t think you can. That was something I struggled with a lot during this book because I entered this project with the idea that I was doing this because I was a journalist. Yes, I was going undercover, but my illegal act of deception was justified by my professional status. Therefore, I would really just be an observer on this trip that involved traveling smugglers and other things that were quite shady. Yet, I was traveling with my friend and his family, and as a human being, I was responsible for my safety and his safety just as he was responsible for mine. So, I was pushed into a role that was much more of a participant. It was difficult and led to some crises, which I talked about in the book.
How has your journalism changed after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan? Has it been more difficult to report in Afghanistan since?
I think in some ways it’s surprising that we are still able to access Afghanistan at all, and that they are still allowing Western journalists to enter. I think the reason they are is because the country is dependent on Western humanitarian aid and NGOs, and they also want official recognition as the government — they want embassies to come back. I think they understand that allowing Western correspondents in is part of the package. So for now, we are able to go there.
It has been getting more difficult, and there have been more restrictions on reporters. I think it doesn’t help that a lot of reporters are not really interested in understanding the current situation with the Taliban and how they’re evolving. They just want to write about the bogeyman that’s been the enemy for the United States for the last 20 years. Of course, there’s lots of terrible stuff that’s happening that they can write about, like the closure of girls’ high schools, which I’ve written about as well. But I think it’s very important to approach the situation with a bit of humility. Honestly, we were so deeply wrapped up in a web of illusions that no one saw the way that it would evaporate almost overnight with catastrophic consequences for the people of Afghanistan. Even as someone who has been a critic of the wars for the last 20 years, I feel like there was a lot that I missed that we didn’t understand. I am trying to approach the country and situation with the most humility, which means learning, listening, and going there — even under difficult conditions.
Similarly, how do you think the coverage of the refugee crisis of 2015-2016 (where Afghans were the second-largest ethnic group fleeing, after Syrians) contrasts with the coverage of Ukrainian refugees seeking support and stability?
A lot of people on the right in Europe have pointed out, as a way of justifying [less restrictions on immigration from Ukraine], that Ukrainians are white, Christian, and European and therefore deserve to be given refuge. Whereas brown, Muslim, refugees – like Afghans or Syrians – don’t. So people are openly saying racist and xenophobic justifications for the obvious difference in treatment.
But I think it’s more complicated than that. It also has to do with the way that the immigration systems are set up to filter people out from the developing world, from the Global South. The contrast in treatment between Afghan and Ukrainian refugees has shown us how much these great border crises are constructed by laws and not just the result of wars or other catastrophes. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukrainians were able to travel legally into the EU – they didn’t need visas because they were granted visa-free entry. So they could get in the car and drive to Poland. They didn’t have to pay smugglers to take them across deserts and forests or risk their lives on little boats. That, of course, is the situation for most refugees, for Afghan and Syrians. So the racialized differences are partly the result of a bigger economic picture that has to do with the disparities in global north and south.
I also think that it’s easier to feel sympathy sometimes for people when you’re not partially responsible for the catastrophe that they’re fleeing. The irony here is that Europe and the United States have much less responsibility for making Ukrainians refugees than the disasters that Afghans or Syrians are facing.
Do you have a story that feels unfinished and you would like to continue working on?
In terms of unfinished work, there’s a lot. For the first time in 20 years, in the rural parts of Afghanistan where the war was most violent, there’s peace because the Taliban is in charge. You can work with them if you can get permission. Then you can travel to these areas and see places and people who were very, very difficult, if not impossible, to access. I feel like there’s a whole new history of the war in Afghanistan that can be finally written for the first time since 2001. There’s a tremendous opportunity and we don’t know how long it’s going to last. We don’t know how much longer Western journalists will be able to work in Afghanistan. We don’t know how much longer this window of peace is going to last either. There’s a lot of unfinished work in terms of accounting for what went wrong over the last 20 years and the tremendous violence and corruption that our intervention inflicted on the country.