At GlobalPost, we’re proud of the coverage we provided this year particularly in Afghanistan. Our team has done stellar work there and we are thankful to them for it. We’ve had some notable successes in other areas of our reporting, which I have tried to highlight albeit sporadically here in this blog. But we also recognize that we at GlobalPost have much work to do in 2011. We are poised for a year of change and growth, a pivotal year where we will launch a redesign of the site and where we will take on more ambitious , in-depth reporting. I would like to keep you involved in the conversation of how we’re evolving as a news organizations. I’ve tried to do that through the blog, but haven’t always succeeded as the demands of the daily news operation have been relentless in our two years since launch. (One of my New Year’s resolutions is to try to do better tending to this blog! )  In the spirit of  starting fresh and living up to resolutions,  I thought I’d copy you in on a New Year memo I just sent to our correspondents in the field and a link to our new 2011 Field Guide for Correspondents. It’s hot off the presses and dated 1/1/11, which as one of my sons just joked will be a one-derful year! We ask that you not reprint the Field Guide without our permission,  but we invite you to take a look as it contains our news organization’s core values and it also includes our correction policy as well as nine essays written by seven of our correspondents in the field and from our editor-at-large Sebastian Junger as well as the BBC Washington Bureau Chief Simon Wilson. Here it is:

To all correspondents in the field,

BOSTON – Wishing you all the best in 2011. Thinking particularly of those of you in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places in the field where you might be far from family and friends. No matter where you are, I trust you are all resourceful enough foreign correspondents to find a glass of cheer. So, here’s to you.
Happy New Year!

Here’s the 2011 edition of GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This year you will see I have updated some chapters and included nine essays from correspondents in the field which we’ve collected over the last two years. I’ve also made an addendum which includes a tip sheet on social networking and our policy for corrections, which was first sent out to you at the beginning of last year. You can quickly retrieve the full 33-page Field Guide for Correspondents at this link. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8465435/globalpost/field%20guide/2011_fieldGuide3.pdf) (Lower resolution pdf files of the Field Guide are also included as an attachment, but it takes some time to open.)

We hope you will download and save the Field Guide and maybe even be old school enough to print it out. We want you to know it and refer to it when needed. We will have some bound copies here for those of you who might be passing through Boston.

The expectations, standards and policies that are written in the Field Guide shape the core of our relationship with those of you in the field. They have put us in very good stead in the last two years as we’ve worked together to build a news organization which has earned a solid reputation for accuracy and integrity.  That has come through the skill and vigilance of our editing team here in Boston and the solid, balanced reporting you correspondents do every day in the field. Thanks to everyone for all the hard work.

The New Year is shaping up as a very exciting one for GlobalPost with a lot of good changes in the air. We are looking forward to the pending launch of our redesign which looks great. We are also looking forward to the transition in our editorial team as Editor Thomas Mucha takes the reins of daily news operations and I turn my focus to Special Reports and a new initiative for in-depth reporting through non-profit funding. It’s a pivotal year for GlobalPost and Tom and I are both looking forward to working together with you to step up our coverage on all fronts.

We are pleased to share the news with you that we have secured two significant grants for 2011, one for reporting on global health and the other for reporting on human rights. I will soon provide more details about those and other grants and how you can be part of these reporting projects. As previously stated, it is my hope that you will be sending along ground-breaking project ideas and that we might have a chance to work together on these Special Reports. I am looking forward to getting back in the field myself in the coming year. Hope to see you out there.

All best in 2011!

Cheers,
Charlie

Charles M. Sennott
Executive Editor and co-founder

Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six US attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the US in connection with the 1998 attack two US embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in Northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The US intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

An early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are scrambling to move base and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened now eight years after the September 11th attacks.

In June, I traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to report on the Taliban at a fateful crossroads as the Afghan election looms, the Taliban continues to exert control and the US military escalates its troop deployments in a major offensive in the South. I wanted to revisit the places and the people I have gotten to know through 15 years of reporting there and share some of their stories and insights.

I was joined by photographer and friend Seamus Murphy of VII along the way, who brought me into the circle of a family from Stonecutter Street in Kabul. He first met them in the worst years of the civil war in 1994 and has documented their lives and their struggles and a new sense of hope. The family’s story is told in the lead video on the project landing page. This project also includes strong reporting from GlobalPost correspondents Shahan Mufti in Islamabad and Jean MacKenzie in Kabul.

The idea of the series was to try to unpack the history of the Taliban in all its complexity and historical context so that visitors to the site might get a deeper understanding of a region that has long been a graveyard for empires.

