Earlier this year, as the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, a number of TV news correspondents reported from the streets and airport in Kabul. But when the U.S. completes its exit from the country as the Taliban took control, so did essentially all U.S. reporters.
Since then, reporting from the country, now firmly under Taliban control, has been sparse. But on Sunday CBS’ 60 Minutes had a report from the country, which is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, with food, medicine and other critical resources lacking.
Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, said that getting the story done was no easy task. In fact, even getting into Afghanistan is a bit of a challenge right now.
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“Obviously, it’s not as easy as buying a plane ticket,” Alfonsi said.
So Alfonsi, her producer Ashley Velie, and their crew hitched a ride with the United Nations, which was delivering humanitarian aid via Doha and Islamabad.
“Even as we were coming into Afghanistan, we didn’t know if they were going to let us in or not, it was a little bit of a gamble,” Alfonsi said. “So we got to the airport, the humanitarian workers from the U.N. were going in and they were letting them through. Our crew, photographers and sound, who were from Europe, their passports got stamped and they went right through, and then my producer Ashley Velie and I, with our American passports, and being women, show up and the guy gave us this look of death, stamped the passports and threw it back at us. But we were like, OK, we are in, and we hit the ground running.”
Alfonsi met with some of the groups delivering the aid, as well as families impacted by the lack of supplies. They also visited Kabul’s children’s hospital, where the doctors have worked without pay since the Taliban took control.
“There’s just wards of children who are suffering from malnutrition, and the doctors say they don’t have medicine to give them, they don’t have food to give them,” Alfonsi recalled.
“For the humanitarian groups, they wanted to tell their story. They are actively nonpolitical; they don’t take sides,” she added. “They just want to alert the world, the people that hold the purse strings, that this is what’s happening.”
But the Taliban are a whole other story. Alfonsi was able to secure an interview with a Taliban minister for the report — though it almost didn’t happen.
“The interview with the Taliban was a little more complicated. We used a third party who was helping us to get in touch with them, and it was on and off,” Alfonsi recalled. Eventually they secured a meeting, though without any commitment to appear on camera.
“My photographer … said, ‘The last time I was here, the Taliban was shooting at me, and now we are going into their building.’ We went in there, we sat in his office for an hour and spoke, and he still wasn’t convinced that he would go on camera, and he finally agreed to,” Alfonsi said. “He tried to stop the interview a couple of times during the course of the interview, but he ultimately kept going.”
And when it was over, they had an unexpected request.
“He invited us in to the basement to eat with these Taliban leaders,” Alfonsi said. “When people ask you to eat with them, you do … but we made sure we had the media of our interview in our pockets, on us physically. We didn’t want them to take the interview. So then we left and we were like, OK, that just happened.”
But in a country that has seen a dearth of foreign reporting in recent months, Alfonsi added that she wants to shine a light to what is happening in the country, beyond the geopolitics.
“There are 38 million people left in this country, and winter is coming, and there is not enough food, and they can’t get access to cash, and the aid agencies are struggling as well to get to these people,” Alfonsi said. “There is so much need.”
