Pod Save the World - Love, Africa with Jeffrey Gettleman

Episode Date: May 16, 2017

Tommy and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman discuss his new book Love, Africa. They talk about the risks that come with working in places like Somalia and South Sudan, including Jeffrey (repeatedly) being held at gunpoint, and the balance between reporting facts and telling stories to that help create empathy for people suffering.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. Today, my guest is Jeffrey Gettelman, who is the Bureau chief of the New York Times' East Africa Bureau, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He's also the author of a new book, Love, comma, Africa, that everyone should read because it's an incredible story that is accessible and fun and like a page turner, but also helps you understand what it's like to be a foreign correspondent, to understand the challenges of that job, the sacrifices you have. to make. It's just an awesome book. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for being on the pod today.

My pleasure. So it's funny because I don't know that we've ever met, but I've read and admired your reporting for such a long time. And I read half of the new book over the weekend. I tell the truth here on the podcast. I would not pretend that I finished it because I started on Friday night, but it is a fascinating book. And I just love it because it's a book that's about like figuring what the hell you're going to do with your life and how you find love and meaning and excitement with the backdrop of the most intense adventures I could ever imagine running around Africa and reporting and all these dangerous places all over the world.

And I was thinking we could start there by talking a little bit about how you do your job. I've never been to Africa, so my knowledge of what's happening there really depends on what I read and people like you. And that's something I think people, I want them to understand about government in general, which is we spend billions of dollars on intelligence and have diplomats all over the world, but reporters can go to places and talk to people that nobody's. else can. And that that work that they do, that you do, is invaluable. So when someone tells you that they're canceling their New York Times subscription, because they didn't like Brett Stevens' column, tell them they shouldn't cancel it because there's not many people that are on the beat in East

Africa anymore, and we need to support them. So a huge story about something going on in East Africa on the front page of the New York Times is as likely to be read in the Oval Office as an intelligence summary on that subject. So that gets me to some questions about how you you do your job because I think in some ways that almost magnifies the significance of what you're doing. How do you decide what to cover? And does it frustrate you that you can find multiple stories every day about the Middle East or business as usual in Washington? But there's like an unstated cap on the amount of coverage from out of Africa for an entire continent? Well, listen, a lot of people have never been to Africa. A lot of people listening to this show have never set foot in sub-Saharan Africa. You,

yourself who had an impressive job in the White House said you've never been here. So that's something you have to deal with as a journalist in Africa, is bringing, is opening this window on this part of the world that a lot of people have no experience with. And that's part of the fun of it. And that was part of the drive behind doing this book, as I wanted to introduce people to a whole new world. and the book is kind of an escape into that world. So the job is great. It's a ton of fun. It's an adventure almost every time I leave my base and go out and cover a story.

It depends on what kind of story I'm doing, but often there's a lot of logistics. I have to figure out how to get to a very remote part of the continent where there's big news. For instance, a few years ago I covered a story about a massacre by a reality. rebel group in a very remote spot of Congo. And I had to get to one city in Congo and then figure out how to hire a plane to then get to this little village that almost no foreigners ever go into. And then from there we had to hire a team of motorbikes, and we went flying off through the rainforest with these huge trees bending over us, absolutely beautiful virgin rainforest to get to these areas that had been affected by this rebel group where a lot of people were killed.

And it takes a lot of logistics. You leave home with thousands of dollars in your pocket. You have to have every step mapped out because it's not like there's a Howard Johnson for you to check into when you arrive. And these places are dangerous. And I have a family. I have two little boys that were born in Kenya. And, you know, one of the most important thing is like getting the story and getting back in one piece.

Yeah, that's a recurring theme in the book, is you jumping on buses or traveling going to plane stations with like five grand in cash in your pocket. It seems like that's a little added risk there. Well, it's kind of old school, but that's what's fun of it. I mean, you're really out there. You're not using credit cards. You're offline. A lot of places I work, my cell phone does not operate,

and I need to be on satellite phones, and I have this thing called a B-GAN, which is about the size of a laptop computer, which is a personal satellite internet connection that I can set up and aim towards the sky and find a satellite and file a story from anywhere, which is an indispensable piece of equipment. This is all just the kind of logistics,

you know, how we go about getting to these places. But the best part is when you're in these places, people are incredibly open and warm-hearted, and it's not difficult to sit down with somebody and have them tell you their whole life story and really open up about what they're terrified about and what happened to them and, you know, what kind of meaning they're looking for in life.

