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LISA MULLINS: The democratic struggle in Afghanistan also says a lot about America’s efforts there.

CHARLIE SENNOTT: This election is not only a political contest; it’s really a test of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan and its entire counterinsurgency campaign.

MULLINS: Charlie Sennott is executive editor and co-founder of the international news site, Global Post.

SENNOTT: If their goal was security for the Afghan people, today was not a good day for the US coalition forces or the Afghan people.

MULLINS: Well I think what we’ve been hearing is that the goal was to have an election that was considered viable knowing that there would be some kind of violence. Is the very fact that the election could go on a sign that the United States at least partially got what it wants or do you think that’s spin?

SENNOTT: I think it’s spin. I don’t think it’s good enough to say they just held an election. I mean they did that in 2004.

MULLINS: Is it good enough for the Afghan people though?

SENNOTT: I don’t think it’s good enough for the Afghan people either. I think the Afghan people are growing impatient with a desire to have a country that is secure and that moves forward and the more the US calls the Taliban the enemy and views it as a monolithic force the more they’re going to miss the point that the Taliban has a constituency. And in Afghanistan the shifting of allegiances is part of the history of that country. And I feel like the US military presence and the coalition presence is denying that part of the history. And I’m wondering if after this elections they’re not going to more more fully embrace the complexity of the place and begin to really look at that as a possibility of doing what President Obama has called for which is to negotiate with moderate elements to the Taliban.

MULLINS: How about in terms of the previous election. This is not the first presidential election. The first one happened in 2004. Isn’t the fact there seems to be something of a sequence right now a good sign even if there is violence which everyone expected or vote rigging?

SENNOTT: This time it feels like this nascent democracy has taken a few steps forward but I still question whether or not the US fulfilled its goal of providing the security that was required for the Afghan people to go out and vote. And you know we’re going to find out now as we get the results in but it certainly feels like it was not a spectacular success and in fact there were many areas of failure.

MULLINS: Let’s look at the outcome. If Hamid Karzai is reelected, which is what’s expected to happen, does that mean that the Afghan people are impressed by what’s he done? And does that mean that the United States by what he’s done? I mean does the US have a stake n keeping him in office?

SENNOTT: The US has had this on-again-off-again relationship with Karzai. It is on again right now. And if in this election Karzai is elected I think the US is going to have to work very closely with him in the really difficult challenges that lie ahead in beginning to open up negotiations with the Taliban on one front and then really going forward with the offensive on what General Petraeus calls the irreconcilables, those with whom negotiations are not possible.

MULLINS: But Charlie Sennott you were just back in Afghanistan for your work with Global Post as a cooperative with The World, with our program. If you can take a step back, because you’ve been there many times, in terms of the American effort there which is so prominent and growing, is Afghanistan doing well by the US?

SENNOTT: It is extraordinary to see just how far Afghanistan has come. You know I was with Seamus Murphy who did these beautiful photographs – over 15 years of one family. And through those photographs I was reminded of the incredible devastation and destruction of Kabul n the mid-1990s, even the late 90s, even when we all came in 2001, the place was devastated. It was a failed state. And where it is today is a lot further along and we can’t forget that. At the same time, right now the US presence in Afghanistan is at a crossroads and I think it’s very confusing to understand which direction is it going in. Is this a counterinsurgency campaign with an increase of 21,000 troops intended to finally crush the Taliban or is it intended to become a security force that will allow the provincial reconstruction teams to build the country and give its own sense of governance? It really is one or the other because they’re very different goals. And we have to establish what our goal is if the US and coalition forces are going to succeed. And right now that’s not clear and that lack of clarity will continually undercut the campaign.

MULLINS: Charlie Sennott, thank you.

SENNOTT: Thank you.

MULLINS: Charlie Sennott is executive editor and cofounder of Global Post, an international news website. He recently returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan where he reported a four-part series for The World. You can find, “Inside the Taliban” at The World dot org.

