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Two months before the fall of Kabul in August 2021, Matthieu Aikins, a freelance contributor to The New York Times Magazine, began working on a story that would take four years to come to fruition.
The results of that investigation were recently published by the magazine as a four-part series, “America’s Vigilantes,” which also featured the work of the photographer Victor J. Blue, a longtime partner and friend of Mr. Aikins’s.
The series exposed war crimes committed by members of the U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan and the subsequent cover-ups. It told the story of a unit that was responsible for the disappearances and deaths of nine men from a remote farming village. It explored how a pardon from President Trump cut short an investigation into a soldier accused of killing a man he suspected of being a Taliban bomb maker, and it even examined how a culture of flagrant military vigilantism is having an impact domestically.
Mr. Aikins has been reporting from Afghanistan since 2008. His coverage of the war and its aftermath, including a 2024 investigation into an Afghan general and U.S. ally who was involved in human rights abuses and disappearances, has earned him two Pulitzer Prizes. For this series, Mr. Aikins spoke with more than 100 people, including many members of the military. The Times also filed lawsuits to obtain thousands of pages of previously unpublished military records.
In a recent interview with Times Insider, Mr. Aikins talked about his four-year reporting effort, which he called a “long, dogged quest for truth.” This interview has been condensed and edited.
What is the biggest thing you hope readers take away from this 25,000-word series?
I think it’s vital for them to understand the secret history of this war. To understand how we’ve gotten to our current moment, where there is a clear and present danger that the military will be used in illegal and unconstitutional ways against American citizens.
How much of your vast access do you credit to your long career covering the war and the region?
There’s no doubt that many people respected the fact that I had been on the ground, that I had gotten access to areas of Afghanistan that were even difficult for the military to go to. I had become very familiar with the way the military works, particularly these elite units. I understood the entire organizational structure, the names of units, the names of officers, how military careers work in special operations, what their training entails. And I can speak very fluently in the military jargon that they use.
Did you encounter pushback from members of the military?
Some people didn’t agree with the bigger picture that I was trying to portray, that there was a culture of impunity that had become a problem in the military. But a lot of people were willing to speak about things they had personally witnessed. I was surprised by the level of access we were able to get. I spoke with two dozen current and former members of Army Special Operations. There were some former Green Berets who were willing to go on record and accuse their organization of misconduct, which is extremely rare for people in elite Army units to speak out like that.
Why do you think so many of them were willing to go on the record?
The sense I got from talking to people in the military is that there is a real feeling of alarm about what is happening. They’re not partisan. They’re motivated by a deep sense that the system is being subverted and the country is headed in a dangerous direction. There’s a widespread feeling in the military that the country’s leadership is ignoring and flouting long-established rules and norms that are for the good of the country.
I was amazed how people were coming out of the woodwork. I had sources just email me out of the blue. It was really out of loyalty to their country, to their beliefs as a military officer in the law and the Constitution that demanded a very difficult choice from them, which was to break from this brotherhood of soldiers. And the price for that was high. You can be socially ostracized; you can face consequences in terms of what jobs you have access to after the military. It was really motivated by their conscience.
This series is largely focused on things that happened overseas. But can you talk more specifically about the domestic implications of your reporting?
This story is really about how a lawless war overseas came home to roost. Because this type of misconduct was allowed to happen unchecked, it now poses a danger to Americans. There’s no doubt that the language and rhetoric of the war on terror is now being mobilized by Trump and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, against immigrants and dissidents on the home front. If you look at the way they’re using tools that were developed to combat terrorism in response to 9/11, they’re now being wielded against those they see as criminals or domestic extremists.
Many of the implications for the United States — the rule of law, the military and the government, and the embrace of this kind of vigilante ethos by our leaders — sort of came to pass in the process of reporting this story. Trump was elected. He appointed Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense. Then they started aggressively pushing the limits of what were considered legal and constitutional uses of the military, including what would amount to lethal strikes against suspected drug traffickers and the deployment of military troops to U.S. cities.
A lot of this stuff had been hypothetical at the beginning of this project. Then it started unfolding in front of our eyes and really gave it an urgency and relevance that this initially more historically focused project didn’t have.
