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.

You can check out the interview here.

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.

“He’s old school,” as his brother in Boston described him.

Photography by: Tomas Munita/New York Times

And that is an understatement. David is one of the most talented and humble reporters I have ever met. He is quiet and unassuming and nothing short of heroic. He has taken extraordinary risks as a reporter from his Pulitzer-Prize-winning dispatches from the war in Bosnia, where he was also detained, to his reporting in Afghanistan, where he also won a Pulitzer Prize for excellent work. He was picked up on November 10 by captors while inerviewing a Taliban commander and he was held for the last seven months, just two months after he had been married. He escaped last week and the story of his release was broken on Sunday in the New York Times and a detailed account of the escape appears in today’s editions. David is fearless, but never reckless. He is not a cowboy, just one hell of a great reporter. He’s old school indeed.

I’ve known David from the field for the better part of a decade and I have been worried sick about him for every day of the last seven months. Those of us who knew about his capture were sworn to silence at the request of his family.

One of his signatures as a reporter was a faded, old Boston Red Sox cap and, when we crossed paths, he and I often shared news from Fenway and our shared hometown. I was traveling in Pakistan and Afghanistan for most of this month and thinking of David at every turn. The story of his capture in Logar Province, just outside of Kabul, was very much on my mind when I took the decision not to go there in pursuit of a story. I know he would have approved of the caution. And when I was meeting with former officials in the now deposed Taliban government, I took each step carefully and tried to think the way David would think about the reporting. He holds important lessons for all of us who do this kind of work in the field, lessons about the need to be careful, of course, but also the need to have courage. There are some other colleagues who I work with and admire who are still being held and whose details have to remain secret for now. All I can say is we are being constantly vigilant about their situation and working quietly toward their release. They share David’s courage and sense of importance for geting the story in the field.

The kind of reporting David has done his whole life is the best of foreign reporting. And when you are dropping a row of quarters for a newspaper as great as the New York Times remember the quality and the courage of some of the people behind those bylines.

I was at Fenway yesterday watching the Red Sox win a great game with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. I was there with my boys in field boxes near the Pesky pole in a swirling mist of rain and thinking of David’s father and about fate. I was hoping David was watching the game with his family. What a great father’s day present for David’s Dad to have his son safely returned. Welcome home, David.

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.

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.