And that's, like, just beautiful because a lot of journalism, and I've done, you're talking to somebody who's been a journalist for about 20 years. I've covered politics. I've covered police beat. I've covered business. I've covered a lot of different stuff. But what's great about this job is I'm often interviewing people who have never been interviewed before, who have never met a journalist before, who'd have no idea what journalism is.

And I'm kind of the ambassador of the newspaper industry or journalism, and I explain what we're doing and who I am and where the information will appear. And there's a purity to that because I'm not being spun. I'm not being, you know, manipulated for somebody else's interest. I'm talking to people to get their story. And often the people in the region I work in are very open and will tell me all that they've been through. And I'm kind of an oddity, too. Like as a white guy in sub-Saharan Africa, I go to a...

a lot of places where people have not seen that many white people. And that creates its own kind of waves of energy because often, you know, the action stops. You walk into a village and everybody's mouth drops open. The fingers go out to point at you. If they were doing some work, they stop, you know, in mid-stroke. So you kind of alter the reality that you're trying to depict. But, you know, the net effect is people are very open and you can really really, communicate what their experiences, which is so different from what you and I grew up with and

live with. I mean, people that don't have any electricity, that have no running water, that are living hand-to-mouth, that are worried about their kids being wiped out by some weird group that's lurking in the forest. I mean, stuff that is not what most Westerners deal with. And that's my job is to explain why should we care? You know, why does it matter what happens in rural Congo or South Sudan or Somalia to us. And there are different reasons. Some of it is moral reasons. We should care about the less fortunate if we can help them.

Others are geopolitical reasons with terrorism spreading outside of Somalia could affect us. There are economic issues in Congo that affect us. So Africa really tests somebody as a journalist because you're doing a lot of explaining and you have to make it relevant, not like the Middle East or some other part of the world. where everybody gets why they should care. Right. And so you've been covering this region for 11 years. I mean, how do you deal with the fact that so much of what you seem to cover is, frankly, hard to read?

You know, some people just don't want to read about a famine or they don't want to read about government-sponsored death squads or rape as a tool of war. How do you get those stories, how do you write those stories in a way that get people to read and to notice them? That's a really good question, you know, and sometimes it totally depresses me. and I don't like surrounding my life with this bad news, and often that's what I have to do. I think you have to humanize the stories. You have to try to write about people honestly, so folks that back home can recognize the predicaments

that like a mother is in when she cares about the welfare of her children or a father trying to provide for her family or protect them. You try to, you have to, I mean, this is newspaper journalism. A lot of the stories are short, they're to the point, but you've got to try within that develop a little depth, a little texture, maybe a sense of smell, maybe the way the soil feels in the desert in Somalia, or the way the leaves look in the Congo jungle, to try to make, try to evoke a scene and transport somebody. And then once you have that, then there's more interest and more what's happening in that jungle, what's happening out in that desert. But that's a big challenge. A lot of people like even very well-educated, sophisticated people who've traveled a lot, many of them have never set foot in Africa, and they have all these preconceived ideas of what it's like.

And some of them are true. There's a lot of famine. There's a lot of conflict. You know, I would be the first one to say that. But you need to push beyond that. And there's also just like a lot of lives at stake. I mean, that's the moral issue and these famines and these conflicts. I mean, millions of innocent people are caught up in some horrible circumstances.

They've done nothing to deserve it. So, like, what do we owe them? Yeah, I mean, one of the things you talk about a lot in the book that I loved is this, this constant fight with copy editors who, like, vomit cliches at you, like, less is more, and they cut all the interesting stuff out of your articles, and your buddy actually, co-worker punched through a wall at one point. What a great sentence was stripped from the story, and I just love that. How do you balance that responsibility of delivering just the facts and the short story,

you talked about with, you know, what we were talking about earlier, which is the role you can play in creating empathy for other human beings who might be suffering. I mean, is that something that you worry about, or is it just a different kind of storytelling than, say, politics? You know, that's a really good question, and that's exactly it. It's trying to create empathy, which is like we all need, and it's been clinically proven. The more empathy you have, the happier a person you'll be because you'll be more connected to others. That's hard. I mean, one reason why I wrote the book was to go deeper into this kind of these issues and what I felt like and what it means to me to be standing in a place surrounded by a lot of, you know, bad and needy and miserable people. And how does that feel and what's my role?

