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

We are all journalists who’ve come to get kidnapped and to trip landmines and get shot at and then to treat massive, life threatening wounds. All of it, of course, is an exercise. It’s not real. But it feels very real if you are heading to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan or even Juarez, Mexico where several of the photographers who’ve come here are working on a regular basis. In all of these places the risk level for journalists rises steadily every time you turn around like a treacherous tide coming up on you.

Jan, a former member of the British military’s special forces, who teaches the risk assessment class for Centurion, one of the best risk analysis firms in the business, is clicking through a power point presentation on recent kidnappings in Pakistan from where he has just returned.

“If you are taken hostage, remember you only have a five-minute window. Your best chance of escape is in the first five minutes. So fight for your life. Go for the eyes. Do what ever you can. Go all the way.,” he says with a crisp British military precision.

The line is delivered with a sort of casual sense of horror and is punctuated with a disconcerting grin. I still have fake blood caked in my hair from the field exercises in treating wounds. And there I am sitting in a folding chair listening to this briefing and thinking, “What the hell am I doing going to Afghanistan and Pakistan?”

Jan, who prefers that only his first name be used, has just returned from Pakistan where he says the risk for journalists is ratcheting up at an alarming rate. We break and Peter, a former Royal Marine in charge of the first aid portion, quips, “Okay, lads we’ll do head trauma right after lunch.”

Aren’t I just getting too old for this? I have a wife and four sons and a noble, aging yellow Labrador all of whom I love and with whom I cherish every minute. The newspaper on the breakfast table is almost daily filled with headlines about bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the worsening situation. I try to keep the sports page on top of the front page so my sons don’t see the news. My wife is smarter than that, but still understands on some level what I do. My mother, who is a great supporter of my career, believes the trip is insane and has taken to letting me know it in repeated early morning phone calls. But I’m still planning on going, and here’s why.

What reporters do in the field in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan matters. We need to keep reporting from there. We need to keep bringing home truths. At GlobalPost, we strongly encourage our correspondents who work in these places to take this hostile environment training and so I am here at the hostile environment class in part to live up to our own standards. The training is disturbing and the paper work is worse. For example, I just completed my KPP or “Kidnap Prevention Protocol.” These are difficult times to work as a journalist in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At GlobalPost, we have correspondents like Shahan Mufti in Pakistan and Jean MacKenzie in Afghanistan who risk their lives every day to report the stories you need to know from there. And I am proud of their courage and the service they offer to those who view our site and come there to find what we call GroundTruth. Most days I am safely ensconced in Boston editing the site. To be returning to the field is the best of what we do, the pursuit of GroundTruth, which put simply is the belief that you have to be there to get the story.

I have been in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan since the mid 1990s when I first started covering the Taliban. I was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks. And I feel like I have history and context to add to the reporting there and I hope it might add to the understanding of the Taliban for visitors to our site and the challenges that US and NATO troops face there. I hope my reporting might contribute something to the understanding of that complex culture and forbidding terrain, that place that is a graveyard for empires throughout history. I still believe in that kind of reporting and that is why I am going.

But even as I was washing the fake blood out of my hair and watching it pool in red and circle down the drain at the end of the training, the questions about whether I am taking too big a risk to be going don’t go away. They are always there.

Like many foreign correspondents who can’t quite explain what it is that pulls them in the direction of conflict, she set out to tell the story of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through a unique installation. The exhibit features the helmets of 50 correspondents who have covered war and it is now on view in New York City at the Cheryl Pelavin Gallery in Tribeca until April 25th.

“It grew out of my fascination with the work of foreign correspondents, particularly war reporters, whose writings have so strongly shaped my own worldview. I wanted to incorporate their field notes and mementos into a work of visual art,” she said in an email exchange from her home on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I was lucky enough to gain the trust of fifty journalists willing to surrender to me an amazing array of letters, press passes, notes and other pungent souvenirs of their travels … The battle-scarred helmets hang from the ceiling in a somewhat ghostly circle.”

The journalists who contributed scraps of notes and old press cards and other broken shards of war include: Jacki Lyden, Deb Amos, Ethan Bronner, Ray Bonner, Caryle Murphy, Jonathan Randall, Anthony Shadid, Neal Conan and many others including yours truly.

I have to say it was a bit unsettling to see plastered on a helmet my own handwriting scrawled on reporter’s notebook paper and a tattered press pass and some prayer beads that were given to me by a Kurdish fighter in Northern Iraq.

It all felt very real and raw to have these very private and interior fragments of war exposed to the world. War is unsettling. And the exhibit captures that.

There is something about the way the helmets hang, suspended in the air that makes all the memories of the horrific things you see in covering a conflict ring hollow and empty. I wondered if I had this feeling because we who covered the war in Iraq — despite some bold insights and brave actions by a notable few — failed collectively to do ours jobs in many respects. This was particularly true in the first phase of the war where we were simply not asking hard enough questions, or at least not asking them persistently enough. I shared some of my own angst about this with Cindy and I asked her about it in our email exchange.

“The artifacts, paper detritus, and notes which I received from most of the journalists did not reveal the kind of “angst” that I think you are referring to, but rather the intimacy of their craft,” she said.

“The cigarette packets, the ear plugs, beer labels, band aids, dog tags, smudged notes, phone numbers, little sketches, hate mail, and in Kimberly Dozier’s case, get well cards from the public after the explosion which she survived, all connect the battle field to the headlines, and that is what I was looking for.”

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

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

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

It is the definition of GroundTruth.

We are a work in progress and there are definitely going to be places where we can improve. We value your input and feedback. Please let me know how you think the site is working and what we can do better.

Our goal at GlobalPost is to tell great stories from all over the world.













