A former foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Charles Sennott is now executive editor and vice president of GlobalPost, an online international news service.

DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, filling in for Terry Gross.

National elections are scheduled next week in Afghanistan, where the U.S.-led war against the Taliban has intensified in recent months. While American troops are conducting extensive operations in southern Afghanistan, U.S. drone missiles have been hitting targets in Pakistan in support of a government offensive against the Taliban there.

Our guest, reporter Charles Sennott, says that a key to understanding the conflict in both countries is understanding the Taliban and its historical roots. He recently returned from the region, where he met with former leaders of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and visited an American counterinsurgency training center outside Kabul.

Sennott is a veteran international correspondent who's been covering the Taliban since 1995. He was the Boston Globe's Middle East bureau chief from 1997 to 2001 and the Europe bureau chief from 2001 to 2005. He left the Globe last year to become the executive editor of GlobalPost.com, an Internet journalism site devoted to in-depth international coverage. This week, the site launched a multimedia series based on the reporting of Sennott and photographer Seamus Murphy, as well as GlobalPost correspondent Shahan Mufti and Jean MacKenzie. It's called "Life, Death and the Taliban."

Well, Charlie Sennott, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Let's begin with just a little bit of a primer here. You know, the Taliban has been so active in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To what extent can we say that the Taliban comprises a unified or even coordinated organization?

Mr.�CHARLIE SENNOTT (Reporter): Well, I think it's very fractured, particularly right now. I think the Taliban started, you know, 15 years ago as a movement that really emerged out of Pakistan, out of the refugee camps, but then, as we know, took power in Afghanistan in 1996 and, after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, when the U.S. began its offensive, it was deposed and fractured and sent back into Pakistan, where it has once again transformed into several permutations.

DAVIES: Several permutations, meaning people of a more or less unified purpose but fractured leadership? Or is it some people are in for religion, some people are in for crime, some people are in for drugs?

Mr.�SENNOTT: I think it's fractured on a lot of fronts. I think it's fractured on motivation, and I think it's fractured on ideology. I think it does come together under an umbrella of wanting to challenge, confront, the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan.

What happened, though, was when the Pakistani military began to support the U.S. by actually going into some of the tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan, then the Taliban turned against the military that had actually done so much to create it, that's the Pakistani military. And on the Afghan side of the border, I think the Taliban movement remains very much in the same direction it has been really since 2001, which is to fight, to force the U.S. occupiers out of Afghanistan the same way they see themselves as having done so against the Soviet Union.

DAVIES: All right, let's talk a bit about Afghanistan specifically. And I'm wondering how the current Taliban insurgency there is different from the pre-2001 Taliban regime that ruled and held the capital of Kabul.

Mr.�SENNOTT: Well, I think the Taliban, when it really began, was a very na�ve movement. I mean, I remember being there in 1995 in the refugee camps, and we're just seeing these foot soldiers coming out of the madrassas in these Afghan refugee camps on the Pakistan side of the border and that movement beginning to take hold in its home base of Kandahar. And back then, it was idealistic. It was puritanical. It was seen as a counter to the very corrupt and brutal warlords.

And when they came into power, very rapidly in 1996, they were welcomed by many Afghans as a cleaner force, as a force that might actually bring some stability and some security. And they did sort of enjoy that reputation, but they were, as they see it, abandoned by the West, abandoned by the United States, left to their own devices. And as I found out through a lot of interviews with former Taliban officials on my most recent trip is that they were basically given a sort of leveraged buyout by al-Qaida, by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida because, as they put it, they had nowhere to turn.

So I think once again, after 2001, when they were crushed and they were deposed, they've fractured, they've splintered. And now this Taliban is trying to resurrect a lot of those old feelings that people had about the Taliban. And I'd have to say, and the U.S. military is saying, that they are doing so with some success, that they are indeed becoming a stronghold once again, certainly in the southeast and surprisingly in some pockets in the north and west.

DAVIES: You know, it was interesting. You - one of the experts that you interviewed for this series, a gentleman named Owen Sears, said that in the last few years, the Taliban had more success because it almost seems like they got it. What did he mean?