Within the paper, you know, I just try to do my best. You brought up a few minutes ago, like, how do you choose the stories? And that's like the hardest part of the job, because even though the New York Times is still committed to covering Africa, we have three full-time staff positions in sub-Saharan Africa, there's still tons of news that we don't cover. And you're kind of like playing God, because if you do cover a story, it's going to bring attention to it. If you don't cover a story, nobody may find out about it otherwise. And so you're affecting things on the ground by choosing what you're going to write about. And, you know, it's a hard, I don't have the answers, man. I've been doing this for a decade, and I'm into it.

But I don't know what the best way to do it is because you don't want to just do bad news and cover miserable stories about famines and wars and conflicts and human rights abuse. Because that gives everybody the impression that Africa is just like on fire and everybody's killing each other. And it's also damaging to me, like to my soul and spirit. So you want to look for a mix of stories, but at the same time you don't want to avoid a hard-hitting story about something horrible that's happening

because if we do a piece on it, there's a chance that could result in some change. You know, the U.N. wakes up, or somebody in the White House takes notice or, you know, somebody in a foreign government feels embarrassed. So it's hard. There's like a moral dimension to this job that's different, I think, than working in other parts of the world.

More nerdy foreign policy coming up on Pod Save the World. The book is titled Love,ama, Africa, which I think is perfect, because it's a book about love and about meeting your wife and your relationship and I grew over time, but it's also about the continent of Africa, but it's also about loving Africa. And you fell in love with Africa so early as a teenager, and you became obsessed, essentially, with living and working there. You learned Swahili, you took it to college, put relationships on it,

hold. Have you figured out this many years later why that happened, why Africa? Do you think you could have had a transformative experience and say South America that led you there? Or was there something special about the place that just drew you and you didn't really have a choice? You know, that's a really good question. Like if I had gone to Bolivia when I was 18 years old, would we be talking, you know, love Bolivia right now? I don't know. I think I've met a number of people like me who grew up kind of sheltered and privileged. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois. My dad was a lawyer.

I went to a good college. I had, like, no complaint. And Africa sort of blew my mind when I went there for the first time in 1990 when I was 18. Because people were very poor. It felt very different. But there was this spirit and this kind of open-heartedness and this acceptance that I felt wherever I went. and there was a closeness among people, even as a stranger that I could pick up on.

And so I've talked to other people who've had similar experiences and where Africa really transformed them. And even people who come out to visit and spend a couple weeks in Kenya, they get it. They're like, okay, now I see why you're living out here. It's beautiful, the people are warm, it's like a whole other way of life. So I do think there was something to do with the place. But I also was really impressionable.

I was 18. I was a year into college looking for some adventure, and I found myself kind of through a fluke on a trip across Africa with a bunch of other students. And one of them was a very special person, this guy, Dan Eldon, who was killed a few years later, very creative, charismatic guy. And just that combination of me being impressionable,

being in a really wonderful, different place, and with somebody that really cared about it, and was a special person, it just changed my life. And, you know, I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't gone on that trip. I think it would be very different. I mean, you know, the reading the parts about Dan

and your relationship and your friendship, I mean, he does sound like an extraordinarily charismatic and special and fun person whose life, you know, I think we've all had friends like that in our lives who are just, they're your peer, but they're not really. They're someone you look up to even though you're a friend. But he was ultimately, he became a photojournalist

and was killed, which it was tragic and brings up the risk involved in what you do every day. What's funny is when we were setting up this conversation today, you actually responded to an old email I'd sent you back in 2011 because you'd been taken hostage. This is how you described it. A squad of goons from the local police department descended on us for committing the high crime of taking a picture with a woman selling bread.

