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The battle for Kandahar is the end game in Afghanistan.

With General David Petraeus taking command on July 4,  the offensive is slowly, grinding to a start as the surge of 30,000 additional troops hits the ground in Afghanistan and the “fighting season” begins. GlobalPost is chronicling this critical turning point in what has become America’s longest war with a stellar team of correspondents in the field. You can follow these reports every day in a new blog we have launched called Dispatches: Afghanistan.

Throughout this summer and into the fall,  GlobalPost will stay on the story. Check, out the outstanding videography and narrative field reporting by Kevin Sites and the excellent photo reportage by Ben Brody. These two correspondents are traveling and working together to bring home the reality of this war. They are both experienced veterans of combat. Sites has reported from dozens of hot spots including Iraq and Afghanistan. And Brody was a U.S. military combat photographer before he joined GlobalPost. Their work is augmented by GlobalPost Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie who is writing about the big picture of the war and working with a network of Afghan reporters who are watching the developments and, through MacKenzie’s dispatches,  providing a unique perspective of how this offensive is perceived by the Afghans themselves.

Dispatches: Afghanistan

So, first of all apologies for abandoning my post here for so long. Not cool. But these are incredibly busy — and good — days at GlobalPost. Lots going on. And every day we are busy editing the work of correspondents who are out there doing great reporting in the field and living up to the central premise of “groundtruth,” which is the simple fact of being there. And often those correspondents are putting themselves in harms way to deliver for us here in Boston and  we never want to forget that. So here I am rushing to finish the week and head out for a long, Memorial Day weekend and I realized I gotta stop for a minute of remembrance of my own. Yes, for all of those who’ve fallen defending the country for sure. But also for all of those journalists who’ve fallen in covering those wars, and for all those who are still out there still doing the work. We have a lot of great reporters all over the world who do work every day that is nothing short of heroic in bringing us the stories we need to know to understand what is happening on the ground. In the spirit of honoring that work , here is an email I just got from Ben Gilbert, our Lebanon correspondent, who is now on an embed in Afghanistan. Check it out:

Hey Charlie –
The long hot summer has begun.
Sorry I’ve been out of touch. The 101st Calvalry Squadron I’m with lost their first soldier the day I was with them (on the air assault operation I was supposed to go on) so we’ve had blackout on communications since then.
I’ve made it to a company sized (troop, for cavalry) Combat Outpost called COP Wilderness.

We got into a firefight today.  AK’s and RPG’s.  The Afghans stopped their (Toyota) truck and ran to a dirt hill as the americans opened up with everything they had.  Then they laid down mortars.  Then, apaches showed up.  Then, the Taliban shot at one of the apaches with an RPG.  And missed.  Then, they took off and probably had dinner as the Amerians hunted for them on foot until dusk. Then we hauled ass back to the COP, where at least three PFC’s were proud of the fact they would now receive their combat infantryman’s badge.

One PFC had five rounds hit the ballistic sheild on his 50 Caliber turret mounted machine gun.  The truck took three other rounds on the side.

I had a front row seat, and was in the truck with the Mark 19 grenade launcher…

This is like the third contact this company has had this week — things are heating up here.  The brigade had three other TICS while we were in contact.  There are reports of Taliban coming in from Pakistan, and intimidating locals.  The Khost-Ghardez highway is being funded with 30 million in USAID Funds, and tribal disputes have put work on hold.  So, the local men have no income.  Easy prey for Taliban recruits, the Americans say.

Still, the contact, and fact that the battallion just lost their first guy, AND that there’s another surge brigade coming into this brigade’s AO in the fall, and some other shit going on, makes for a good story about the summer thaw in the east, as everyone focuses on the south.

I’d like to file it for Friday or Monday, depending on what else these guys have me going out on tomorrow.

BTW — i’m on the MWR computer (eight computers in all) so I won’t have regular access to email and my phone isn’t working here.

