You can check out the interview here.

Everyone who is anyone in Kabul was gathering for the ceremony at a heavily guarded military base where Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former top special operations commander, took charge of nearly 90,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

McChrystal told the gathering on Monday that the US and coalition forces must protect Afghan civilians from all kinds of violence.

“The Afghan people are at the center of our mission. In reality, they are the mission. We must protect them from violence, whatever its nature,” McChrystal said. “But while operating with care, we will not be timid.”

McChrystal takes charge in Afghanistan at a fateful turn in the US military presence here as an increase of some 21,000 troops gets underway and the US braces for a full-on offensive against the Taliban in the south.

It’s going to be a long, hot summer in Afghanistan.

And President Hamid Karzai is turning up the heat on U.S. forces to prevent civilian deaths. It is a problem that has plagued the US operation and caused wide-spread anger among Afghans about the US presence here.

The death of what the Afghan government claims was 140 civilians during May 4 air strikes in the Farah province is largely perceived as the tragedy that cost General David McKiernan his job and effectively ended his military career. A US military inquiry stated that the number of civilian casualties in Farah was lower, and estimated that the attacks killed approximately 30 civilians and some 60 Taliban militants.

GlobalPost interviewed the governor of Farah Province, Roohul Amin, by phone Sunday night from inside the governor’s palace in Farah. He said that the US forces were “working very hard” to be more careful about civilian deaths.

“The truth of this is the Taliban has intentionally put civilians in the middle of the fighting. They know what they are doing,” said Amin.

McChrystal is known as a bit of a wild man and is expected to take a more “unconventional” approach to taking on the Taliban. That may mean less air strikes and more targeted assassinations, observers here say. It is an approach grows out of his long experience with special forces and elite military units like Navy SEALs and Army’s Delta Force.

And these “unconventional” approaches can come with risks of their own.

Like we said, it’s going to be a long, hot summer.

U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, right, salutes during his assumption of a command ceremony as the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in Kabul. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Photography by: Seamus Murphy

For a moment, you feel what it must have been like to live here in the early 1960s.

That’s when Dupree first arrived in Kabul and where she would meet the two great loves of her life. The first was her husband, Louis Dupree, the dashing American paratrooper turned world-famous archaeologist. The second love was one they both shared: the cultural and historic riches of the rugged, magical landscape of Afghanistan and its people.

As an archaeologist and ethnologist, Afghanistan has been the focus of their life’s work.

She and Louis, who passed away in 1989, lived through it all and suffered with the Afghans through the wars and celebrated the life that has gone on in between. She survived the dark days of the civil war here in the early 1990s and the even darker days of the Taliban. Through it all, she studied and worked to protect and preserve the country’s culture and heritage. Today, there is no Westerner who knows the Afghan people like Nancy.

Some 45 years after her arrival here, I meet with Dupree on a sunny day in the late afternoon shadows of the once-grand home where she lives part of the year in downtown Kabul.

The rest of the year she lives just across the border in Peshawar, Pakistan still writing and researching at the age of 83. She divides her time between the two cities tending to an archive that is housed at Kabul University. The archive, an idea inspired by Louis, is dedicated to creating a resource center for all the different aid workers and Afghan experts who could no longer travel freely in war-torn Afghanistan.

She looks heart sick when she talks about the Taliban’s destruction of the two giant Buddha’s of Bamayan. She also wants to set the record straight that she was negotiating with the Taliban leadership to protect the Buddha’s, and believes the decision to dynamite them was made by a militant fringe closely connected to Al Qaeda. She insists that many in the Taliban government were opposed to the destruction, but the militants had run away with the Taliban movement.

She holds the secrets to so much of the politics that has gone on in Afghanistan, but at every turn the conversation comes back to the Afghan people and her love for and fascination with them and their history.

“I’m a people person,” says Nancy, who apologizes that she doesn’t have much time to talk as she is heading out to a party at the embassy to meet the newly appointed American Ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who also served as the commanding general in Afghanistan.

Right away, she wants to get into it.