They roughed up the photog and fixture, chambered bullets, and forced us into the back of a police truck at gunpoint. And that wasn't the first time. This is me talking now. You were also taken hostage in Iraq in 2004. you write in the book about this. I mean, if you're wondering how absolutely insane we were to march out into the middle of the desert and place our lives in the hands of a band of freshly blood-saint outlaws led by a man named Commander Peacock,

I can offer an explanation, the transitive property of trust. Reporters deposit their lives in it all the time. People I trusted it hooked me up with people. They trusted it hooked me up with people. They trusted. Peacock and I were simply two terminal points on a long line drawn by trust. I love that. I love that passage because it encapsulates sort of what you're doing.

and what you seemingly love about the conversations you get to have, but also the very real risks. Can you talk more about that trust in the risks inherent in the job and how you balance your need to do your job and get out of the office and get to these far-fung places with the very real risks inherent in doing it? Well, first, very generous with your appreciation of the book, and that means a lot to me.

As far as the risks, it's like a huge part of the job, and I'm not one of these adrenaline-junkie, danger-free, battle zone guys that just like needs conflict to feel alive. And there are journalists out there who are very good under pressure, but they are like best, you know, in a high-stakes life-and-death situation. Right. And sometimes because it's, you know, anything can happen when people start shooting at each other and you're in a confusing situation and you're with desperate people with nothing to lose, the risks, you know, it's a constant like risk reward calculation. Yeah, I scope out a story and I think, okay, this is a pretty important story to tell. It could be

dangerous. Is it a big enough story to warrant, you know, taking some risks? Is there a responsible way to do it? Like, for instance, when we had that email exchange, I was in South Sudan right before Independence. And I was in a pretty hot area that was a contested part between South Sudan and Sudan. But I was with, you know, with the local journalist who, who was well known. I was staying with some people that worked for the U.N. It didn't feel like it was in a dangerous place, but not, it wasn't like an active battlefield.

But the night that we had talked about in those emails, I was at a restaurant with some friends, other journalists, and one of my friends was taking pictures of a woman cooking bread, and all of a sudden these soldiers pounced on us, pulled out their guns, you know, put the chamber of the bullets, pointed them at our face, and we're about to shoot us because they were screaming at us

in Arabic, which we didn't understand, and they wanted us to stop taking pictures or to do something, and we didn't move fast enough. And the next thing I know, we're being driven out into the middle of the desert in the back of the pickup truck

by these guys wearing ski masks, guns at our heads, middle of the night, and I thought they were going to kill us. Jesus. I really thought, like, this is it. I'm going to lose my life over a stupid picture

of like a piece of, piece of peter bread being roasted on a charcoal grill. I mean, it was like, it was unbelievable. But I've been in that situation enough times to know that anything can happen out there. And life is cheap. And it's really sad because people will point a gun and pull the trigger and just not give a crap about what the impact is on all the people that that that missing life is going to affect. And so I have no allusion. about like the sanctity or the invincibility of myself. But I feel committed to the job, so I'm constantly torn.

Like, I can see good stories from my base in Nairobi, but I know they're dangerous. I did a lot of work on Somali pirates. These guys specialize in kidnapping people. You know, how do you do that? You know, how do you organize a trip to interview pirates and educate the world about what's really happening with piracy and not get yourself like taken hostage? So it's a balance of trying to be responsible but at the same time aggressive Or trying to be aggressive but at the same time responsible

As I've gotten older, to be honest, like I take fewer risks You know, I got two kids at home, the worst thing I could do to them Would be to get myself killed That would be like the worst thing I could do to them And so I take that like really seriously But at the same time I don't want to be a, you know, total wimp and just let these big stories go by because there's some risk involved in covering them. So, you know, I'm kind of in the middle. There are people that are sort of scared to enter any,

any dangerous place because you could easily lose your life. And then there are people that just jump in and are very fatalistic and say, you know, whatever happens going to happen. And I'm kind of in between. Like, I take the risks, but I try to minimize them. Because, you know, if I had to walk away from this job I could. I'd much rather be with my family than being a journalist. I wouldn't want to lose them, you know, for anything. And so that's like the most important thing. So I try to, and the book is a lot about that. It's a lot about trying to sort of figure out that full picture of like how to be a good person and how to be a good husband and a good dad and do a job that you care about. And we all relate to that, like whatever we're doing, Will. Yes, we do. I mean,

it also sounds like an evolution that a lot of reporters go through. It's like you get a little or you have some kids and a wife and a family. Like Chris Chivers, who's another amazing New York Times reporter, I think wrote a piece about why he sort of stopped going to war zones. But, you know, then you read people like Rini Kalamachi and her work behind the lines in Mosul and interviewing ISIS fighters and, you know, we just have to be incredibly grateful to the people that do that job to inform us, risk to themselves and maybe not deride them all as fake news when you're the President of the United States.

