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NEW YORK – On September 11th, I visited Ground Zero and stood there in a driving rain while the names of the 3,000 innocent victims were read by the bereaved families and cops and firemen.

Eight years.

And, as I wrote in my column that day for GlobalPost, there are hard questions that linger: how is it possible that we have not completed the construction of a 9-11 monument, what have we accomplished in Afghanistan and how did we go so far astray in Iraq?

It was a somber moment to reflect on eight years of reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the London bombings and the Madrid bombings and the seemingly endless struggle that came to be called “The Long War” during the Bush administration and that these days seems to have no name at all. Check out two interviews I did about the anniversary of September 11 on John Hockenberry’s The Takeaway, the kick-ass, morning radio show produced by Public Radio International out of WNYC in New York, and on our editorial partner WorldFocus, produced out of WNET in New York and aired on PBS television stations.

I was thinking about all the datelines form which I had filed on this long, struggle against terrorism. And about one place in particular, Ganjgal, Afghanistan, where four US Marines were killed last week in an ambush. McClatchy Newspapers correspondent, Jonathan S. Landay, an excellent combat reporter, was embedded with the unit that entered the village in the Sarkani district and walked into the ambush. Landay’s harrowing account is must reading to understand just how bad things are over there.

But I have some unique background on Ganjgal, a village in Kunar Province. I was there for The Boston Globe on the fifth anniversary of 9-11 and it provided the centerpiece of a special report — with video, audio, written dispatches and excellent photography by VII’s Gary Knight — on the perils of the US’ “forgotten war” in Afghanistan. (That report was in many ways a precursor of the GlobalPost special report “Life, Death and the Taliban.”) In 2006 , I wrote about how insurgents fired rockets down on the Forward Operation Base that is adjacent to the village. The attack shook us and we awoke to US and Afghan forces returning fire into the darkness at an unseen enemy. The local US commander was surprised by the attack because the village was considered sympathetic to the Americans set up in the FOB next door. In fact, in the trite shorthand that goes with war, the commander called them “our friendlies.”

Back then, I reported how, after meeting with village elders from Ganjgal in the following days, we learned that the village elders had allowed Pakistani militants to set up the attack because the village was angry that several of its elders had been captured and detained and were being held in Bagram on no charges. There were allegations of torture and brutal treatment. There was a mistrust brewing between the village and the FOB
and you could feel it taking shape back then. Now, it is my understanding, that several of those village elders have never been released from Bagram and now there is an open hostility between Ganjgal and the nearby FOB. In every village in Afghanistan where insurgents are engaged in battle against the US and the coalition, there is a back story like this one. The only way the US will ever be effective in Afghanistan is for its troops to know these back stories, to understand where the hostility of that village comes from. And then, to have the courage and the wisdom to examine whether in fact its village elders were wrongly accused and unlawfully detained. And if they establish that is the case, they should work hard to correct the error and secure the men’s release. That will go a very long way in turning that village around to become what General Petraeus calls, “reconcilables,” or what the local commander called, “our friendlies.”

Why the ambush at the Afghan village of Ganjgal tells us everything we need to know about Afghanistan

BOSTON – GlobalPost got action today.

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.

Funding the Taliban

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.

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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.

The Taliban as organized crime; and why an American mob boss must be rolling over in his grave

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

They are the words of the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, and they seem as if they were penned for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who persevered through tragedy and always did so with a great sense of humor and a love for laughter.

There are many things to say in remembering Senator Kennedy. There’s the passion for helping the downtrodden, the commitment to human rights, the determination to carry the torch for the ideals and the dreams of his brothers, John and Robert. And there are the burdens of tragedy, the lost opportunities for greatness, the failure to achieve health care reform in his lifetime, the scandals that caused so much harm to himself and those who were scandalized.

But in the search for the enduring traits that Kennedy leaves behind, humor should not be overlooked. He liked to laugh and his laughter and playfulness cut across all boundaries geographic and otherwise.

That should be remembered as the somber tributes continue and the country prepares for a world-class Irish wake.