Nancy still has a lot of fire in her voice and she has some stern criticism of the U.S. military and diplomatic approach in Afghanistan.

“They make strategies for people who they don’t talk to,” she says, sitting on a couch in the parlor where we are talking and leaning forward with intensity.

“They sit behind the fortress with razor wire walls of the Embassy. And the rest make their strategy from behind desks thousands of miles away … They don’t seem to realize that the strategy has to be about the people,” she says.

She checks her watch and says, “Sorry, I have to go put on my face now and get ready for all the diplomats. Too many of them, if you ask me.”

Moments later she heads out through the steel gate, looking elegant in a long, traditional embroidered gown. She slides into the back seat and she and her driver head out down the crowded, chaotic and sometimes-perilous streets of the city she loves.

And yesterday, opening day for the Red Sox, represents a kind of religious holiday in this baseball-obsessed town. One of the high priests of the temple is David Ortiz, “Big Papi.” He is one of the greatest home-run hitters in the game and like approximately 10 percent of the players in Major League Baseball he hails from the Dominican Republic. The tiny Caribbean nation has developed a booming export market for baseball talent.

And so in celebration of opening day, GlobalPost began a continuing series titled “Dominican Dreams: El Barrio to the Big Leagues.” It is GroundTruth on the desperate race by teenage talent to make it out of the poverty of the Dominican Republican to win a coveted spot in the baseball academies where the lucky and the talented will be groomed for a lucrative contract in Major League Baseball. Follow the characters in the series — the talented recruit, the hard-ball agent, the corporate brokers for MLB — all through the summer on the chase for the Dominican Dream. The series is written and produced by the very talented documentary team of Casey Beck and Trevor Martin.

The Honorable Barack Hussein Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20520

Paris, February 17, 2009

Dear Mr. President:

Dear Madam Secretary of State

Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization, would like to draw your attention to the situation of journalists in a number of countries now ranked as diplomatic priorities for the U.S. government. Mr. President, you appointed yourself to be the spokesperson in the fight for the right to inform and to be informed while visiting the Sudan in 2006, when you stated: “Press freedom is like tending a garden, it’s never done.” These words are somewhat reminiscent of those spoken by President Thomas Jefferson: “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that limited without danger of losing it.”

We consider it essential that the country of the First Amendment actively participate in promoting human rights within the international community, and especially in those regions of the planet in which these rights are being repeatedly violated. The executive order signed on January 22, 2009, which was aimed at putting an end to the humanitarian and legal scandal represented by the Guantanamo detention camp sent, in our opinion, an important signal. Moreover, we are expecting the new Congress to finally approve a “shield law” guaranteeing journalists federal protection for the privilege of source confidentiality, thus sparing the latter from prison terms like those handed down under the previous administration-a period characterized by a decline in public freedoms. What is at stake is not only the preservation of a basic principle of investigative journalism, but also of the quality of information that the American public has a right to expect.

The fact that the United States of America is speaking on behalf of human rights obviously implies that you must keep a particularly close watch in regions where you have established a military presence. The war that began in Iraq in 2003 has been the bloodiest of all time for local and foreign journalists, and the U.S. Army bears the heavy burden of responsibility for some of these tragedies. The necessary withdrawal of the troops that you plan to successfully carry out by 2011 must be accompanied by guarantees essential to peace. In Afghanistan, too, the U.S. Army has too often hindered journalists’ work, and Bagram Prison remains closed to the media. As a Reporters Without Borders’ delegation realized during an on-site mission there in January 2009, American support of early efforts to further a democratic process have in no way prevented violations of the freedom to inform and to be informed by Afghan courts. Case in point: Perwiz Kambakhsh’s 20-year prison sentence, upheld on appeal, for having downloaded “blasphemous” material on the condition of women in the country.

