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Michael Slackman, Lauren Katzenberg, Doug Schorzman and Greg Winter | The New York Times

For 20 years, The New York Times has remained fully dedicated to covering the war in Afghanistan. As we usher in a new era, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Christina Goldbaum take the helm in Kabul.

Dear Colleagues,

Afghanistan experienced tremendous upheaval last summer that forced The Times to evacuate all of our staff after the Taliban took control. It was a trying time, you will all recall, as over the course of five days we sought to get more than 120 Afghan current and former colleagues and their family members out of the country, without any idea what would come next, all while putting out a report on the historic moment.

We succeeded on both fronts, thanks to the tremendous efforts of so many throughout the newsroom and the company.

But while our commitment to covering Afghanistan never wavered, we were unsure how we would move forward.

Now those plans are clear and we wanted to share them with you.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff, who took on the role of acting bureau chief at the height of the crisis, is now our permanent Kabul bureau chief.

He will be joined by Christina Goldbaum, who became part of our Kabul reporting team just five weeks before the collapse and will return to Afghanistan as a correspondent.

Both will work closely with David Zucchino, a prince of a correspondent who will continue to rotate through Kabul with extended visits. We expect other correspondents to rotate through as well.

When they are in the country, the team will work from our Kabul bureau, which was reopened a few weeks ago and is managed by Warren Coleman. Were extremely thankful for the months of hard work by The Times operations team, including Tug Wilson, Charlie OMalley, Warren and Mark Powell and by our correspondents who made this return possible.

Thomas T.M. Gibbons-Neff

Thomas T.M. Gibbons-Neff joined The Times in our Washington bureau in 2017, covering the Pentagon before heading to Kabul in 2020. In Afghanistan, he reported on a range of stories, from the Talibans choice of sneakers to the shadowy militias forced to defend Afghanistans highways. On the frontlines, he painted haunting portraits of the war through dispatches that showed the rapid collapse of Afghan security forces as U.S. troops left, weaving his experiences as a Marine with what he witnessed on the frontlines as a reporter.

As Kabul fell in August, T.M., alongside other Times employees, helped evacuate our Afghan colleagues and their families over five brutal days where he had to draw on his experience as a Marine and journalist to help get everyone to safety.

In October last year, T.M. returned to Afghanistan to cover a country now ruled by the very movement he had fought a decade earlier. He visited his old battlefields and showed a country now at peace but ravaged by a humanitarian crisis and the remnants of war. T.M.s coverage also wrestled with the one question that has endured after the two-decades-long U.S. occupation ended last August: What was it all for?

Christina Goldbaum

Christina Goldbaum won the Livingston Award in 2018 for her coverage in East Africa and joined The Times that same year. In Metro, she had a fine run covering immigration and transportation, then quickly established herself in Kabul. As the Taliban seized territory, Christina anchored our coverage, charting Afghanistans unfolding migration crisis and offering an early glimpse of life under Taliban rule. After the U.S.-backed government collapsed, she worked around the clock to help secure The Times Afghan employees safe arrival in Doha and transfer to Mexico City and then the United States.

Christina returned to Afghanistan last October and has traveled across the country writing the insightful, compassionate stories we have come to expect from her: She introduced us to high school girls coming to terms with life under Taliban rule, delved into the rising threat from the Islamic State, and defly explained the economic collapse and ensuing humanitarian catastrophe. Her reporting on women trying to keep their children alive amid a worsening hunger crisis spurred the U.S. government to issue humanitarian exemptions to sanctions, U.S. officials told The Times.

David Zucchino, who had a brilliant career with The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Los Angeles Times before joining The Times as a contributing writer, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, first in 1989 for his series, Being Black in South Africa, for The Inquirer, and in 2021, for his book, Wilmingtons Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

For 20 years, The Times remained fully dedicated to covering the war in Afghanistan. In 2021, it operated the largest bureau in Kabul of any foreign newspaper. Now, we will continue that commitment in this new era and are thrilled to have T.M. and Christina at the helm.

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Afghanistan: The New York Times announces next steps in coverage - Editor And Publisher Magazine