Thanks and talk soon,

Ben

“The Long, Hot Summer Has Begun:” A blast of “groundtruth” from Afghanistan

I was looking back at the last week of coverage and wanted to pause to highlight two recent pieces where GlobalPost correspondents dug deep into their beats, using enterprising reporting and digging and good-old fashioned shoe leather reporting.

Bogotá-based correspondent Nadja Drost revisited the dark chapters of Colombia through a court case ruling on a 2005 massacre of seven members of a peace community in Northern Colombia. Drost’s investigation used deep reporting, examination of court documents and interviews with military officials to draw out the story of exactly what happened, from U.S. military partner General Montoya down to the local impact of the killings. Where U.S. taxpayers thought they were supporting the fight against narco-terrorism and the FARC, in reality they helped to fund a hidden dirty war in Colombia.

Part one of Drost’s report depicts how the massacre occurred. Part two examines the massacre’s fallout and the court case. On the ground, a quiet monument to the village’s fallen is a reminder of how violence can rip apart such small, innocent communities.

A pile of stones lies in the center of the village of San Jose de Apartado. Each time a community member is murdered, their name is painted on a stone and added to the mound. (Photo courtesy John Lindsay-Poland)

GlobalPost correspondent Kathleen E. McLaughlin contributed three new installments to our “Silicon Sweatshops” series, investigating worker conditions in American electronics factories in China. McLaughlin traced the impact of Apple’s use of n-hexane to clean LCD screens- a substance that has hospitalized workers with nerve damage. Our report also examines the uncertainties of worker compensation. Will injured workers actually receive aid promised by law? McLaughlin talks to a Chinese lawyer familiar with such cases to find out, uncovering the international consequences of American consumption.

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GlobalPost Managing Editor Thomas Mucha attended The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW)’s 47th annual conference at the University of Arizona’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism this past week, collecting “Best in Business” journalism prizes awarded to GlobalPost for our “Silicon Sweatshops”, “World of Trouble” and “Living in the Shadows” projects, as well as Mucha’s own column.

GroundTruth from Colombia to China

Rose Devine was the eyes and ears and the heart and soul of The Boston Globe. As the operator at the switchboard in the newsroom for more than 20 years, Rose knew GroundTruth and she loved it.

She loved everything about reporting –  the crackling sound of police radios and the breathless calls from reporters out hustling a big story somewhere in the city back in the day long before cell phones and texting. She listened to those who would call in to drop a dime on a corrupt politician, to complain about a story or to sing the praises of something they’d read. She knew names and kept phone numbers and always had an idea about how to pursue a story.

In my case, I was usually calling in to the switchboard from the Middle East. Rose would pick up the line when I was  calling in on a satphone from Iraq or Gaza with all hell breaking loose in the background and the connection going in and out. She would dispatch someone to go pull the editors out of a meeting or find them in the cafeteria. And she’d stay with me on the line, catching me up on all that was going on in the newsroom and she’d ask about what was going where I was and then like punctuation at the end of a sentence she’d ask me the same question every time:  “Hey, have you called your wife?”

She was always reminding those of us in the field about what’s important.

“When’s the last time you read a story to your kids?” she’d ask with an accent sharpened in her native South Boston.

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Rose was the daughter of a an Irish cleaning woman, or “scrubby,” as they were known who mopped the floors of the Globe. Her father was a Longshoreman. Her parents were both immigrants from Ireland and Rose was fiercely proud of her ancestry and just as proud of her hometown of “Southie.” She loved to sing the old Irish songs and she knew every word to every one of them. She and her sister Barbara, who was also an operator at the Globe, were inseparable. She was  a loving mother and a doting grandmother. And she was the kind of friend who always had time to listen and offer a quick bit of advice whether you wanted it or not. Before I went overseas for the Globe, we’d share laughs and cigarettes in the small, windowless office of  columnist Mike Barnicle. They were good days when newspapers still had confidence and swagger and great characters and a great value for GroundTruth.

Here’s how Barnicle described Rose in the Globe obituary:

“She was absolutely the heart and soul of The Boston Globe. Rose knew everyone she looked out at, sitting in the newsroom. She knew something about their lives, she knew things about their families, a child’s illness, a daughter getting into college, a marriage breaking up. She also happened to be one of the finest reporters I’ve ever met. She had a sense of what news was, what stories people wanted to read, and what people would read.’’