Your decision to promote dialogue with certain powers cannot fail to take into account this necessity, either. In China, the Olympic Games did very little to further the progress of freedom of expression. We hope, Madam Secretary of State, that your next visit to the country, February 20 to 22, will induce Chinese authorities to release prisoners of conscience. The “comprehensive dialogue” that you wish to initiate must keep its promises by venturing beyond economic and trade considerations. In the world’s biggest prison for freelance journalists and cyberdissidents, it is nearly impossible to pick up broadcasts from such stations as Radio Free Asia or Voice of America, and websites of American daily newspapers like The New York Times are still blocked. Your “extended hand” to Iran, whose Internet connection capacities rely upon U.S. companies, calls for a relaxation of the filtering now being imposed on foreign media websites and an end to the legal harassment of human rights and gender equity activists such as lawyer Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Founder of the Circle for the Defenders of Human Rights.

History has shown it, and you have understood it: placing a ban on countries subject to the most repressive regimes has often exacerbated their isolation without changing the attitude of their leaders. That is why we are particularly focusing on the State Department’s desire to mediate in favor of a genuine sharing of power between the political forces present in Zimbabwe. The participation of Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC in the government is an essential precondition for reinstating freedoms, for an in-depth reform of press laws and for foreign journalists to gain access to a country in chaos. Although Western chanceries have spoken out against Robert Mugabe and his regime, their silence in the face of the tyranny prevailing in Eritrea is all the more incomprehensible.

Moreover, being aware of your personal attachment to East Africa, Mr. President, you cannot tolerate the fact that the Asmara government, some members of which also possess American citizenship, is targeting Eritrean exiles – of whom there are many in the United States – for extortion and threatening them with reprisals against their friends and relatives remaining in the homeland, who are already being terrorized. For many years, Reporters Without Borders has been urging that the assets of certain identified leaders be frozen, that they be prohibited from entering the U.S., and that the Eritrean Ambassador to the United States be summoned without delay. The same sort of pressure needs to be placed on the Gambian government, which continues to ignore appeals from the international community, and the injunctions issued by the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) concerning the disappearance, in July 2007, of “Chief” Ebrima Manneh, a reporter for the Daily Observer. Pursuing this logic, it would be in the best interest of U.S. intelligence services to make public the information they have on the circumstances surrounding the murder, in 2004, of Deyda Hydara, editor-in-chief of Gambia’s private daily newspaper, The Point. Our organization, which had conducted two in-depth investigations on this matter, has certain details that placing the security services surrounding President Yahya Jammeh under strong suspicion.

Worldwide, there are too many of these closed-off States adept at double talk and ready to exchange a strategic position in return for impunity. How can any serious diplomatic relations-ones which truly promote peace and security-be established with regimes that are exercising draconian control over information? Syria cannot claim that it should be considered a reliable negotiating partner in the Middle East if, at the same time, it continues to violate the principles that this ambition demands. It must provide proof by releasing cyberdissidents Homam Hassan Haddad, Habib Saleh, Tariq Biasi, Kareem Arabji, Firas Saad, Muhened Abdulrahman and journalist Michel Kilo, who are being held arbitrarily. This requirement also applies to Myanmar, where dozens of recently arrested journalists and political opponents are serving their sentences under disgraceful conditions. The United States has everything to gain by strengthening the UN mandate in this country, without which contacts with the ruling junta may be permanently broken off. A dangerous isolationism, conducive to the worst kinds of human rights violations, is also at work in the strategic region of the Central Asian Republics, where Russia has regained its influence, to the detriment of that of Western countries.

The consistency and credibility of U.S. foreign policy will depend upon the ability of your administration to demonstrate the same vigilance in relations with your partners and allies. As a member of the UN Security Council and a key actor in what has become a multipolar world, Russia merits special attention. Disarmament constitutes a necessary yet inadequate step to ensure that the Kremlin can inspire confidence in the international community. The rejection of transparency by Moscow’s leaders can be seen in the troubling repression against civil society and the opposition. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, undoubtedly paid with her life for having informed the world of the horrors committed by Russian troops in Chechnya. No democracy can withstand the scrutiny of the international community and its media when it yields to the temptation to act for the worst. The Israeli offensive in Gaza, which led you to appoint a new U.S. envoy in the person of George Mitchell, reminded us of this.