It's just an idea. Well, it's sad because there's a lot that goes on. to those stories from the field. You know, there's just, like, we believe that it's really important to get as close as you can to what's happening and relay that back from, you know, from the field while it's fresh, while it's happening, to surround yourself by the story. And that's not easy. It's much easier to sit in your office and make a few phone calls and kind of extrapolate.

But it's also much more interesting to get to the field. Like, that's when I come alive. That's when I really enjoy my work. Like, the other day I was doing a story in Western Kenya, and for breakfast, we were doing a story about how much exercise all a typical woman in rural Africa gets just going through her daily routine. You know, washing the clothes, farming the field, pounding the grain, making the food, cleaning up, taking care of her farm.

You know, it's a lot. They're never, like, sort of sitting around. They're just constantly doing physical legs. labor. And for breakfast, the woman came and insisted we'd breakfast with her, and she served this bowl of freshly cooked termites that tastes a little like popcorn. They actually weren't bad. And I was thinking as I was like eating these like insects, I was like, this is great. Like, you know, they weren't nearly as nasty as it must sound. But it was also just fun. I was like, this is an adventure. I'm like kind of, you know, shaking it up a little bit.

and that's what's really rewarding. So going to the field is like a responsibility to get the real story, but it's also the adventure of it. That's like why I got into this business in the first place. Yeah, the adventure and the excitement comes through in the book. Before you were a reporter, though, you were working in development. You worked at Save the Children in Ethiopia. That doesn't sound like it was the most rewarding experience.

It doesn't sound like the programs were necessarily, the most effective programs. I guess since that time, you've probably covered countless development and relief efforts. across Africa. Do you think that on balance that the way the United States is doing aid is productive and working? And can you talk a little bit about what you think the potential impact would be of the proposed Trump budget cuts to USAID? Yeah, I listen. That's a really good topic. Foreign aid is like one of the bigger issues in Africa because so many of these African countries depend on foreign aid in many, many different ways for roads, for schools, to bring food to people who are, you know,

the brink of starvation, health care, vaccination programs. My take, because, yeah, I have a chapter in my book, which was like one of the kind of, you know, more of a downer chapter about my experience in Ethiopia, where at the time I thought I wanted to be an aid worker in Africa, and I was very idealistic, and I thought, this is the best way to help people is to be an aid worker, and you're out in the field and you're working, like, face-to-face

with people trying to make their lives better. that summer was like a disaster. I was very lonely. I missed my girlfriend. I felt very isolated, and I saw a lot of programs that were not working. My take on aid is that the more specific and concrete it is, the better. So, like, the health programs are really effective. Like PEPFAR?

Bringing malaria medicine to, like, rural Africa. Got it. Vaccination programs, really helpful. That stuff is, like, pretty. hard to knock like not a lot of money is wasted and it saved lives like aid the you know the united states government paid billions of dollars every year and aids of that aids treatments for people in sub-Saharan africa who have HIV and these treatments let people live a normal life and it adds like amazing amounts of productivity to the societies because

these people are able to work and take care of their kids and farm their fields and if they were sick and dying it would be a disaster right Those programs work, and a lot of that was started by President Bush, and a lot of Africans credit him with being, you know, more generous and more involved in Africa than Obama, which is interesting, given Obama's heritage with his father being Kenyan. But a lot of people have a lot of affection for President Bush because he put a lot of money into these health programs. That stuff works great. What doesn't work as well is these vaguer programs like capacity building or governance support of running. of running workshops, teaching people about human rights,

abuse, or how to be more effective government or more transparent. I mean, these ideals that in the abstract are very important, but transmitting them is difficult. And there's also a power dynamic.