Mr.�SENNOTT: Well, he's a very interesting guy. He was a defense intelligence officer for many years who now is an academic, but he's been secunded to the U.S. military to help train counterinsurgency leaders. What he meant by that is that the Taliban gets that it needs to convince the local populace that it is going to be here, it's going to outlast the U.S. empire. That if you are a village leader or a malak that you should put your faith in the Taliban because they're the ones who will be around.

They are making this message more convincing through a climate of fear, through burning girls' schools, through going after anyone who cooperates with the U.S. military or the coalition. So this is not, you know, purely ideological and sort of religious or spiritual. It is also very much an element of thuggery, of militancy, and it is a convincing mix in those very rugged, rural lands where they are, once again, very much in control.

DAVIES: Now you - on this recent trip, you actually met for some time with some former Taliban leaders that are in Kabul. Now, these are officials of the former Taliban regime, right?

Mr.�SENNOTT: That's correct.

DAVIES: And you said that they are in close contact with leaders of the current insurgency. Why does the government in Kabul allow them to do that and talk to foreigners then?

Mr.�SENNOTT: I think it's very much seen as a channel, and some of them are in close contact, some of them are no longer in contact at all. But for those who are in contact, the understanding is this is an opening, a channel through whom the government can communicate to the Taliban insurgents. And there have been some meetings that we reported on that were held in Saudi Arabia earlier this year and some ongoing meetings in which dialogue is underway on a very low level and a very unofficial level between these Taliban leaders and the U.S. government, with an eye toward finding out what the Taliban insurgency is all about and what it wants.

DAVIES: Now, you know, President Obama has talked about trying to reach out to, you know, elements of the Taliban with whom a productive dialogue might be, you know, initiated. What did these leaders tell you about what kind of agreement that might be or cooperation or discussion with the United States?

Mr.�SENNOTT: Well, that's exactly right. Obama has talked about the so-called moderate Taliban. And one of the great questions here in Kabul is, what does that mean? What is the moderate Taliban? And it's a fair question, but I do think there is an element of the Taliban that was in control in Kabul before September 11th, 2001, that felt very strongly that their movement had been hijacked by militants, that it had been hijacked by al-Qaida, it had been taken over through naivete and mismanagement and a very poor sense of how to govern.

And they are, from my interviews with them, repentant about that. They understand the mistakes they made. And in their understanding, I think, comes an opportunity to try to connect with that Taliban on the ground that is what General Petraeus calls the reconcilables: those who are willing to become part of the future of Afghanistan. And from what I heard, and you hear many different things, even with these six leaders who I had a chance to meet with.

I would say each one of them had a different position, ranging from open to talking and encouraging it and actually doing it, to refusing to talk and raising the question: If the U.S. military indeed wants to try to negotiate with the Taliban, why then are they increasing the troops by 21,000 and creating an offensive in Helmand?

But I do think there's a feeling that negotiation is going to be inevitable. And what I heard on the ground, probably the most interesting takeaway I had was that this is a good moment for dialogue because the election is August 20th, President Obama has said he wants dialogue. General Petraeus has talked about part of the counterinsurgency mission is to define who are those reconcilables, and I think the sense was that right now is a moment for that dialogue to open up.

Whether in fact that will happen and whether that will happen in ways that are productive I think will be seen in the coming weeks.

DAVIES: Did any of these leaders present you with the outlines of a potential deal?

Mr.�SENNOTT: Not a potential deal but an understanding that's very much from their perspective. You know, they said if the U.S. military would stop all of its attacks on civilians, if the U.S. military would release - I think the list was 100 prisoners who they had very officially named, that then they would indeed begin a dialogue that would start at the point at which they would stop bombing schools and they would no longer attack government officials.

That was the very raw parameters in which this dialogue wants to take place from the Taliban perspective. What I heard from U.S. military officials and counterinsurgency analysts who are there on the ground is that the Taliban isn't being realistic yet enough for the U.S. to really engage. So while there are low-level discussions, nothing has quite clicked in yet. And I think we're so close to the election now, it may be after the election that we see movement.

DAVIES: You know, it's interesting to remember that in 2001, I mean, American forces attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan not because they hated their ideology or wanted to liberate the Afghan population but because they were indeed harboring al-Qaida, which had staged the September 11th attacks. And I would think that from the American point of view, American security is the critical question, and therefore, a critical question for the Taliban leaders would be: Are they prepared to harbor terrorists who will stage attacks on the West? Did you hear discussion of that in your conversation with these Taliban leaders?