I hope you will check it out and post a comment.

Seamus Murphy/VII, 1996

The radio series is the first phase of an ambitious multimedia project that we are putting together and which will appear on GlobalPost later in the summer. The series focuses in on the Taliban and how the US troops seeking to confront the religious movement fail to understand it. It will feature the powerful photography of my colleague Seamus Murphy of the photo agency VII and video and audio portraits of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The reporting trip was built around revisiting people and places that Seamus and I know through 15 years of reporting there. And in case you have been wondering, the writing and producing of this multimedia project is what I’ve been doing with my summer. We will keep you posted on when it will appear on GlobalPost. Until then, please check out The World.

On Thursday morning, Taliban terrorists packed a timber truck full of explosives and detonated it at a checkpoint between two schools in the Logar Province, they killed 25 people, including 13 elementary school students.

I was just in Afghanistan reporting on the girls’ school that is right where this bombing went off. On Wednesday I met with Sally and Don Goodrich. They are an amazing couple from Vermont who lost their son, Peter, in the September 11 attacks. They raised the money to build the girls’ school in his honor through the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation. Two years ago, I went on a trip with Sally to document the opening of the school. It was a joyous occasion. And we stayed in touch and have become friends.

We sat together Wednesday night and talked about the school and disturbing news that the village in which it lies is now apparently under control of the Taliban. The son and brother of Haji Malik, the village elder who has helped Don and Sally win community approval for the school, have been detained by US military for allegedly supporting the Taliban. A cache of weapons and explosives was found on their property, the military claims, and they have evidence photos to prove it. Sally and Don talked of wanting to close the school because they feared for the students’ safety.

Only hours later the truck bomb went off. Already Don and Sally have moved into action, raising more money to send to the families to help pay for burial of their children.

The girls school in the Mohammed Agha district of Logar is a microcosm of all that has gone wrong in Afghanistan. It is a sad illustration of the best of intentions and the worst of intentions.

Who, in God’s name, could kill children walking to school?

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.

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.

In his day he went after them with everything he had.

In 1907, there was a famous naval standoff in which Barbary pirates held an American for ransom. It was a drama that riveted the nation and the world just like the one now playing out off the coast of Somalia.

The brigand was the legendary Ahmed er Raisuli, a Moroccan known as the last of the great Barbary pirates. The American held captive was Ion Perdicaris, who was being held for $70,000 ransom.

Roosevelt announced, “Pedicardis alive or Raisuli dead!”

And the slogan became part of the legend of the high seas and the American might that would protect its global shipping and commerce.

Roosevelt sent seven U.S. battleships across the Atlantic to the Moroccan coast, but in the end the hostage drama was resolved when the Moroccan government paid the ransom and Perdicaris was freed.

The story even became a Hollywood movie titled, “The Wind and the Lion.” But, OK, so in the 1975 Hollywood version the American businessman with the hard to pronounce last name was turned into a beautiful woman played by Candice Bergen and the pirate was Sean Connery.

Today’s real, live drama on the high seas with Captain Richard Phillips being held captive by Somali pirates also has all the makings of a Hollywood film, but perhaps with a more complex plot.

We haven’t yet heard Obama declare: “Phillips alive, or pirates dead!”

But we are certain screenplay writers are already circling like sharks around this story.

This time around the narrative seems to be not about the might of the U.S. Navy and the brash confidence of Teddy Roosevelt, but about the strange futility of American power in the modern world.

There are hulking Navy ships aligned against a small, out-of-gas lifeboat where pirates are holding captive an American who , if the story line is accurate, heroically endangered his own life to protect his crew and ship. And the Navy, it seems, can do nothing but wait.

It’s becoming more akin to “Dog Day Afternoon” than “The Wind and The Lion.”

It’s not over yet. The script is being written every hour on CNN, which has truly done an excellent job covering the story.

We’re pretty proud of our smaller team of reporters at GlobalPost who have also done an admirable job.

Our correspondent in Kenya, Tristan McConnell, has been on the story from day one. GlobalPost columnist HDS Greenway provided an authoritative history of America’s long battle with pirates. Tom Fenton in London commented on the failures of U.S. policy in Somalia that stand as the backdrop to the drama. And now our Boston reporter Stephanie Garlow has contributed an excellent profile of Phillips, who hails from Massachusetts and studied at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy here.

We call this kind of dogged, on-the-scene reporting GroundTruth, but the phrase seems off given that it is all unfolding in the high seas. So we’ll have to call it just plain, old truth.

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.