Like other countries whose populations have grown mainly as a result of immigration, the United States must prepare itself to accommodate journalists fleeing oppression and terror, and grant them asylum. Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans-they are also coming in from neighboring countries, like Mexican Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, unjustly detained for seven months by the immigration services in El Paso, Texas, merely for having sought to save his own life and that of his young son. This case is the consequence of the deadly drug cartel war, intensified by the violence of the authorities, which is grieving Mexico. As you promised, Mr. President, during a meeting with President Felipe Calderón prior to your inauguration, the American and Mexican governments need to join forces if they are to secure the border between the two countries, without which no Rule of Law can exist there.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the havoc wrought by the drug traffic and paramilitarism are draining all sense from the constitutional principles previously taken for granted. In this respect, like certain members of the U.S. Congress, we would ask that Plan Colombia’s funding – so costly for the American taxpayer – be reviewed in proportion to the actual efforts being made by Bogota authorities on behalf of human rights. President Alvaro Uribe has too often connived and made irresponsible statements that have placed in jeopardy journalists of whom he did not approve, or forced them into exile. Finally, your willingness to relax the clauses of the embargo imposed since 1962 on Cuba -the only country of the continent with no free press, and in which there are 23 journalists listed among its 200 political prisoners – may persuade Havana authorities to comply more closely with the international community’s expectations. The embargo, challenged in its principle by virtually all members of the UN’s General Assembly, has done nothing but strengthen the Castrist regime, to the detriment of the Cuban people. It must be raised one day. The island’s future depends upon it.

Mr. President, Madam Secretary of State, we look forward to your response, and thank you for your consideration. I am at your disposal, as is Lucie Morillon, our Washington D.C. bureau director, should you have any questions or desire further clarification regarding the situation of journalists and press freedom around the world.

Yours very respectfully,

Jean-François Julliard

Reporters Without Borders
Secretary-General

Caryle Murphy’s piece out of Afghanistan

We have stories from Italy and India and Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Jean MacKenzie’s piece out of Afghanistan offers readers a chance to glimpse life behind the veil and outside the parameters of war and politics. She has four beautifully written vignettes of Love in the time of the Taliban.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Today’s exclusive story is bold and insightful GroundTruth.

Our correspondent in Pakistan, Shahan Mufti, has broken a news story that is a must read. Mufti knows Peshawar, Pakistan well. He’s been in and out of there and has great contacts on the ground in the rugged, ancient Silk Road town that lies near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was there covering the attacks on US military supply routes last month when he stumbled upon a market which is essentially a fencing operation for stolen US military equipment, including computers with restricted information. The theft of this property imperils the US troops in Afghanistan. And so he began to investigate.

We decided to send him into the market with a wad of cash to pose as a buyer. He was sold a US military laptop packed with sensitive information on US military equipment and logistics for about $650. He took photographs of the laptop and studied and in some cases photocopied the material that was on it. He then contacted the military attache at the US Embassy in Islamabad and eventually returned the laptop to its rightful owner: the US government.

The Pentagon tells us it is looking into how it was stolen, but clearly the military has a problem on its hands with a growing black market in Pakistan and Afghanistan for stolen US military goods. It’s supply routes are getting hit regularly. So America is learning what so many empires before it have learned: the Khyber Pass is the Achilles’ heel of armies that dare to invade a terrain as hostile and forbidding as the mountains that lie between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Throughout the ages, from Genghis Kahn, to Alexander the Great, to the British and the Soviets and now the Americans, the lesson of Afghanistan is written in stone: This place is a graveyard for invading empires.

And there couldn’t have been a more perfect vignette for the theme of our Sports columnist Mark Starr’s excellent piece on football as the metaphor for America. Starr argues that in the end of the day the gridiron doesn’t work as the organizing principle that captures who we are. We are just too complex a country, Starr writes, to be defined by any one sport. And after all the new President is all about basketball.

Petraeus is a man who captures the complexity of America, and who understands the complexity of the challenges the military faces in its struggle against terrorism. I watched Petraeus standing at mid-field at the start of the game and couldn’t help but think, he is about to toss a much more important coin in Afghanistan.