Fittingly enough Rose’s wake was held on St. Patrick’s Day. A funeral Mass was held the day after.  And today she was laid to rest.  She was 73.

Waking Rose Devine

Take a journey on the Colorado River with photographer Brian L. Frank and see the “dust bowl era” images of life along its banks. “Death of the Colorado” is a powerful statement and part of our “Full Frame” series in which GlobalPost highlights the work of outstanding photographers around the world. Brian is a major talent who has a lot of voice as a writer and as a photographer. He is a storyteller. And the images he brings to the site raise important questions about how the profligate waste of water on the American side of the river is devastating the communities that rely on its bounty across the border in Mexico.

See below for Brian’s audio slideshow, featuring the photographer’s own narration of the project.

A powerful journey along the Colorado River

NEW YORK — GlobalPost is proud to announce that our coverage of the global economic crisis has won four Best in Business awards given by The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW).

In the Enterprise category we won for our in-depth series “World of Trouble” on the global economic recession. GlobalPost’s Managing Editor Thomas Mucha led the coverage by 20 correspondents in 20 countries who provided what we call “groundtruth.” That is reporting that focuses on how this sprawling crisis affects real people, their lives, jobs and living standards. Not the kind of coverage that relies on talking heads and analysts on Wall Street, but gritty, down-to-earth reporting in the field by correspondents who live in the countries about which they are writing.

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GlobalPost also won two awards in the Special Projects category: for our series “Living in the Shadows” about migrant workers in China, reported by correspondents Kathleen McLaughlin, Sharron Lovell and Josh Chin, and by Mucha; and for “Silicon Sweatshops”, a five-part investigation of the supply chains that produce many of the world’s most popular technology products, reported by correspondents Jonathan Adams and Kathleen McLaughlin. And finally we won in Columns, again our Thomas Mucha, for his excellent and insightful columns on global business issues.

From Greece to China and Argentina to India, GlobalPost plans to stay on the story of the swirling economic crisis and the ways in which it affects us all. Stay tuned!

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Our team wins awards for providing “groundtruth” on the global economic crisis

One year ago to the day, we launched GlobalPost and it has been a helluva good year. We’ve built an amazing team of correspondents, columnists and editors and a growing community of visitors to the site. I’d like to thank all of you who make up that loyal community and turn to GlobalPost for stories that enlighten and inform from every corner of the world. We have a lot to celebrate and a lot of challenges ahead in 2010. I invite any and all of you to get in touch and let me know your thoughts about our news organization in its first year and how we might improve our coverage. What are the stories we’re missing, the countries we should be covering, the angles we don’t see. Please feel free to post a comment here on the blog or on GlobalPost.com. I value your input and I will do my best to get back to you.

Here is a first anniversary memo that I sent out today to our team of more than 70 correspondents in 50 countries. In the spirit of transparency and pride over what we have accomplished, I thought I’d share it here:

To all GlobalPost correspondents, columnists and editors,

Thank you for all the great work that made our first year at GlobalPost a spectacular success.

On this day one year ago, we set out on a journey to create a new voice in international news for the digital age. And now one year after launch we’ve achieved that. In fact, we have surpassed all of our goals on the editorial side by making an impact in the field of foreign reporting and in building an audience.

We’ve achieved what many said was impossible: drawing millions of actively engaged readers to our site by offering quality, in-depth coverage of international affairs. We’ve built the foundation of a GlobalPost community that understands that the challenges we face – terrorism, climate change, economic crisis — are global, and therefore require a news organization that is global in reach.

We’ve broken news and been recognized for coverage that takes readers beyond the daily headlines and into virtually every corner of the world. All of you make up a fantastic team of writers, photographers, videographers and editors who’ve provided rigorous journalism and riveting storytelling. To put it simply, we owe our success in this first year to you, our team in the field.

Cheers!