In Africa, it's the rich white guy telling the poor, you know, black African what to do. That's often the dynamic, whether it's coming from the U.S. Embassy or from,

the children or you know from coca cola whatever it is it's a somebody from a position of power giving you know advice to somebody who doesn't have the power or the wealth yeah and that's that's hard to overcome and sometimes the advice is perfect the advice makes you know is good advice like you should have a more transparent government and tell your people what you're really doing with their tax money but the way that's communicated and often just that dynamic is creates resentment and push back. And so I've seen like a lot of money, like for instance in Somalia, I cover Somalia very closely.

The U.S. government has put in billions of dollars trying to help Somalia. A lot of it has been wasted because Somalia is not as far as its government or institutions than it was before all that money was invested. Now what's going to be the impact of a huge foreign aid cut? I think it could be a disaster because a lot of it. of people rely on American food aid, for instance, or medicine to survive. And this is another thing which isn't being talked about. You know, American farmers grow surplus food that the U.S. government buys,

and a lot of that food gets shipped overseas as foreign aid. So if we eliminate, you know, a large percentage of our foreign aid, let's say food aid for Africa, that's going to have an impact back home in Nebraska and Iowa and the places where they're producing that food. that problem is going to be shared. So I don't know. I do think there's some fat. I'm not going to, like, you know, instinctively defend all of, like, foreign aid because I do see a lot of it being wasted.

You know, some of these U.N. jobs, people travel business class, they stay in nice hotels. You know, they live pretty large. They get paid nice salaries. Some of them are doing good work. Some of them are not. You could say the same of anybody. You could say the same of the New York Times.

You know, we stay in nice hotels, too, sometimes. but we are a private company. It's not taxpayer money. So when you're using public money and asking people, you know, saying, hey, Tommy, I want you every time you pay your taxes to take a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars out and we're going to use that for foreign aid, there's a higher responsibility of not, you know, misspending that money. For sure.

I agree. As you said, food aid is a very important piece of what America provides. On March 27th, you wrote a piece that scared the craft. out of me about the real possibility of famine occurring simultaneously in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen. Can you talk about the confluence of events that came together to create that risk and where things stand, you know, six weeks, almost two months after you wrote that piece? And then if there's anything people can do to help as individuals. No, I'm not on the margins in a good year growing and their livestock suffered.

And right now that's happening in Somalia, South Sudan, and Nigeria. On top of that, what can droughts happen from time to time. Some of it is connected to climate change. You read the Bible, they talk about times of famine and times of plenty. Conflict makes it so much harder because conflict prevents people from getting the food they need, the emergency food. So, for instance, in a place like Kenya, there's no active, you know, large-scale conflict. If people are experiencing a drought, you can pack food onto trucks from the port of Mombasa, drive it all the way. up to the affected areas and distribute it, and nobody will starve to death.

You can't do that in Somalia or South Sudan because the trucks may be attacked by rebels. The roads might be mined. Warlords might try to block the trucks because they're using food to, you know, increase the food prices and extort money from people. So wherever there's conflict and drought, those two together are what equals famine. And the reason why we're seeing it happen now across these different areas is because there's a lot of conflict at this very moment, and there's a pretty, you know, severe drought. Since I wrote that story, there's been, you know, the way the weather works in East Africa, there's a rainy season

in the spring, and like March and April, so there's been a little bit of a reprieve, but the forecast is that it's going to be back, you know, the famine situation will be back in effect in a month or two, because the rains will stop, and the rains weren't strong enough. As far as what people can do to help. There's organizations like UNICEF, Oxfam, Save the Children, lots of smaller ones, the American Refugee Committee that all work on, that survive on donations and take money from people who donate and use that money for food aid and for other, you know, help. So we can do something. You know, all of us can do something. And climate change too is a huge thing. Like, you know, if we all continue at the rate we're, the way we behave and the way we

pollute, it's going to get worse and worse in these areas. Like, all the science is there. And Africa, it's sad because Africa produces very little pollution. If you look at like those maps that show the world at night with all the lights, Africa's like all black, except for a few places, you know, in South Africa and Kenya, but there's huge stretches that are, there's nothing. Africa produces very little pollution, yet because of the pollution from other places, they are going to suffer the most because their climate is going to get drier and hotter with more droughts, and there are going to be millions of people that are going to suffer. So I don't know. I just saw this Leonardo DiCaprio movie before the flood on the plane over here from Kenya,

and it just, you know, you got it. We all have to think about these things. I totally believe that. Like, we all have a responsibility to try to make the earth a little better. And Africa, you just see, like, the most extreme impact of what's happening with global, you know, warming. Yeah. It's a depressing reminder that, you know, we can debate this in Washington all we want and, you know, pick sides and politicize it. But the people outside of the United States are going to suffer more than we are if we don't do something soon. You're listening to Pod Save the World. Stick around.