The planned troop surge in Afghanistan is a mission of chance in which he is hoping that it might help stabilize The Forgotten War. For the last six years, George W. Bush’s administration neglected the situation in Afghanistan, leaving the intelligence gathering and special operations to what was at best the B-team. President Obama has vowed to change course and double the number of US troops in Afghanistan. General Petraeus, as the head of Central Command, is completely supportive of the move and indeed had been pushing for it behind the scenes in the Bush presidency for a long time.

In the last six years, I have had a chance to observe General Petraeus up close. I was covering his 101st Airborne Division in Mosul in the first phase of the war; I met with him again in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where he and his team re-wrote the military counter-insurgency manual, I was embedded with some of his troops during the surge in Baghdad in March 2008; and I interviewed him in Washington where he unflinchingly stood before congress and told a bitterly divided country that there was no military victory in Iraq to be achieved, only a “political solution.” The surge, he said, would be the only way for the US to help Iraq find that political solution.

And Iraqi voters who safely made their way to the polls this time walked in a path cleared by the successes of Petraeus’ surge. It was Petraeus’ military leadership that made yesterday possible, and that should be recognized in all the analysis that will be going on about the results.

Our two correspondents in the field, Tom Peter and Jane Arraf, have done an outstanding job keeping us up to date on the details on the ground.

Arraf, who is also there reporting for the Christian Science Monitor, is our regional editor for the Middle East. She brings to our coverage the eye of an experienced veteran who has covered Iraq since the US led invasion in 2003 and many years before that. Her Reporter’s Notebook today from northern Iraq is a fine example of what it is to gather ‘ground truth.’

So keep checking on GlobalPost coverage of Iraq for Jane’s big-picture, election analysis which will be coming in the next few days.

The voting in Iraq came on the last day of a month in which Iraq recorded its lowest levels of violence and killing since the US led invasion began in 2003.

According to the AFP, January’s death toll was down 42 percent from December, which was at the time the lowest figure for three years. Iraq is still a very dangerous place with a total of 191 civilians, soldiers and police killed during the last 30 days. Eight candidates were killed in the run-up to the vote. And some analysts have argued that the relative calm may also be simply because those insurgents and other groups still fighting had decided not to strike. Voter turnout was low at about 55 percent. Still, who could deny that Iraq is on the road to stability even if it is not yet there?
The country has undeniably seen a turn around since the execution of the surge strategy which was conceived by Petraeus, who more than any other military leader in America has the intellectual capacity and sheer stamina to confront the extraordinary challenges that lie ahead for the US and its diminishing role in Iraq and its new level of engagement in Afghanistan.

Whether Petraeus’ newly forming strategy to increase troop levels can succeed in Afghanistan the way his surge appears to be succeeding Iraq is, well, a coin toss.

It was Napolean who, when asked what kind of generals he wants, answered, “Lucky ones.”

Let’s hope Petraeus calls it right in Afghanistan.

GlobalPost’s Egypt correspondent, Theo May, finally landed inside Gaza. Using his Blackberry to file because he couldn’t get any internet connection through his laptop, he has just filed a riveting account of what it feels like on the ground tonight under the Israeli air strikes.

Getting inside Gaza makes him one of the few Western reporters who has managed to get on the ground to document the devastation and the killing that has gone on during three weeks of an Israeli offensive. Many Palestinian reporters and photographers have been the only ones documenting the conflict. The Israelis have blocked the Western media from going inside Gaza. But Theo was able to enter from the Egyptian side of the border at Rafah.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that broke the ceasefire and began rocketing southern Israel. Israeli officials say those Hamas rocket attacks provoked their overwhelming display of force which has killed more than 1,100 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians. Theo is now in a place to be our witness on the ground and he will be bringing you his live reports from the field all weekend.

We have also put together a photo gallery of Reuters images from the Israeli offensive. The images show the massive destruction and the horrific suffering of the Palestinians under this offensive. It also shows the Israeli military carrying out what it believes is a necessary offensive to put an end to the Hamas attacks on its civilians. Some of the images are disturbing. But then again so is war.