We have many challenges ahead this year. And in many ways 2010 will be the pivotal year for this bold attempt in online journalism. We will need to build on our success and at the same work to protect our brand. We have to keep our standards for quality journalism at the highest level. In that spirit, I am once again attaching our field guide for correspondents and a new correction policy. Please read them both.

We must continue to develop our GlobalPost brand that uniquely blends old-school reporting and a digital-age desire to break new ground in multimedia. We have to continue to seek out “ground truth,” the facts on the ground gotten only by living where you report and analyze. We have to continue to produce special projects, and I invite you to propose ideas through your editor.

In short, we must continue while stepping up our game even more. We need to break news and find stories that matter and get noticed. Along these lines, we welcome any and all ideas for high-impact reports from the field.

We’re now able to amplify this kind of outstanding work by our editorial team through carefully cultivated partnerships. As many of you know, we’ve established key editorial partnerships with CBS News and PBS’ NewsHour. Your reporting and a special series of reports titled “On Location” are regularly featured on these broadcasts.

We’ve established syndication partnerships with some 25 newspapers, including the Newark Star Ledger, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the New York Daily News, the Cambodia Daily News, the Khaleej Times, the South China Morning Post and others around the United States and around the world. Your work is appearing in the pages of these newspapers and being read by a growing and loyal audience who are starting to recognize the brand, GlobalPost.

We’ve developed linking agreements with big players on the web, including the Huffington Post, NewsMax, Reuters, AOL and others. In these agreements, we offer stories from the field so that they can reach a wider audience. In exchange, we receive links back to our site, which has proven to be a steady driver of traffic.

Our audience growth has been outstanding and has far surpassed goals we set last year. We had originally hoped to achieve 600,000 unique visitors per month in our first year. We surged past 500,000 in October, and by November achieved 750,000 unique visitors in a month. That pace of growth has allowed us to feel confident that we can close in on our goal this year of 1 million unique visitors per month.

The 1 million threshold puts us in league with many large news gathering sites and will be critically important for advertisers and our ability to become a self-sustaining enterprise.

As we have built the brand and the audience, we have gathered the support of several national advertising accounts. These sponsors include Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Liberty Mutual and Siemens. With the solid editorial team we have built, the reputation we have earned as a serious news organization, and a rapidly growing and increasingly engaged audience, we feel we are now poised in 2010 to make great strides on the business side. For a detailed picture of where we are in the business plan, please read CEO Phil Balboni’s year-end message.

We are well into this journey now, but we still have a long way to go. I look forward to hearing from all you about your ideas and your feedback on how best to navigate the way forward.

Respectfully,


Charles M. Sennott

Executive Editor and Co-Founder

The Pilot House, Lewis Wharf

Boston, MA

GlobalPost celebrates its first anniversary

GlobalPost invites you to listen to “This Year with Global Post,” a special radio report in partnership with WGBH-Boston on how our correspondents have covered the big stories of 2009. I am hosting the radio show and will be talking with our correspondents around the world about the global economic crisis, the war in Afghanistan, climate change and the many challenges that lie ahead in 2010 and beyond. The show will air on the PBS flagship WGBH (89.7 FM) in Boston at noon on Thursday, Dec. 31. And will be rebroadcast on WGBH on Sunday at 8 p.m. It will also be available online through WGBH.org. You can also hear a podcast of the program.

This Year With GlobalPost

As the plot thickens in the case of the thwarted Christmas bombing by a Nigerian man purportedly trained by Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, the US is reportedly stepping up its counter-terrorism efforts to open a largely covert front in Yemen.

The New York Times reported this on its front page Monday as a follow to the story of the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a chemical bomb. The chemical detonator failed and passengers jumped him, preventing the attack from taking down the airliner.

The New York Times’ Eric Schmitt and Robert F. Worth had some interesting facts about how the CIA began a program a year ago to send top field operatives in Yemen. They also revealed that the Pentagon is spending $70 million over the next 18 months and using teams of special forces to work with the Yemeni military in counter-terrorism

At GlobalPost and here on this blog, we first reported the US expanding its counter-terrorism initiative to Yemen and around the Horn of Africa back in September. It looks like we were on to something and we will continue to follow the story.

