The federal government announced an investigation and congress declared it would hold public hearings this fall on our Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie’s investigative piece about how American tax payers’ money is ending up in the hands of the Taliban. You have got to read this piece which was credited on CNN, CBS, Reuters, HuffingtonPost and all over the blogosphere and different websites. It was one of those stories that staggers the mind. The headline says it all: “US taxpayers funding the Taliban?”

MacKenzie’s reporting focuses on what has long been an open secret in Afghanistan, that the Taliban has established what is essentially a protection racket in which it takes a cut of up to 20 percent from contractors receiving hundreds of millions of dollars for development projects in Afghanistan. Twenty percent.

That’s a big cut even for the mafia. The Italian organized crime families traditionally took only 10 percent of the construction industry in the cities in controlled.

I was thinking about that this morning as I walked near our headquarters here on Atlantic Avenue in Boston and saw one of the last great mafia funerals.

The black limos were lined up along the narrow streets of the North End, this city’s Italian neghborhood. And there were flatbed trucks filled with fresh cut flowers. And wise guys in black suits with sunglasses were standing solemnly as the casket of Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, one of the most powerful mafia figures in New England as his coffin was loaded into the hearse.

Angiulo died a free man, but only after serving 25 years in federal prison on a litany of charges including racketeering, gambling and loansharking. He was 90 years old.

The scene got me thinking about the federal government’s long fight against organized crime in America and what it can teach us about the struggle against the Taliban.

In the end of the day, the Taliban are criminal thugs and the sooner the US treats them that way, the sooner the government will begin to have impact in Afghanistan. After all, it was when the federal government stopped fighting the mafia and starting trying to cut off their money supply that they succeeded in breaking its hold on cities like Chicago and New York and Boston. It’s time for the US State Department to start thinking that way about the Taliban. Go after the money. To his credit, US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke likes this strategy, but Washington has been slow to move on granting him the auditors and investigators he has requested. And meanwhile the Taliban continues to brazenly carry out its protection rackets and pocket what is estimated to be at least tens of millions of dollars in money that was meant to build bridges and roads and other public works.

The Taliban are an armed insurgency for sure, but they are also a corrupt crime family, not unlike the mafia, that uses fear tactics to control its population and fund its organization. Like the mafia, the Taliban is beloved in the local community because it offers security and a sense of belonging. The North End has always been the safest place to live in Boston. And the community have always looked out for each other. After all, “Cosa Nostra,” means “Our Thing,” in Italian.

That really is not that different from the Pashtun villages where the Taliban holds power. It is ‘their thing.” They know the people, they keep the peace, they protect the collective culture and their way of life and they quite simply kill anyone who gets out of line or threatens their hold on power. Angiulo would have understood that. But he never would have understood 20 percent. In the old world of the mafia, that is just not gentlemanly. It’s not honorable.

Jerry Angiulo must be rolling over in his grave.

And yesterday the world mourned the loss of the last surviving son of an Irish-American family from Boston that suffered triumph and tragedy, sometimes scandal, and came to define American politics.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the last of the legendary political dynasty of brothers and one of the most effective legislators in recent history, died Tuesday night.

Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who was known as the “lion” of liberalism, was 77 years old.

The death of Sen. Kennedy, who had been suffering from brain cancer, was announced by the family Wednesday morning from the family compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The news came even as the family was gathering to mourn the loss of the senator’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died two weeks ago.

GlobalPost will be taking reports from around the world on the Kennedy legacy and GlobalPost Washington correspondent John Aloysius Farrell will be compiling a remembrance of the senator he covered and the legacy the Kennedy family leaves across the globe.

Not exactly.

And definitely not these days with a spate of suicide bombings, one of which exploded outside a mosque where worshipers were lining up before the Friday prayer service in the northwest of the country.

Photographer: Asim Hafeez / June 6 2009.

The blast reportedly took 29 lives and came amid an all-out military offensive by Pakistan aimed at confronting a rising Taliban insurgency concentrated in the Swat Valley.

It’s my first time back in Pakistan in more than two years, and the situation has deteriorated rapidly in that time. On this trip, I will be revisiting many of the places and people I have reported on before as a way to assess where the situation stands. I am here on a partnership with GlobalPost and the BBC/PRI program The World, which is produced at WGBH in Boston.

My reporting will focus on the Taliban, which I first started covering in 1995. Although there was no claim of responsibility as yet in the bombing that took place at about 1:30 PM local time, all eyes are on the Taliban which analysts say is desperate to respond to the military’s purported successes in pushing back the Taliban insurgency that has been raging in the Swat Valley for months.

Pakistani television reports broadcast the aftermath of the bombing and reporters on the scene quoted military officials who put the death toll at 29 with at least 40 wounded.

The violence came just one day after the country’s leaders urged President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, who is visiting the region, to provide more aid to stave off Taliban-led militancy in the northwest of the country.

The Pakistani military has dramatically stepped up its fight against the Taliban in the last month. One of Pakistan’s leading English language newspapers, Dawn, carried a front-page headline today proclaiming, “Tide has Turned Against Terrorists.”

Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani said, “The tide in Swat has decisively turned and major population centers and roads leading to the valley have been largely cleared of organized resistance by the Taliban.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast at the Sunni Muslim mosque in the Haya Gai area of Upper Dir, a rugged and lawless province that straddles the Swat Valley.

Photogrpher: Asim Hafeez / June 6 2009

As a country that has too often found itself confronting the futility of its force in the post 9-11 world, the patient, well-executed US Navy mission that freed Captain Richard Phillips came as a welcome ending to the five-day standoff.

Navy Seals shot three of the pirates saying that Phillips was in “imminent danger.” A fourth pirate was detained. It turns out that President Obama had given clear orders to use lethal force if necessary to protect Phillips. And in doing that Obama has successfully navigated his first significant international crisis. It was a small confrontation in relative terms given that Iraq and Afghanistan loom so large. But small failures can have big consequences as Presidents Carter and Clinton learned all too well in their first terms.

Obama said he is “resolved to to halt the rise of piracy.” And yesterday he backed up that resolve with action and saved the life of a man whose crew see him as a hero for sacrificing his own life to save theirs. We don’t have a chance to write about too many heroes these days. But the story of the drama in the Gulf of Aden gave us a chance to do just that.

Her exclusive interview with two former officials from the deposed Taliban government offers the kind of insight on the Obama administration’s rethinking of Afghanistan and opening the door to talks with the Taliban.

On March 7, the New York Times broke the story of Obama reaching out to the Taliban as the US did to Sunni insurgents in Iraq with great success. That was an important story, but it was delivered to the New York Times on Air Force One. It was about access in Washington.

What Jean delivered to us tonight after a very long day is about the gritty, dusty reporting in the field that only comes from living in the place about which you write. She is a courageous and talented war correspondent who offers GlobalPost readers an incredible glimpse into the thinking of the Taliban and how the US might find an opening for important talks that could lead to reconciliation with some elements of the Taliban. It is a report packed with history and understanding.

It is the definition of GroundTruth.

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.