Mr.�SENNOTT: Well, you do hear discussion of it, but the discussion often just dissolves into rhetoric. And there would be - they would have a debate as to whether al-Qaida is a legitimate force against Western imperialism, sort of, you know, the whole idea that America is an empire on foreign soil and that there is substance within the Koran that gives them a Koranic grounding to fight and to fight within what is considered Islamically correct against that occupying force that is threatening a Muslim population.

And you sort of dissolve into this very unproductive sense of whether or not al-Qaida is a terrorist organization. But in the end of the day, al-Qaida has mostly moved over into Pakistan, and that's where the Pakistani Taliban comes in. I think that Pakistani Taliban is much more fractured, is much more open to corruption, to thuggery, to theft, to just pure, raw tribal power in that area and that they are willing to work with al-Qaida because al-Qaida has great funding links.

I tend to view the Taliban as almost like a host of a virus that is known as al-Qaida. The Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1990s began to allow that virus in. That Taliban leadership saw what happened when they did that. They were toppled and they were brutally pushed out of the country. The Pakistani Taliban is now really courting al-Qaida in a way because it helps with their funding, it helps with their power base, and I think once again we're seeing this movement known as the Taliban serving as a host for al-Qaida. But that is now more on the Pakistani side of the border.

DAVIES: Charles Sennott is the executive editor of GlobalPost.com. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is Charles Sennott. He is the executive editor of GlobalPost.com, an Internet journalism site devoted to international news, which this week is presenting a series on the Taliban.

When you were in Afghanistan, you managed to visit a counterinsurgency school run by the U.S. military. This is Camp Julien, just outside Kabul. Was it hard to get permission to get in there? I would imagine so.

Mr.�SENNOTT: It was, and it was permission that was given to me through contacts, through many years of reporting in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and talking to a lot of counterinsurgency officials within the U.S. military who, if they see you write about this issue over time, understand that this might be beneficial to open that door for you.

And they did open the door, and I really appreciated it because I got to see some very intense and, I think, effective training going on in educating the troops on the ground about the Taliban, about the religious grounding that shaped the Taliban, about the Deobandi tradition, which is a counter-colonialist movement from the 19th century that grew out of madrassas in what is today India. And they are really trying very hard to start over in Afghanistan and to start over by understanding that you need to negotiate on a very micro level with the villages.

And in order to do that, to talk to a malak or what would probably be closely described as a mayor of one of these villages, you have to know your stuff. You have to know where they're coming from. You have to know where this village was, you know, back in the mid-'90s, where it was in 2001, where it is today. And you have to understand that there is a lot of negotiation that happens in Afghanistan's culture, and it's always been part of it, and it's very easy to flip someone from one side to the other, and it's just as easy for them to flip back to the Taliban.

So it's very fluid, and it requires a lot of complexity. And I saw that, at least a glimmer of that, there at Camp Julien, where this counterinsurgency training center is located.

DAVIES: Let's just explore that idea a little bit. If you're a Marine or Army unit operating in Afghanistan, and there's a village and the Taliban have been strong there and you approach, you know, the local officials, what are the negotiations about? What's the approach?

Mr.�SENNOTT: I think part of the negotiations are recognizing that what people in that village want and what the malak wants for his people is very simple. It's security and it's the ability to conduct trade. I'd say a tertiary importance is education. And that's how they see it, and that's how they prioritize it: security, trade and education.

You know, if the U.S. military can go into a village and recognize those as the primary concerns, they can then have a groundwork to discuss how the U.S. military is going to provide that for them more than the Taliban. Right now that's a tough sell because the Taliban is in control in a lot of these areas. And frankly, the Afghans are real smart people.

They know their village, they know their terrain, and they are making an assessment right now that they are putting their faith in the Taliban. And that is what's come out of even General McChrystal's statements this week, in which he's basically saying that the Taliban has made great strides in coming back.

DAVIES: McChrystal is the U.S. commander of forces in Afghanistan.

Mr.�SENNOTT: Correct.

DAVIES: Yeah. If I were looking at this from, you know, all these many thousands of miles away, I mean, I might look at this and think, well, there are 68,000 American troops there now. That's less than half the number that we had in Iraq, in a country that is about the same population but a bigger area, far more rural, far more sprawling. Is it realistic to think that one can provide sustained security in so many thousands of villages?

