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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GlobalPost began a beta test by about 100 site evaluators today. And so we welcomed the first small community on to the site in advance of our live launch on January 12, which is just four days away and counting.

Today was an incredibly productive day. We moved onto the test site almost 90 stories — well-reported, well-written, well-crafted pieces of journalism from every corner of the world.

Today a few of the stories I edited that we look forward to sharing with you on Monday came from our correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan, Jean MacKenzie and our Washington writer and long-time colleague Jack Farrell and an incredible essay and photo gallery that we are putting together from acclaimed photographer Seamus Murphy. We also loaded to the site a multimedia journey by Greg Warner through Afghanistan. I don’t want to give away what these stories are about. You’ll find out on Monday.

But I will tell you the journalism that is flowing onto our site is world class.

I am incredibly proud of the journalists out there who have joined our team and who are unearthing the kinds of stories that we call GroundTruth. We still have a lot of work to do to get ready for you to come to the site live. So I need to get back to it.

But before I do I need to get to the task at hand which is to continue to publish GROUNDTRUTH: GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This guide which is being published on the blog is a statement of purpose, a field guide for correspondents about the values of journalism that we hold to be true. Here are the next two chapters, four and five. Tomorrow, I will post the last two chapters.

GROUNDTRUTH: GLOBALPOST’S FIELD GUIDE FOR CORRESPONDENTS

FOUR:

Be fair and accurate.

Out of careful listening comes fair, truthful reporting. And truth is always the best defense against libel.

Check the facts all the time. Check spelling, particularly the spelling of names and be sure you have the proper title of a source. We are employing the AP style book. GlobalPost is also developing a policy for corrections and clarifications on the site. And any correspondent whose work requires persistent corrections on issues of material fact, will be warned that their relationship with GlobalPost will be terminated if a pattern of inaccurate reporting continues to occur.

Accuracy matters and our reputation as a news organization and your reputation as a correspondent rely on getting it right. There is a great axiom of deadline reporting: When in doubt, leave it out. Live by that. Only write about the things you know, the things you’ve seen with your own eyes and be sure you have clear and accurate attribution on everything else. If you live by these relatively simple and straightforward rules, you will always be on solid footing.

We discourage the use of unnamed sources. We believe it is far better to get a comment on the record. We encourage correspondents to always try their best to get a name attached to a comment. Sometimes it requires asking more than once, but persistence is better than accepting a blind quote and finding out later it is unusable.

We understand that there are circumstances in which anonymity is necessary to protect the life or livelihood of a source, but that is the only occasion in which unnamed sources should be used. GlobalPost retains the right to request a reporter to share with a senior editor any unnamed source of a story. GlobalPost also forbids any reporter from writing on a story in which they have a vested economic interest or a clear political bias. The spirit of full disclosure matters in reporting and we request that you let us know if you believe there is any potential line that might be crossed during the course of your reporting.

We are aware that our correspondents operate in many corners of the world where there are different legal standards for journalism and different ideas about what constitutes fairness. But we hold to a very American tradition of journalism in this regard and one that we believe is a proud tradition.

Our research shows legal precedent is being established that online news organizations will be held to the legal standards of reporting in the country from which they originate. As the United States has perhaps the most fierce protections of freedom of the press of any country in the world, we believe that good, honest, accurate and fair reporting from any place in the world will always put us on solid legal ground. (GlobalPost has a libel insurance policy which offers protections for the organization and those reporting for it. If anyone has questions about the policy, we will make ourselves available.) If you are ever working on a story that you believe is potentially libelous or if any one you are reporting on threatens any legal action, you are obliged to get in touch with me promptly and directly.

FIVE:

Be honest.

Be sure you are accredited as a journalist and work within the guidelines set by the press office in your respective country. Always identify yourself as a reporter when you are working in the field.

Any fabrication of quotes or made-up reporting will not be tolerated and will be considered grounds for GlobalPost to immediately end its relationship with a correspondent. The same prohibitions on fabrication hold true for multimedia. And GlobalPost forbids the manipulation of any photos, audio or video in a manner that distorts reality or misrepresents any facts or quotes.

Plagiarism of any kind will also be grounds for terminating a contract with GlobalPost. Plagiarism includes not only directly copying someone else’s words, but also borrowing quotes, ideas, images and insights without proper attribution.

GlobalPost reporters should not accept gifts or any payment from a source involved in a story, nor should they offer any gifts or payment in return for getting a story.

Any time a correspondent or columnists is provided travel or lodging as part of a reporting trip, this should be discussed in advance with an editor. Typically, we will not permit such trips. But there are exceptions when GlobalPost believes it wise and sometimes necessary to accept free flights on international aid and trade missions or military flights. We may also, for example, allow our global health or auto writers to take an expense-paid trip by an industry group as long as the correspondent has clearly established with his or her host that none of the services-in-kind will influence the outcome of the reporting. If GlobalPost does accept such a trip, we will let the viewers of the site know so they have full transparency and can judge for themselves if any undue influence has crept in to the coverage as a result. We the editors will be working very hard to be sure it does not.