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The World offers this audio podcast of Sennott’s four-part radio series, “Inside the Taliban:”

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GlobalPost offers an amazing mix of stories, photos and videos:

Life, Death and the Taliban

The PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer offers a series of videos:

Profiles of the Taliban

Even more is available on our Inside the Taliban series page.

How We Got Here is back after a vacation hiatus. Journalist Otto Pohl journeys back to Moscow to find out who shot him during a demonstration in 1993. Veteran foreign correspondent Charles Sennott returns to Afghanistan and Pakistan on the trail of the Taliban. And Warren Kozak tells us about the legendary American General Curtis LeMay.

Pohl was a young photographer working for The New York Times when Russian President Boris Yeltsin abruptly dissolved parliament back in October 1993.  Pohl was shot by security forces while covering a demonstration outside Moscow’s central television tower. He tells us about his journey back to Russia to understand what happened all those years ago. (He wrote a piece about it for Men’s Journal this summer.)  Charles Sennott is another reporter going back to a story he reported long ago; he returns to Afghanistan and Pakistan on the trail of the Taliban.  You’ll hear Part 1 of Charlie’s series Inside the Taliban; as you’ll see it’s a very “how we got here” treatment of the subject. It’s familiar territory for Sennott, a long time foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe and now Executive Editor of GlobalPost.  Look for a full podcast of the series with additional commentary from Charlie very soon.  And in the final segment of this week’s episode we continue our exploration of the history of bombing with a look at a new biography of a key architect of  American air power strategy during WWII and beyond.

The Taliban have risen, fallen, and then risen again in the past 15 years. The Islamist movement rose to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, ruled the country in the late 90s, and fell to the US-led invasion in 2001. Nowadays, the Taliban seem to be regaining strength, not only in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan. Reporter Charles Sennott covered the Taliban from their rise in Afghanistan, to their ouster in 2001. Sennott recently returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan to do a series of reports on the history and fluctuating fortunes of the Taliban. Sennott begins his series with a visit to a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan. There, he meets Pakistanis displaced by the fighting between the country’s military, and Taliban forces. Sennott travels to the camp with Rahimullah Yusufzai, the Pakistani journalist who is widely credited with making the first report on the Taliban in 1994, and who has interviewed Osama bin Laden several times. Looking around the camps, Yusufzai tells Sennott: “It’s a familar story I think. When I look at these camps, I remember the camps for Afghan refugees, which became the nursuries for the Afghan Taliban. Some of them joined Al-Qaeda. So, maybe this is being repeated.”

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PART I

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Read the transcript of Part I of Inside the Taliban here.

PART II

Pakistan is now a crucial battleground in the fight against Islamist extremism. The fighting and the disruption of life for more than two million displaced people is putting a severe strain on the country. Some of those displaced are now returning. In Part Two of our series Inside the Taliban, Charles Sennott reports on Pakistan’s new internal war on terror, and how the country has turned against the movement it once supported.
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PART III

Sally Goodrich in Afghanistan. 2007. Photo by Jean Chung

Peter Goodrich was a victim of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was a passenger on the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. Goodrich was 33 years old; his parents were devastated. But Peter’s mother, Sally Goodrich, found a way to honor his life. She raised money to build a school for girls in Afghanistan’s Logar Province. In 2007, Sally Goodrich journeyed from her Vermont home to Afghanistan, to visit the school she helped build. Charles Sennott traveled with her, and filed this report for The World. You can find more pictures, and a transcript of that original story here.

Now, fast forward to 2009. In today’s Afghanistan, schools for girls lie directly on the front line in the war against the Taliban. Almost daily, girls’ schools are bombed and burned. The Afghan Ministry of Education now estimates that at least 20 percent of its 11,000 schools across the country are in districts under control of the Taliban. For our Inside the Taliban series, Charles Sennott and Sally Goodrich return to the school she helped build, only to find that it now appears to be under control of the Taliban.
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PART IV

In the final part of our series on the Taliban, Charles Sennott sat down with former Taliban leaders, clerics and US counter-insurgency experts to try to discover the minds of the Taliban and whether the US military is making any progress in understanding them.

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