Mr.�SENNOTT: No, and that's the problem in Afghanistan. And if you look on every desk in that counterinsurgency training center, there was that hefty, bound volume, the counterinsurgency field manual that General David Petraeus co-authored, which is an amazing document of the history of counterinsurgency and really a textbook for the post-9/11 U.S. military struggles against terrorism. If you read that book, it will tell you very clearly that the force ratios right now in Afghanistan are way off.

They should be 20 to one. That is, you have to have a counterinsurgent force member for every 20 residents of that area of operation or you're going to lose. And right now, the U.S. military, even combined with NATO and with the Afghanistan army and Afghanistan police, does not meet those force ratios. And the truth is, this counterinsurgency campaign has design elements to it that I don't understand just by reading the counterinsurgency documents themselves. And I think this is a debate that's about to really take off in Washington and inside the Pentagon.

They're going to call first for more Afghanistan army troops and more Afghanistan police troops, but ultimately that will mean a need for more advisors to train those troops and to integrate them into the 68,000 existing U.S. military troops. So this escalation is coming, I believe, and I think it's going to be coming sooner rather than later.

DAVIES: And when you bring more foreign troops into Afghanistan, of course, there is the risk that you will stir up this, you know, centuries-old hatred, I mean, and risk yourselves being seen as simply the latest colonial power.

Mr.�SENNOTT: That's right, and really everywhere you drive in Kabul are these reminders of empires that have failed in that place. You go past the British military graveyards or you go past, you know, the old Soviet military hospitals, where this just really boring, ugly architecture speaks to the Soviet presence there and the failure of that, and you wonder how it is possible that the U.S. military, with great leadership, with the best and the brightest calling the shots in Afghanistan, can't see this trajectory. And that arrogance on the part of the U.S. military, I think, is really something that we as reporters on the ground have to highlight.

I don't think we did it aggressively enough in Iraq, and it really did create a fiasco. And I think it's time now to really turn a pretty harsh light on the U.S. military's plan and its intentions in Afghanistan and question them because on the ground, even from what I'm hearing within military circles, it doesn't make sense.

DAVIES: So is this a hopeless mission?

Mr.�SENNOTT: I don't think it's a hopeless mission because I think we have a lot that we need to do to help Afghanistan be a better country that can have its own systems of governance and that can sort of dig its own way out of the rubble of so much war. And I think there is an active role that the U.S. military can play there through the PRTs, the provincial reconstruction teams, and through building of schools and roads. And yes, they do need security to be able to do that, but I think the big challenge for the U.S. military will be staying focused on that mission. And if they stray into a wider mission of trying to destroy the Taliban, and they look at it as a monolithic movement that is the enemy, I think they'll, in the end of the day, they'll fail in that larger and more important mission of helping Afghanistan to rebuild.

DAVIES: Charles Sennott is executive editor of GlobalPost.com. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies filling in for Terry Gross.

We're speaking with Charles Sennott, executive editor of GlobalPost.com, an Internet journalism site devoted to in-depth international coverage. He recently returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and GlobalPost is now featuring a multimedia series on the Taliban based on the reporting of Sennott and other correspondents.

While he was in Afghanistan, Sennott visited a counterinsurgency training center run by the U.S. military. Sennott says American commanders, led by General Davis Petraeus, are struggling to find an approach that will win the allegiance of Afghan civilians and isolate the Taliban.

You know, David Petraeus is known for assembling an unorthodox team of advisors, including a lot of civilians. Is he doing that in Afghanistan? Do you think he's going to get it?

Mr. CHARLES SENNOTT (GlobalPost.com): I think that General Petraeus has an extraordinary understanding of counterinsurgency. I think that in my many times being able to interview him, I've always been impressed with his ability to take the history and the knowledge of the region and the history of counterinsurgency and bring to it a game plan that can work. We saw that in Iraq with the surge. I think there were great successes to the surge.

In Afghanistan, I think it is a completely different challenge. It's a rural fight. It's a fight with an incredibly difficult terrain. It's a fight in which the population gives wide support to the Taliban, and I don't think it's anywhere near the same game in Afghanistan that it was in Iraq, and how they think they can accomplish in Afghanistan what they accomplished in Iraq with half the troops baffles me.

