A few days ago I found out that Jeff Rigsby was dead. A friend of mine sent me a Twitter post reporting that his body had been found in Kabul and that he had likely been murdered. “Holy shit,” my friend said. “Didn’t you know this guy?”
Indeed I had known Jeff Rigsby. We were not the closest of friends. I reckon that I saw him fewer than a dozen times in total; I’m not sure if we had more than twenty conversations, and those conversations were on matters we considered more significant than our private lives. (Borges has a line about how he could make good friends in Japan because people did not share in excess: “they told me nothing of their private lives — their lives were indeed private — I told them nothing of mine, and I felt that we were friends because we could talk, not of our mere circumstances, but about real subjects.”) The last time Jeff and I had spoken – the last time we will ever have spoken – was about six months before he died; and it struck me that because that conversation and many others prior were associated with two inaccessible Twitter accounts – one deleted, the other belonging to a dead man – all records of those conversations are effectively struck from the earth. Even when Jeff was alive it was hard to find information about him; now it will become only more difficult. In some number of years the Twitter account that constituted the bulk of his presence in the world of others will disappear for one reason or another. Some obscure glimpses of him will remain in articles no one will read, and eventually he will disappear from the minds of men and it will be as though he never existed. Thus is the way of all flesh.
I did not expect that Jeff’s death would leave me so affected. Part of it was the suddenness; he did not occupy a prominent enough place in my memory for me to think that he was mortal and would one day perish like all mortals do. For me Jeff was one of those background characters whom one encounters in a single episode of the meandering picaresque that constitutes a life; and I just never really gave him enough thought to realize that he, too, could die. Such are the encroachments of death on the realm of living.
I was provided little consolation by the facts of his death. The idea that he had died violently was appalling. Thankfully I discovered it wasn’t true; friends of his told me that he had died of a stroke or a heart attack in an apartment in Kabul where he was living. He lived alone. And so the horror of violence was replaced by the horror of loneliness. Jeff had died in November. There was no one there when he died, and in fact no one had discovered the body for ten days. I could only imagine the body starting to rot before someone entered the apartment and discovered the corpse that once was Jeff – perhaps a neighbor alerted by the smell, perhaps a friend realizing he had been silent for more than a week: that was a long time for Jeff to be silent!
I first met Jeff through Twitter, when I was preparing to go to Afghanistan for a magazine piece I was writing. It was the winter of 2022. I knew that he lived in Kabul; I reckoned that he was the only American who decided to live permanently in Kabul after the Taliban took over. I didn’t quite know what he did for work. In some articles he is billed as an “investment consultant,” but my understanding was that he was simply a lifelong expatriate who lived in one of the cheapest cities in the world and cultivated neither a conventional career nor an ordinary family life. Occasionally he discussed business he did or wanted to do in Afghanistan but none of his ideas seemed to go anywhere. It was hard, after all, to make things go anywhere in Afghanistan. Perhaps “freelance researcher” is a better descriptor of how Jeff occupied his hours. He had lived in Afghanistan before, in the years of the war, working for USAID and the U.S. military doing development projects of one kind or another; and so it was strange that he would decide to return after the Taliban had triumphed in 2021. But he did return, for some obscure reason he never quite explained clearly, and he made Kabul his final home.
I have only a vague understanding of his life prior to my meeting him in Afghanistan. He was in his 50s when I met him. He had grown up in North Carolina and gone to Harvard for undergrad, graduating sometime in the early ’90s; the only record of his being there is a brief Harvard Crimson article on Rawls. After Harvard he lived a basically peripatetic life, spending time in various impoverished countries for years at a time. At some point he owned a large farm in Ethiopia with the idea of developing the country’s agricultural exports, only for civil war to make the plan infeasible. There were stints in other countries. None of them amounted to much.
But Jeff lived in the cheapest of cheap countries and earned, where he could, in dollars; and so regular work was never such a necessity for him. I suspect he never had a good idea of what he wanted out of life. Why would a Harvard graduate be spending down his life in this backwater? He led his life in pursuit of goals and ideals I did not understand, a set of desires he never elucidated. But I recognized that he was clearly very intelligent and passionate about his areas of focus; he clearly loved Afghanistan even as he was willing to criticize it harshly; and he was congenitally scrupulous, honest, and fair. There was much to commend him. He was a good man.
On Twitter Jeff had built a niche as a frank and sober commentator on Afghanistan, one of the relatively few Westerners with any idea what they were talking about. It helped that he actually lived in the country and had spent many years of his life there. In his writings Jeff focused on the mundane and crucial aspects of development – irrigation, currency management, electricity, road-building, population health – that practically everyone else ignored: he exhaustively covered the issues preventing the country from receiving new currency that the pre-Taliban republic had ordered from a Polish manufacturer, and devoted enormous attention to the saga of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves. He talked about simple failings of governance that could be corrected, and bemoaned basic issues like lead exposure and shoddy medicine. At the end of his life lead exposure became a particular focus for him. The publicity he gave to the link between aluminum pressure cookers and lead poisoning will, if acted upon, improve the lives of many Afghans. At least I hope so.
