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Cover Story newsletter: Inside Afghanistan
An exclusive look at how we designed our cover
Peer into The Economist’s decision-making processes with Tom Standage, our deputy editor, who explains how we select and design our front cover. Cover Story shares preliminary sketches and documents the—often spirited—debates that lead each week to a design seen by millions of people.
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Our cover this week focuses on Afghanistan, five years after America’s chaotic withdrawal from the country and the Taliban’s subsequent return to power. Our South Asia bureau chief, Tom Sasse, made a 1,000km road trip from Herat to Kandahar to Kabul to see what life is like for ordinary Afghans. He found that under Taliban rule Afghanistan is, for once, at peace. Cities which previously resounded to the blasts of suicide-bombers feel surprisingly calm. Birds have returned to Kabul. After decades of war, such stability is welcome.
But Afghanistan is also hungry, poor and repressed. Music is banned. Armed men rule the streets. Women are barred from workplaces and universities, and cannot travel without a male guardian. Girls over 12 are banned from school and, since child marriage is now legal, many have been forced into wedlock. Foreign aid has been cut, food prices have risen and the government is focusing spending on security, motorways and mosques, while defunding health and welfare. The country’s fast-growing population of 45m—almost two-thirds of whom were born after 2001—can see no path to prosperity. The challenge for our cover was to indicate that we were presenting an assessment of this complex situation, based on first-hand reporting.
To accompany our coverage we had arranged for a local photographer to capture some images of everyday life. Few Afghan photographers work with Western media organisations, but we managed to commission someone to take pictures in Kabul over a few days. Some of us liked this image of a poor hillside neighbourhood in Kabul. It is certainly visually striking. But it doesn’t show how things have changed under the Taliban. The second image, of a boy collecting water jugs, signals that our coverage combines a wide perspective with a focus on individuals’ daily lives. The orange plastic provides a good pop of colour. We ended up using this image for our Insider discussion on the topic, but it wasn’t right for our cover. Much of our reporting is about the fate of girls, rather than boys.
The photo of two young girls in matching pink dresses is sweet. But it risks giving the impression that girls in Kabul are free and hopeful. In reality, those girls will soon be required to cover their hair and stop going to school. The image of two girls carrying bread past barbed wire, and a mural of women whose faces have been erased, illustrates the oppressive ideology of the Taliban (they consider the display of women’s faces to be a violation of public virtue). It is a poignant image, but it is probably too complex for a cover; most people seeing it will be unaware of the context.
Perhaps it would be better to show the Taliban themselves. But this more graphic cover, with men holding weapons, felt too backwards-looking, and obscures the welcome news that the fighting has stopped. (When it comes to reducing Afghanistan’s violence, the Taliban have one huge advantage: they do not have to fight the Taliban, who used to perpetrate most of it.) We also toyed with the idea of a cover based on “Afghan Girl”, an iconic photograph of an Afghan refugee taken by Steve McCurry, which appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. To illustrate the Taliban’s takeover we could, we thought, add a veil to cover her face, so that only her eyes are visible. But again, we worried that this cover would not have made sense to anyone who lacked the necessary context. So instead we decided to focus on images of women. There are few women walking the streets of Kabul, but our photographer managed to get permission to photograph a young woman trying to study indoors. The images of her peeking out of the window capture her new reality, and that of millions of others: shut in and isolated.
The photo we went with, of a woman grasping the curtain, was the one that we felt best captured this quiet frustration. The headline “Inside Afghanistan” neatly encompasses both the isolation of those shut indoors, and the on-the-ground nature of our coverage.
Most Afghans yearn for more freedom, but Western efforts to isolate the regime have achieved almost nothing. So it is time to try a more pragmatic approach. The Taliban are not going away, and if democracies do not engage with them, other powers will. Donors should stop cutting humanitarian aid. Economic sanctions, which have locked Afghanistan out of the global financial system and starved it of private investment, could be relaxed to boost growth, which might ease the mass joblessness that threatens the country’s long-term stability. Reform must come from within, but it could be the work of decades. In the meantime, judicious engagement is likely to do more good than harm. America and other democracies should hold their collective noses—and talk to the Taliban.