I don't understand this, but I think that I try to keep coming back to recognizing that people like General Petraeus really have an ability to build a great team with a lot of different opinions and brilliant minds. I'm just not seeing that game plan coming out the way we saw it in Iraq.

DAVIES: You know, it was interesting. I read this series on GlobalPost.com there was relatively little mention of the election. Almost no mention of the Afghan president, you know, Hamid Karzai.

Mr. SENNOTT: Mm-hmm.

DAVIES: This is, of course, a country in which the central government really has little impact in large parts of the country. Why do the elections matter?

Mr. SENNOTT: The elections matter because the Taliban is going to try its best to derail them. If they can succeed in derailing that election by creating a culture of fear in which people are afraid to go to the polls, that will help the Taliban increase its power and its sense of invincibility.

The U.S. military can secure, particularly those larger cities and towns where there will be more voters, if they can keep that so that there are people at the polls and there really is a sense that this is a legitimate election, that will speak in favor of the existing Afghan government and the U.S. support for it.

So the election is really about more than just the candidates. I think the accepted wisdom is that Karzai will win. But there's a larger contest, if you will, about what's going to happen with the election itself.

DAVIES: You know, it's a little surprising to me that from the little that I've read about the candidates, what you don't see is a slate of candidate which says we can't keep fighting the Taliban, we have to negotiate with them. I mean is there a kind of pro-Taliban, or at least a, you know, candidates who want to accommodate and negotiate with the Taliban? Is that an issue in this campaign?

Mr. SENNOTT: No. There are not any sort of, you know, tickets that would come together that would create a block that says we must negotiate with the Taliban. But I think there's a recognition across a lot of these parties that that's inevitable.

You know, already Karzai has appointed several former Taliban officials to positions both in the upper house of parliament and the lower house of parliament. One of those officials I spoke with - and that's Rahmani, who was the former minister of higher education in the Taliban and who is now serving in the lower house of parliament - and you know, he's openly saying that there should be negotiation with the Taliban. But he's sort of a minority voice within the parliament, and I think many people are afraid to voice that opinion even if they feel it because it would be so wildly unpopular with the U.S. and coalition forces. So there's a quiet rumbling about it that sort of exists throughout all of the different political parties and the different political affiliations within Afghanistan, but I don't think it's given a lot of voice...

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Mr. SENNOTT: ...particularly not in the American media.

DAVIES: Let's talk about the Taliban in Pakistan. You've said that, you know, for years the Pakistan government and military worked in alliance with the Taliban. That's changed lately. What brought about the change?

Mr. SENNOTT: What brought about the change was the U.S. putting enough pressure on General Musharaf, President Musharaf in Pakistan, to begin to fight the Taliban in Waziristan and in the Swat Valley. When that happened, the Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, recognized that the military and intelligence establishment that had done so much to create the Taliban was now going to confront it, and they in turn turned their backs on Afghanistan and began to fight back against the Pakistani military.

So that's the dynamics that's at play right now and it is interesting to see this really shift in even popular opinion in Pakistan against the Taliban. The last time I was in Pakistan before this trip, the Taliban was very popular. They were seen as a force that is countering the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan.

They were even seen sort of, if you went, you know, down into the areas where the military and the intelligence officials gather and you get down and talk to these folks off the record, there was great sympathy for the Taliban and in many ways support for that Taliban. So this is really what I would call blowback. That is a CIA term that we know from the Mujahadeen. We supported the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets. The Mujahadeen then became those forces that now have turned against us, including the Taliban and including al-Qaida.

DAVIES: To what extent is the Taliban's conduct and its treatment of the civilian populations in the Swat Valley and Waziristan, to what extent is that responsible for the change in sentiment?

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, that's a really good question. When we were in the refugee camps where the Swat refugees were fleeing the Pakistani military's offensive against the Taliban in Swat, we were hearing from the people in these tents where it's hot and it's crowded that they have anger against both the Pakistani government for not having a really good game plan for this offensive and what it would do to civilians and it created, of course, two million people forced out of their homes and a very large refugee crisis there along the border.