Jeff was very intentional in the topics he chose to discuss. In his politics he was a Western liberal; I recall him mentioning that he had favored Pete Buttigieg in 2020. But he did not focus on the Taliban’s restrictions on the rights of women in the way that other Western commentators did. He clearly opposed the restrictions. But he thought it was useless to try to persuade the Taliban of the virtues of an Enlightenment-derived moral framework of which they were either unfamiliar or contemptuous. The Taliban could be reasoned with, and there were clearly significant elements within the Taliban that wanted to loosen restrictions on women; but you could not simply expect them to comply with a worldview that was totally foreign to them. You had to show why it was a practical good for Afghanistan. In a piece that makes casual reference to Kant, Rawls, Nozick, and Bernard Williams, Jeff wrote:
The Taliban nowadays take social media seriously, so Twitter dunking is absolutely a valid form of resistance to their rule. But their international critics have more than one option today. They can tweet: “Banning girls from school is immoral, according to an ethical framework invented during the European Enlightenment and codified in international human rights conventions.” Or they can tweet: “Banning girls from school will make Afghanistan weaker.” Which is more likely to have some practical effect? … Regardless of their gender, angry people who are visibly helpless to affect the situation are unlikely to inspire much respect in their adversaries. And if their anger is motivated by an abstract political doctrine their adversaries don’t share, it’s unlikely even to evoke much comprehension. You have to meet people where they are.
Jeff did not approach the Taliban with a mindset of total condemnation; he sought to provide advice that was practical, earnest, and humane. Here was an American who was intelligent, who cared about the country (enough even to live in it!), who sought to contribute his knowledge where it would be useful for improving people’s lives. For that reason some among the Taliban accorded him a wary respect. He knew what he was doing.
But Jeff was also more than willing to criticize the Talibs on grounds large and small, and in some cases they gave him blunt reminders that he was, at the end of the day, only a guest in their country. I recall that he got in trouble a few times, though nothing too serious. And Jeff made enemies of many of those opposed to the Taliban, too, because he was willing to give the regime credit where it had succeeded, recognized that several popular foreign NGOs were likely engines for embezzlement, and pointed out that plenty of the more lurid anti-Taliban reporting was fabricated. This did not make him popular with critics of the Talibs; after his death many of them celebrated. He belonged to no side and did not aim for popularity.
When I knew him he was living out of a hotel called the Intercontinental; we first met over a breakfast of biscuits and bad coffee in an empty hotel restaurant overlooking the city, and spent a few days talking frequently, walking around Kabul and meeting with his Afghan friends. At some point during my stay in Kabul we spoke to a school for girls of the Hazara ethnic minority (you can see a photo of the visit above; Jeff is in the center in jeans, I am to his right with a mustache) in a rather dangerous neighborhood of the city. I remember that all the girls wanted to learn English and get out of Afghanistan, and after the visit Jeff and I sat on the floor with the principal and ate something like macaroni and cheese. I don’t remember what Jeff said; I don’t remember what I said.
Toward the end of his life – not that he knew it would be the end of his life – I suspect that Jeff realized that to the extent he would have a legacy it would reside in whatever minor contributions he could make to Afghanistan. By the time I met him he had not been back to North Carolina in years, and in a sense Afghanistan had become his country. But he did not try to blend in. He spoke some Persian but not much Pashto, and preferred to use English when he could. He tended not to wear the kurta that Afghan men wear; usually he dressed in collared shirts and jeans, as though he was still in North Carolina. Jeff had plenty of friends in Afghanistan, but with them he spoke only about Afghanistan: he did not share much about himself, and maintained a guarded privacy about his own affairs. He was not particularly close to his family in the States, and never mentioned any romantic relationships. There were some rumors that he was gay and closeted – these, too, came to light after his death – but I never spoke to him about it.
Jeff was a basically solitary person, and around the edges of his conversation you could detect hints of melancholy. At some point he shared a quote from Doris Lessing that what all people want is “just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me.” But I was not that person for him. We spoke almost exclusively about Afghanistan and its problems; he told me stories about drugged-up suicide bombers in the war years, fraudulent NGOs, poisonous medicines; and in the years after our brief time in Kabul we texted infrequently over Twitter or Telegram. Over time we texted less and less. By the time I’d found out that he was dead I had not thought about him in months. I did not expect to be so affected by the news.
I will not lie to myself or to the reader and say that this eulogy of sorts sums up Jeff, for I knew him poorly, and all eulogies are pale beside the experience of any particular life. Our time in each other’s company was brief and professional. I do not know if Jeff will have a funeral or if much else will be written in his memory, and if those words written in his memory will come from those who knew him: since his life and death won’t fit into any narratives of much convenience I find it doubtful. He had a life that has now ended; and we will never know what that life was for itself, for we can see his life only dimly and without mercy, as a stranger might view our own life. I will not pretend that his contributions will survive long in the minds of others, for he labored for purposes obscure to the outside world and for causes that are in likelihood doomed. But he lived and now does not, and once could be counted among the ranks of my friends and now cannot. I will miss him.