There's more great show coming your way. So just switching gears a little bit, you went to Afghanistan to cover the war in 2002 during a period you described in the book is a relative calm. Here we are, 16 years later, still fighting in Afghanistan, still debating whether we should do another troop increase. Do you think that the international community in the United States missed a chance in 2002 that could have gotten to get Afghanistan to a better place than it is today? Or are there structural challenges there that are just so big that we can't necessarily fix it? You lay out the question like so well, the answer's kind of there. I mean, it's both because there are structural problems in Afghanistan. Those guys have been so steeped in war for so long with the weak central government. It's pretty hard to unite the country under one flag, meaningfully, no matter what you do. Like, that's embedded in that place, sadly, for a lot of people. There's just never been a strong, effective central government. And that's a problem in a developing country because it breeds lawlessness.

Like, it's fine to have states' rights and decentralization and in a developed society. I think that there's a good argument for that. But in a place like Afghanistan, it just then leads to warlordism and, you know, no control over weapons, no control over the borders, and just this kind of, like, almost a medieval level of lawlessness, where anything can happen at any way. time. So that's the history of Afghanistan, as we know it. I do think, though, that we squandered a huge opportunity in 2002. So I was there at a time when the, you know, the U.S. went into Afghanistan in October, 2001 after September 11th, and that was like a heavy operation for a couple months. By the time

I got there in early 2002, that was over, and the Taliban was nowhere to be found. And there was a real spirit of hope in the country. And that was just kind of, you know, the U.S. invested in it for about six months, and then guess what happened? Iraq. And then all that attention and all those resources just pivoted. You know, yes, we still had troops in Afghanistan, and there were still money being spent in Afghanistan, but nobody really cared about it once Iraq kicked off. and so while the Iraq war was being fought, Afghanistan just festered, and it just got worse and worse. So by the time Iraq kind of phased out, and we got interested in Afghanistan again, it was too late. All these structures that we had set up had been, you know, had kind of crumbled.

And people's, it's more like the spirit. Like there was, you know, countries have moods, you know, just like, just like anything. And there was a mood at that time in early 2002 that we can climb out of this. And that just, and way more than Iraq, because I was in Iraq like the next year in 2003, right when the U.S. invaded. And it was messed up from the beginning. There was deep bitterness in the Sunni areas. There was suspicion of American motives from the beginning. In Afghanistan, there wasn't.

People were like, oh, thank God, you know, we have peace. And that just, I just saw that disappear. Yeah. The decision to invade Iraq is one of them more about, I mean, even just on a logical level, it's just so hard to understand how we could possibly get that distracted in the middle of another war. But I guess neither here nor there. But one of the big problems in Afghanistan in a lot of countries you cover is corruption. Politicians get rich, eight organizations get bilked for millions.

Citizens get zero services provided. Where do you rank corruption on your list of regional challenges in East Africa? And is there, should the United States, change the way it approaches some of these countries to better prioritize corruption, because it feels like it often gets lost to security cooperation and other priorities? It does. I mean, and you know from your former vantage point, like national security is like, you know, the most important thing by far.

So anything connected to terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism, is going to just, you know, be the top. Bandwidth left for anything else. I see that. Like I see the U.S. supporting governments in Ethiopia, you know, and even in South Sudan at one point, that had horrible human rights records. And the reason why they did that was because they saw these countries as allies

against, you know, Islamic terrorism specifically. I see corruption as like a symptom. I see corruption as a symptom of bad leadership. But the reasons for the bad leadership are complicated. So in Kenya, for instance, Kenya is a very promising African country. It's also very corrupt. It's also a democracy.

