Thanks and talk soon,

Ben

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

It is fair to ask whether those of us in the media are not too impatient on such matters. After all this is the most consequential decisioin of his presidency and isn’t deliberation and careful consideration a good thing? Well, to a point.

The truth is that Afghanistan is in a part of the world that doesn’t understand such slow, ponderings. It is mistaken for weakness. I am worried that this administration is locked in indecision.

As President Obama travels to China, the reporters in the bubble are saying that he has asked his national security team to go back at the problem and come up with new alternatives. Right now we know that General Stanley McChrystal seems to want a troop increase of somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000. That to me feels like a fateful miscalculation.

The McChrystal approach feels like a half-hearted attempt at trying to beef up a classic counter insurgency campaign when the truth is a counter insurgency campaign, by the military’s own field manual, would require hundreds of thousands of troops … Our country is not anywhere near ready to accept that kind of burden. So aren’t we wiser to go with the more contained counter-terrorism approach where we focus the mission and define victory in clear achievable terms and then focus on getting out? I think so.

I do understand the weight of the moment on this president who is already carrying a lot on his shoulders. But I truly believe the wisest course in Afghanistan is to hold the troop levels where they are now, then work to clarify the mission as counter terrroism, succeed in accomplishing its limited goals and begin to draw down the troops and leave it to the Afghan people to chart the course for the future of their country.

Whether President Obama should escalate the US troop presence in Afghanistan is coming to a head this week on the eight-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

And it is all playing out behind closed doors in the White House and the Pentagon and in the cool, air-conditioned offices behind razor wire in the U.S. Embassy compound in Kabul.

The choreography of power is under way with General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of forces in Afghanistan, entering the stage through a leaked memo and President Obama in the wings agonizing in indecision as he tries to formulate a policy.

The stuff of great tragedy.

McChrystal’s obvious lobbying in favor of a US troop increase of 40,000 over and above the 68,000 in country already has tested the patience of the Obama White House.

A speech McChrystal delivered in London earlier this week has raised many eye brows in the military-intelligence community and prompted Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration to suggest he broke the chain of command as an officer.

In the speech, McChrystal clearly tried to advance a position calling for more troops which contradicts the views of Vice President Joe Biden who favors a more modest troop presence and stepped up drone attacks.

I have been wondering for at least six months why CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus has been so conspicuously silent in this debate and why he has let McChrystal run roughshod.

And know we know the answer: General Petraeus has been undergoing radiation treatment for cancer. A statement by the military says he learned he had early-stage prostate cancer in February and for the last two months has been in treatment.

This might help to explain the chaos that has been enveloping the Obama administration’s military strategy in Afghanistan. Sometimes one man can make a difference and in the several opportunities I have had to interview General Petraeus I come away with the distinct impression that he is a game changer. He is the best mind on counter-insurgency in the American military, and we just haven’t heard much from him.

But the military insist that his doctors caught the cancer early and that the treatments have not significantly impacted his work schedule.

So perhaps the confusion runs deep in the White House as the administration scrambles to craft a coherent policy and a clear mission.

If the president were seeking advice – as if he doesn’t have enough already – there is an important consensus emerging among the counter-insurgency experts I know, including Andrew Bacevich, the Boston University professor of history and international relations. He is also a West Point graduate, a retired Army Colonel and his son, also named Andrew, was killed in action in Iraq. He speaks with the kind of authority that is shaped by experience and by loss.

Bacevich, who is widely respected for his insights on military strategy and who has been a persistent critic of the so-called “Bush doctrine,” is among those who believe a troop build up is ill-conceived and perilous, and that the continuing confusion about the mission in Afghanistan will prove disastrous for America and its allies.

The consensus is this: less is more.

There are already 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan and they need more training in the tactics of counter insurgency. They need to hit the books and study the field manual that Petraeus worked so hard to research and codify and which provides the playbook for counter-insurgency strategy in the post 9-11 era. Okay, it’s true the manual calls for troop ratios that would require a massive influx of US soldiers into Afghanistan. But even if McChrystal’s plan were put in place those ratios would still far off. So let’s put that argument aside.
The troops need to be taught much more about the culture and the politics and the religion of the people in the country where they are serving. That kind of education will make them more effective.

That’s what I learned this summer at the US military’s excellent counter-insurgency training center at a forward operating base outside Kabul. You can check that out in our special report on Afghanistan titled “Life, Death and the Taliban.”

An escalation of troops – more troops who don’t know enough about where they are – could potentially work against the US in Afghanistan by further alienating the local population rather than providing it more security. More troops can lose hearts and minds, if their mission is unclear and they are clumsy in carrying out counter-insurgency.
Similarly, the hydrant blast of US funding for development and military aid that is pouring into Afghanistan in the billions of dollars is also fraught with peril.
On face value, it would seem that giving the Afghans more and more money to create an infrastructure and build the institutions of governance that they will need could only serve to help a country that has been a basket case for so long, right?

Well, not all think so. Including some, like Andrew Wilder, who have spent a lifetime in third world development particularly in countries of conflict. Wilder has spent many years along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and speaks with great knowledge from the field.
“There is actually remarkably little evidence that aid has a stabilizing impact. Some argue that it has a destabilizing impact,” explained Wilder, who is now director of research at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University.

Wilder was commenting on a developing body of work on aid in Afghanistan by our Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie.

“The big contracts become faceless and open to corruption. We need to spend money in smaller amounts and in the right places where we have oversight capacity … We all bemoan corruption, but we don’t look at how we contribute to corruption by funneling aid in ways that are reckless and counter-productive,” said Wilder.
Her stories, which began in our special report “Life, Death and the Taliban,” document how the contracting process in Afghanistan is being manipulated by the Taliban and providing the insurgency with an estimated tens of millions of dollars in funding.
As MacKenzie has uncovered, the Taliban is shaking down Afghan subcontractors on huge US aid development projects and military procurement contracts through what amounts to a protection racket. Either you pay, or the people working on the project are in peril.
So what can be done about that aid going to the Taliban? The contracts should be smaller and better coordinated with a larger number of accountants and project managers keeping their eyes on where the money is going.
In other words, once again, less is more.
Back on October 7, 2001 when the US-led air strikes began. I was there among a group of correspondents who were in the country to cover the US retaliation for the September 11 attacks.
It was eight years ago, not that long really. But it’s still hard to remember just how traumatized America was back then, how scary it was to be on the frontlines with the Taliban still in power and Al Qaeda fighters literally arrayed on hillsides across the valley from us speaking in Arabic on two-way radios.
We all knew then, this would be a very long war.
But I don’t think any of us realized that eight years later America would be pondering an escalation of the conflict, or that the Taliban would be resurgent and in many areas taking control.
Back then an Afghan military commander who we had gotten to know said to me, “Welcome to the Great Game,” referring to the British empire’s long and ill-fated adventures in Afghanistan.
I wonder why our military leaders don’t simply look around in Afghanistan at the graveyards of empires past and realize that it is time to clarify the mission, assign the appropriate troop levels to carry it out and prepare as quickly as possible to leave the country in the hands of the Afghan people.