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.

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 guide/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

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!

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.

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.

Thanks and talk soon,

Ben

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.

GlobalPost Managing Editor Thomas Mucha attended The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW)’s 47^th 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.

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.