But they also were expressing anger against the Taliban for getting out of control, for imposing upon them a life and a lifestyle and an interpretation of the Koran that they don't accept. So there was this sense of civilians very much caught in the middle this fight.

But there's also an open question which is, where will that go? Where will that anger and despair end up? Because if you're in those hot refugee camps right now, where some people are deciding to go back to their homes in Swat and some are afraid to go back to their homes in Swat, I think you feel the same tension that you could in the Afghan refugee camps, you know, back in the late '80s, the early '90s, out of which movements like the Taliban grew.

And I'm very interested in hearing from Pakistani officials, from journalists there on the ground and analysts who are going to track what that anger and despair right now in those refugee camps is going to create, and I think that's a big open question.

DAVIES: The question being, do they eventually take their allegiance to the Taliban or do they believe in a unified Pakistan?

Mr. SENNOTT: Exactly. Do they throw their support behind the Taliban because they're so despairing of the way the government has treated them? And they are very rural. They're very uneducated. They rely on their interpretation to a large extent from what they hear in the mosques, what they hear on the radio stations that are these sort of pirate radio stations that the Taliban controls in those areas, and they are very open to interpreting this chaos crisis in their lives as support for the Taliban. And that is an equation that I don't know where it's going to end up.

I don't know that anyone does. It could swing the other way and it could be a force behind a more Islamic, certainly, but also secular aspects of the state of Pakistan as it sees itself defined with a strong military and Pakistani unity, and that is a big question that will play out in the coming months.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Charles Sennott. He is executive editor of GlobalPost.com.

We'll talk more after a break.

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DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is Charles Sennott. He's executive editor of GlobalPost.com, an Internet journalism site devoted to international news, which this week is presenting a series of in-depth reports on the Taliban.

You know, there have been controversial American military strikes at targets in Pakistan. I assume that that only inflames anger against the government and against the United States?

Mr. SENNOTT: It does. Particularly the drone attacks. It was this CIA drone attack that killed Baitullah Mehsud, who's the head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, which is sort of the umbrella group for all of these disparate Taliban movements out of Waziristan. And there is a sense of - of cowardice, I would have to say, on the part of the U.S. military as the Pakistani and Afghan people see it by attacking from afar with drones.

You know, this is a land of fighters. They believe in the nobility of fighting and they see these drone attacks as cross-border cowardice, and I'm certain that that strike on Baitullah Mehsud will be effective in fracturing the Taliban. But there will be a price to pay for it in anger among the Pakistani civilians as well.

DAVIES: I wanted to ask you about that, because there was a lot of reporting that the death of Baitullah Mehsud would in fact weaken the Taliban. Do you think it plays out that way?

Mr. SENNOTT: I don't know. I think it's a very complex terrain. I don't think I've had enough time there in this recent trip to assess that thoroughly. But I do know that there are many who believe the opposite, that you don't weaken the Taliban movement by killing Baitullah Mehsud, and you don't weaken the al-Qaida movement either, the same way killing Zarqawi didn't weaken al-Qaida in Iraq.

I think that you have forces at play in this region that will have plenty of new leaders who will emerge. It's interesting that the number two, Hakimullah Mehsud, who's no relation but who's from the Mehsud tribe in Waziristan, was killed in in-infighting, and I think that would lean toward the interpretation that this was an effective strike, that this has - classic counterinsurgency strategy of divide and conquer seems to be working effectively there.

And I do think that that would be the initial assessment. But this place is so complex. Things can shift so quickly and turn so dramatically that I don't think anyone knows the real answer to that yet.

DAVIES: Well, what are the prospects that this military offensive by the Pakistani military might actually eliminate the safe harbor for al-Qaida and result in either the capture or displacement of al-Qaida leaders?

Mr. SENNOTT: I think that's part of the intent of this mission very much at the urging of the U.S. military and the White House, but I don't know that it will be effective. This is a region that is a place that you really have to see to believe how remote these pockets are and the different hollows and canyons and valleys, and a potential for hiding out is extraordinary. It is very hard to find someone who is intent on hiding, particularly in that terrain.

DAVIES: In this series you make clear that the Taliban is not a bare-bones operation, that it's expensive to recruit and maintain its fighters and that it requires a lot of money. Where does the Taliban get its funding?