CIA and special forces turn the spotlight on Yemen

When President Obama announced Tuesday night that he will “finish the job” in Afghanistan and the White House began its hard sell to the media on the idea of a troop increase of approximately 30,000, there is one looming question that rises above all others.

What does “finish the job” mean?

There is a desperate need to clarify the mission in Afghanistan that far exceeds any consideration of troop size in Afghanistan.

When Obama delivers his national address on Tuesday and announces the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency, he will have to sell the troop increase with a contradictory mix of resolve and exit strategy in a war that is entering its ninth year.

It will be a hard sell to an increasingly skeptical American public, an over-stretched military, a faltering international coalition, wary Afghan neighbors such as Pakistan and Russia and a Democrat-controlled congress that might for the first time resist getting in line with a popular president. It will even be a hard sell to the military brass and political hard-liners who will see it a halting, half step toward what is needed for success.

But as he tries to close a fateful deal, the thing to look for is not whether it is 20,000 or 25,000 or 30,000 or even 40,000 troops, but whether he has succeeded in clarifying the mission and clearly explaining what he means by “finish the job.”

Is this a comprehensive and classic counter-insurgency campaign intended to deliver a death blow to Al Qaeda as well as the Taliban? Or is this a more focused counter-terrorism strategy that will cripple Al Qaeda and contain the Taliban by bringing into the fold moderate elements and chasing from the cities the more militant factions?

If it is indeed a broad counter-insurgency campaign as President Obama’s rhetoric in recent weeks and the leaks from General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and others would suggest then the math doesn’t add up and the administration’s proposed troop increase is a perilous miscalculation.

Here’s why.

Al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters who live and die by the ideology of Osama bin Laden, according to the military’s own assessment. The Taliban is a multi-layered, multi-factional, cross-border ethnic, social and religious armed movement with wide support and deep roots in Afghanistan, particularly in its most remote regions. The many elements of the Taliban live and die and are in fact bound together by an enduring commitment to resisting corruption among Afghan leaders who control Kabul and resist any empire that should try to occupy its land.

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A fight against the ragtag remnants of Al Qaeda does not require any more troops, it requires instead better, more focused tactics and much better intelligence, particularly from neighboring Pakistan. A fight against the Taliban is never going to have sufficient troops levels even with the the 100,000 U.S. troops that will be in country if and when the 30,000 troop increase takes effect. Just ask the British military historians and the retired generals of the former Soviet Union who still remember their humiliating retreat from Afghanistan like so many empires before them.

This calculation of doom is based not only on the lessons of history, but also on what is known as “battlefield geometry,” the laws of which are very clearly spelled out in the U.S. military’s own field manual for counter insurgency.

That manual was co-authored by one of the world’s greatest military minds on counter insurgency, General David Petraeus, and in the document he calls for troop ratios that would far exceed — by at least a factor of two — what the U.S. and its withering coalition partners would have on the ground with this proposed increase.

Furthermore, a troop increase of tens of thousands more U.S. soldiers could significantly hinder an effective counter-terrorism strategy by alienating the Pashtun villages where the Taliban is strongest, according to many leading counter-insurgency experts from Washington to Helmand.

Troops that are thrown into Afghanistan without a deep understanding of its history and its tribal structure will inevitably make serious mistakes and likely be seen as an occupying force. So a bungled troop increase could, in effect, inflame the Taliban and make it stronger.

This is a critical decision by President Obama with enormous import for our country, for military families who will pay the price and for Afghanistan. No one should fault the president for careful deliberation, which the far right’s commentators prefer to call “dithering.” But it is fair and important to challenge the president on this proposed troop increase and to press him hard with an eye toward history and to ask whether his “finish the job” comment will years down the road ring just as hollow in Afghanistan as the “mission accomplished” sign came to signify the failures of the president before him in Iraq.

So will Obama’s vow to “finish the job” in Afghanistan end up ringing as hollow as “mission accomplished” in Iraq?