I had a chance to see Ted Kennedy in one of his last public appearances in Boston prior to his diagnosis for brain cancer.

It was at the Kennedy Library in Boston in early May, 2008 at the annual gathering for the Profiles in Courage award which honors leaders in public service in America. And there was Ted, looking great in a tuxedo, and on stage with his beloved niece, Caroline.

I will hold that memory of the way he worked the room and convinced everyone there that he knew them and somehow managed to conveyed a knowing sense of compassion with a wink and a handshake. I’d covered Kennedy on different issues, including his stand on Northern Ireland, the war in Iraq, but also the family’s darker side, including the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith, an allegation that came out of a night of hard partying in the family’s Palm Beach, Florida estate on Easter weekend.

I’d seen him and studied him and taken notes on what he said in many settings, but it never ceased to amaze me how he worked a room.

Maybe they were just the gifts of a lifelong politician, but something far deeper was there as well. It was a genuine passion for the little guy, a fighting spirit that was always framed by genuine laughter and joy.

On the stage that night, Ted Kennedy sang a Broadway show tune and danced a soft shoe and the whole time he looked like he was having the time of his life. All the remembrance and the tragedy and the weight that surrounds the Kennedy Library was there, but he danced on like the old Irish ballad, the Lord of the Dance, and it felt in that moment like he would always be there. It was just a few weeks later that his diagnosis of brain cancer was announced.

I would see him again, but not laughing. Instead he was focused and serious and impassioned and that was the night of his endorsement of Barack Obama for president in the heat of the Democratic campaign.

Last August, he went on to deliver what was his last great speech during the Democratic Convention. Kennedy’s address echoed perhaps his most famous speech at the convention in 1980 when he delivered, no, roared a single phrase that is now echoing across every broadcast honoring him from America to Africa and Asia and Latin America and Europe and the Middle East.

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Those words will echo for a very long time, and so will his laughter.

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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

BOSTON — From Berlin, where President John F. Kennedy’s words still echo, to Belfast, where the Kennedy family played a key role in brokering peace, to Cape Town, where Robert F. Kennedy made a historic speech, the Kennedy name is known the world over.

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.

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The world remembers Sen. Kennedy

Earlier this week, I sat down with Dave Davies, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, on NPR’s Fresh Air. We spoke about GlobalPost’s special report, “Life, Death and the Taliban” and my recent travels to AfPak for the series.

You can check out the interview here.

Life, Death and the Taliban on NPR’s Fresh Air

Today GlobalPost begins a special report titled Life, Death and the Taliban. It is a series of stories from the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a multimedia project that includes video, photography, strong reporting and writing and an interactive historical time line by a team of reporters, photographers, editors, producers and researchers for GlobalPost.

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.

Special Report: Life, Death and the Taliban

Our Maggie was a truly international dog, a canine diplomat of sorts who had lived all over the world.

A big, old yellow Labrador who lived to eat, Maggie begged on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide when I was based as a journalist in Jerusalem with my wife and family. In fact, she was well known for sauntering down the ancient, cobbled streets and picking up scraps from the Palestinian shwarma shops and then making her way across the street to the Israeli falafel vendors. In a culture where dogs are feared and often loathed, Maggie had made good friends on both sides of the conflict.

Later when I was assigned to London, Maggie dined on left over Shepherd’s Pie from one of the great old pubs of Hampstead which was right next to my office.

She quaffed buttery croissants in France when she lived briefly with a retired French military officer on the coast of Brittany. He was an in-law who offered to take her for 90 days so she could get her European Union citizenship and avoid the officiousness of the British laws for quarantining pets.

She traveled in and out of many ports of call and across international borders with her own small blue, pet passport in which was recorded her many journeys and the attendant inoculations and paper work required for her passage.

I gave Maggie to my wife as a present for our first wedding anniversary 14 years ago. And she lived with us all over the world since then. She was at our side as we had four boys born in Boston, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and London. They loved her and never knew life without her tail thumping the floor in the early morning and her steady breathing putting us all to sleep at night. My wife showered her with affection and treated her as if she was our only girl, which of course she was.