And in the lead up to the Jan. 20th inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, we are organizing our storytelling around a single question: What does the idea of America mean to the world? The special project is called “For Which It Stands.”

We wanted to find stories in every corner of the globe at a time when new leadership is setting out — at least in the resonant speeches of the campaign — to redefine or “reboot,” as Obama put it, America’s relationship with the world. We do not believe in partisan journalism and we vow to be as tough and fair in our reporting on this president as any other. But we do believe this is a moment in our country that transcends party politics and offers an opportunity for America to engage with the world in a new way. We very much want to be a news organization that taps into that new energy in this new administration.

So please go to the guide to our series For Which It Stands to navigate all of the great stories and multimedia that make up the series. There are more than 50 stories reported by more than 40 reporters as well as a handful of photographers, videographers and multi-media producers.

Today, you will see a lyrical and poignant photo essay accompanied by a strong piece of writing by a friend and colleague, Seamus Murphy. It is titled Seeing America: From Kennedy to Obama and I invite you to see and read his work. He is an extraordinary storyteller. I also hope you have time to read Matt McAllester’s piece on Guantanamo about the former guard and former prisoner who are coming together to try to find some common ground in their anger over what happened there. Matt is also a friend and colleague and an incredibly talented and principled reporter. And there is HDS Greenway comparing Obama to Wilson; Joshua Hammer in Berlin on Kennedy, Reagan and Obama and the historic speeches they made there; Royal Ford introducing his new column Wheels or Jack Farrell on foreign policy in Washington. There are also guest writers including NPR’s acclaimed reporter Deb Amos and the brilliant Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg. The list is just too long. But the guide will serve you well in finding out what’s there, so please use it.

One of the more engaging multimedia stories that I hope you will see has a back story that involves Johnny Cash and I think captures the spirit of GlobalPost. You see, we at GlobalPost want to be the Johnny Cash of international news.

I was joking with a few friends back in the summer about that. Off the cuff, I said how we wanted to be like The Man in Black telling stories in the world that are honest and true and that come from the street and have an ear for the music of America.

But what I didn’t realize then was that there was a great story teller out there named Greg Warner who was playing Johnny Cash on his accordion in Afghanistan. Someone sent me a YouTube video of his performance of “Ring of Fire” in Mazar-e-Sharif and it was a good laugh. But then I heard one of his reports from the Congo on NPR and I immediately called him and now he is doing a few multimedia columns for us. He is on his way to Kenya now.

One of his columns is about his “Accordion Journey” as he calls it through Afghanistan. It’s the kind of story telling we want to do at GlobalPost. And since today is the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Folsom Prison Blues single and the 40th anniversary of his concert inside the prison. I thought it was fitting to do a shout out and invite you to watch the video which has a great tribute to Johnny at the end. It even had a public viewing tonight at the “Cash Bash” at the Milky Way Lounge in Jamaica Plain, Boston in a night celebrating “the Man in Black.”

At the stroke of midnight, we officially launch.

Welcome to GlobalPost. And welcome to GroundTruth.

This blog is a place where you can come every day to be taken behind the scenes of GlobalPost and hear about what our correspondents are working on and how they managed to unearth great stories.
Here I will be highlighting reporting from the field by our 65 correspondents who live in the countries about which they write. Every day they will be out there finding and reporting the kind of stories that are close to the ground and can enlighten you about the corner of the world they cover.

We call that “GroundTruth.”

Starting tomorrow, I will use the blog to provide you with a guide on how to navigate the site. I want to take you through how it works. There are “Dispatches,” which are our correspondent feeds from the field, and “Latitudes,” which are areas of coverage that cut across national boundaries and connect us all. The “Latitudes” are themes such as global health, climate change, diplomacy, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), cars and their relationship to the world, sports, and more. Each of them has a veteran correspondent assigned to them who you can follow week in and week out.

I also want to draw your eyes to the “Timelines,” which are on most of the country pages. Here we have tried to offer you the historical and current context that is required to understand the news. These ”Timelines” are interactive tools for you to have facts and the sweep of history at the click of a button. We’re very proud of these Timelines and we hope you will explore the world and its history through them. Twenty-five of them are up on the site now and more will be rolled out over the next few months.

I also hope you will take some time to view the “Go there” multimedia player that is located on our homepage. The lead video on the home page for our first day is titled “Afghanistan: An Accordion Journey” by Gregory Warner. Greg, a writer and freelance reporter for NPR whose work has appeared on This American Life and Radio Lab, combined his audio recordings for public radio with video he shot on his own to produce a GlobalPost multimedia essay that is mesmerizing and funny and ultimately a great story about a journey through Afghanistan. It’s exactly the kind of storytelling that we want to do here at GlobalPost.

This video is part of our series “For Which It Stands.” And there is a guide to the “For Which It Stands” series available for you to navigate what is a large body of work focused around a single question: “What does the idea of America mean to the world?” The series begins at launch and will culiminate with the inauguration of President Obama and continue through the first 100 days of his presidency.

In the coming days, I will go deeper into the series and the great writing, photography and videography that has gone into it.

For months, I’ve been blogging about the process of our launch from my journey around the world this fall recruiting correspondents to the count down in the last few days as our web development team and editorial staff worked almost around the clock to be ready for this launch. And we are ready.

We are officially launched as of this moment, but our ace web developer Jason Oliver of Mochila actually pushed the button to transfer over our beta site to go live on Saturday night. It was precisely 11:11 PM EST on January 10. 2009 when he began the propagation of the GlobalPost.com domain name, or URL, to the web.

As a heavy snow fell silently over Boston, the physical act of launching the site was only represented by the clattering of a keyboard and Jason’s announcement, “Okay, I just hit the button. We’re live! Congratulations.”