There have been some election problems, but more, you know, more often than not, people are voting for the leaders who then get elected to office. It's not like a total rigged system. It is a free voting system where people line up and cast their votes and the people who get the most votes take office. That's pretty clean. But you have horrible corruption because politics are very ethnic.

and so everybody's interested in getting the person from their ethnic group into office because they believe that then they will benefit personally if the person from their tribe or ethnic group is holding office and so then nobody cares about corruption you know and I guess I should modify that people care about corruption but politicians with with well-known records of corruption keep getting elected because they are from your group they are your man so yes you know this

guy had taken some public money. And yes, you know, this guy had steered government contracts to his family and everybody got filthy rich and this. But he's from your group and you'd rather him be in office than a guy from another, another ethnic group who you don't trust. And so if you have this very fragmented, you know, by ethnic group politics, it leads to a lot of problems. And then the question is like, well, why is it so fragmented? Why are people voting for somebody who's clean or who's a technocrat or who has a good education and why are they so you know ethnically focused and a lot of that goes back to the way africa was colonized and it goes back to the first leaders in these countries goes back to the way africa connects to the west and sort of creating

you know raw materials and natural resources and there's not a lot of industry so there's not so many professionals there's not other bases of identity and i use the example so you know my religion is Jewish and and I vote like a certain way politically in the past I voted you know for Democratic candidates and if there was a Jewish person running on a Republican ticket and then there was like you know a non-Jewish person running as a Democrat I wouldn't be so swayed to vote for the Jewish guy of a different party I'd vote with with with the party that I usually choose and that is a different basis of identity. I have my own ideology that I believe in. And that's different from a lot of places in the developing world where they don't have those ideologies. It's all about

what group you're in. We see that in Somalia with clan politics. It's just a different way looking at the world. Yeah. My last question for you, because even though there's far more important things going on in the world, he dominates everything. Has Trump changed the way people talk about and view the United States in your experience in Africa. Are folks you work with and live with as obsessed with him as we are back in the United States? I don't think so. And Africa is familiar because they've seen many leaders that do the things he's doing. They do.

They see many leaders that it's all about, you know, what appears, it's all about them. And it seems more of a cult of personality than it does somebody who is working from institutions. They've seen leaders who are very wealthy and come into office from a business perspective and use that wealth to get very far in politics. And they're used to kind of the big man persona, this idea that, you know, I know best for all my people, and I'm not going to consult, I'm just going to kind of go with my instinct and tell you what's right and what's wrong. That's familiar to many Africans. I do think it's changed the perception of America, a bit. It makes the U.S. look less exceptional and more like the rest of the world where,

you know, anybody can rise to the highest level of office with just kind of bravado and not a lot of experience. So I do think, I think people are worried because the U.S. often seems so stable compared to the rest of the world. Even a country like Italy or France that had all these big political scandals, you know, the U.S. always was pretty stable. I had a two-party system, you know, they would switch, you know, take turns running the country, all the different sort of checks and balances with the judiciary and Congress. And now I think people are like, hmm, I wonder how strong those institutions really are. And maybe, you know, the U.S. is just like anywhere else where if somebody is, is popular enough, then the rest of it doesn't really

matter. Yeah. We're wondering that too. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually, you know, it was a shock. I felt very out of touch with what the U.S. was feeling being in Kenya during the whole election period. And I know a lot of people in America were surprised by the outcome of the election, but it just felt even kind of more shocking to watch the news and think, okay, the country's really changed in the last 10 years since, you know, I've been living here. And that just, it's just a strange feeling. It makes me feel kind of more cut off from the place I'm from. So, yeah, but sometimes it's nice to be in rural Kenya eating termites. You know, you can just kind of focus on, like, the present.

Yeah, you're focusing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Jeffrey Gettelman, thank you for the incredible reporting you do for the New York Times, and thank you for the book, Love Africa. Everyone should read it not just because you're interested in foreign policy and what's happening in far-front parts of the world, but because it's a great story.

It's accessible narrative. It's about a kid trying to figure out what the hell he's going to do to grow up. And I think everybody's going to enjoy reading it. So thank you for doing the show. Really glad to participate. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. All right, I'll talk to you soon.