The constant plane travel and the plastic air crates grew more and more difficult for Maggie as she got older. After so many years of parachuting in and out of stories all over the Middle East, I knew how she felt. We’d both begun to lose our traveling legs a bit.

In the last few years, she was happy to have retired with us to a small New England town West of Boston where she had a pond to swim in and lots of grass to roll around in.

But sometimes she’d sit on the porch and look out on the road and I’d wonder if she, like me, didn’t long to get back to traveling.
In the end, Maggie had one last lesson for us.

We thought for sure she was gone when we took her to the vet last week. She was struggling all summer with her breathing due to laryngeal paralysis, a degenerative condition that restricts the air passage and is quite common in Labs. Her condition worsened dramatically while we were on a lakeside vacation in Maine.

A local vet said there wasn’t much we could do to prevent her from dying, but as a last resort he gave her steroids that reduced some of the swelling of her larynx and she rallied for a few more good days. Our boys joked that the steroids would mean that her life would have an asterisk just like the Red Sox players David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez who had been exposed for using steroids. But the drugs worked just as they did for Big Papi.

Suddenly, Maggie was swimming and doing what our boys called “the happy dance,” which was rolling on her back in the grass with her paws in the air and a wide smile.

She taught us at the very end to just live every day as if it’s your last.

We fed her lamb and hugged her and told her we loved her. We cherished every minute with her and quietly wondered why we didn’t treat every day with her like that, and every day with each other like that. For sure, that was what she was telling us in her own quiet way. And sometimes it takes an old dog to remind you of the simplest truths.
We said “goodbye.” Then after a few days, her breathing got very heavy again. She was lethargic and clearly unable to get air. Her tongue was turning blue. She was rushed to the emergency room at an animal hospital and the vet quietly told us what we already knew, that Maggie was not going to live. But like everyone who has been through the extraordinary ordeal of euthanizing a pet, we denied the obvious until we couldn’t any longer.

When the vet finally put her down on Sunday morning, Maggie heaved her last breath and set out on the final journey.

Saying goodbye to Maggie, a well-traveled dog

Listen in to the journey I took through Afghanistan and Pakistan on The World starting tonight. A special four-part series of radio reports titled “Inside the Taliban” will be aired over the next four days on The World, which is a co-production of the BBC-Public Radio International and WGBH, Boston . The project is a partnership between GlobalPost and The World and was funded in part by a Luce Foundation grant for reporting on religion. Check it out on your local public radio station or on-line at theworld.org.

Seamus Murphy/VII, 1996

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.

AfPak journey on “The World”

I know that road just outside of Kabul in the Logar Province. I know the kids who walk to school on it every morning. I know their faces were full of hope and glee when I saw them two years ago at their beautiful new school and I can only imagine the fear that must be etched on their faces now.

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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?

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

Iason Athanasiadis was released, as you can read at the top of GlobalPost.

Iason, a freelance journalist who had been writing for GlobalPost in Iran, was detained without charge for nearly three weeks by the Iranian government. He was picked up at the airport amid a crackdown on Western media covering the contested elections and the dramatic street demonstrations that followed.

Yesterday was a waiting-to-exhale afternoon as the first sketchy reports came in from Iran that he was going to be released. And then we got the word from the Committee to Protect Journalists, who have done outstanding work on his behalf, that the good news was confirmed. The Greek government and representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church were pivotal in making direct pleas for his release to the Iranian government. A Greek and British citizen, Iason lives in Istanbul and is on his way to be with his family and loved ones. We hope to speak with him soon. We will give you an update when we do. Check out my last post to read more about Iason and his profound talent as a reporter and photographer.

The CPJ reports that there are still more than 35 journalists, bloggers and commentators who remain under detention in Iran for their coverage of the events that unfolded there last month. We will continue to work with CPJ and other news organizations toward their release. And I am certain Iason will want to play a role in that effort. Welcome home, Iason.

Iason’s released!