The curious life and lonely death of an American in Kabul

Sofie Buckminster
Sun, November 16, 2025 at 1:06 PM EST



The News
A year ago, Jeff Rigsby hammered out a 13-post thread to X dissecting the feasibility of a proposed natural gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan to India, via Afghanistan. The writing was characteristic of his style: urgent, heavily researched and focused on a niche topic that he kept returning to. (“People are probably tired of seeing me tweet that the TAPI pipeline… is never going to be built,” he wrote.)

The 54-year-old American had many such interests. His 12,000 posts — some with millions of views — spanned issues from public health to energy, across geographies from South Asia to Switzerland.

The thread was emblematic of him in other ways, too. Rigsby had typed it out from his apartment in Kabul, a city he had moved back to two years prior. Afghans he knew were simultaneously fascinated and terrified by his willingness to expound on all manner of topics, including those that might ultimately be critical of the ruling Taliban authorities. He was, one Kabuli friend told me over the phone, “truly a friend to the Afghans.”

At that point, Rigsby had been on the road for some 30 years. A precocious North Carolina boy who enrolled at Harvard at 16, he had left the US soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, arriving in Kabul via Japan, China, a prior period in Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/curious-life-lonely-death-american-180608632.html