Mr. SENNOTT: This is a question that our two correspondents for GlobalPost, Jean MacKenzie and Shahan Mufti - Jean is in Kabul, Shahan is in Islamabad -were both looking at very closely, because it's a big question. What we were hearing from Washington, from the best assessment we could get, is that it's approximately a $300 million pool of funds that spills across the border that funds the Taliban on both sides of the border.

How that gets broken up, how that gets divided is in question. Certainly poppy is a huge part of their funding, but less so than many of these U.S. military officials had originally thought. A lot of the drug interdiction has been successful and it's hurt their funding. So some of the new funding includes things like logging, for example.

They will take a percentage from the big logging companies for security to operate in those areas. They will also take a percentage from mining for the same idea, that there'll be a sort of protection racket offered by the Taliban.

We're also seeing interesting funding coming through - you know, really the Pakistanis who live in the Diaspora who send money home - we are hearing that the Taliban is taking a cut of those remittances. So we're seeing the Taliban being much more sophisticated and reaching out for new revenue streams, essentially.

Where precisely they're all coming from is not that clear, but there are certainly great knowledge that the U.S. military, if it's going to be effective, is going to have to understand those better, and Holbrooke recently announced that he's going to be taking a much deeper look at that and that he'll be actually bringing people out of the Treasury to help assess the Taliban's funding base and how to go after it.

DAVIES: That's Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan...

Mr. SENNOTT: Right.

DAVIES: ...and Pakistan for the Obama administration. One of the things that surprised me in the series was reading that contracts for reconstruction and other infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, which are funded by, you know, the United States and other Western countries, actually itself goes to fund the Taliban because contractors simply understand that to get something done, they pay the Taliban a cut.

Mr. SENNOTT: This is as GlobalPost correspondent Jean McKenzie put it, the great open secret in Kabul. You know, NGOs are a big business. And NGOs work with a lot of sub-contractors. And the billions of dollars that the U.S. is pumping into these projects through these NGOs absolutely goes down to sub-contractors who work on local conditions, which means they are paying off the Taliban. So, we were able to confirm that with Afghan officials and with U.S. officials and even with some of the NGOs off the record themselves. The idea that it is happening is not in question. The extent to which it's happening is something that I think Richard Holbrooke will be working very hard on analyzing as he begins to really assess what is the funding base for the Taliban.

DAVIES: Well, Charlie Sennott, you spent a lot of years working for newspapers, and everybody knows that newspapers in this new media world are in trouble and people are wondering how important, original reporting is going to be sustained. Tell us about this venture, GlobalPost.com, and how it hopes to answer that question.

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, GlobalPost.com really started with the idea that American news organizations are really suffering economically. And one of the first things they are cutting is their foreign coverage, right at a time when I would argue America needs to understand the world more than ever. So much of what we face, whether it's climate change or terrorism, is really a global story. So GlobalPost's idea is to try to create a new kind of news organization that is completely Web-based and that will see international news as its mission. And we see it as a mission to provide that international news for an American audience not completely, but certainly in tone.

DAVIES: You know, it's a noble goal but everybody knows that paying reporters is not cheap, and particularly paying reporters to operate in international environments is not cheap. I don't know how much you want to talk about how this works, but I think - sure a lot of people want to know where you get the revenue to pay for the original reporting - is it advertising, is it subscriptions, is it foundation funding?

Mr. SENNOTT: Well, at GlobalPost, my co-founder, Phil Balboni, who is a great businessman and a great journalist, really had a game plan for this as a for-profit operation. To say international news, great international reporting from the ground, has value and that we believe we can become self-sustaining as a for-profit organization. So, we have investors, private investors, who have no political leaning. We're very much independent and they allow us to operate editorially independent, but they believe in that idea as spelled out in Phil Balboni's business plan. And that's where our funding comes from.

We have developed a business plan that calls for a network of foreign correspondents who are freelancers, who work all over the world, but who we give a steady contract to, where they really know they can make a monthly stipend that will allow them to operate in the countries where they live. And we also look for three revenue streams in this new model where we go for online advertising, we have a new syndication model where we're going to newspapers that have had to cut back on their foreign coverage and who are looking for other opportunities and outlets to provide that foreign coverage. And we also have a subscription model for premium content called Passport. And out of those three revenues streams, we think we can make this a viable organization that can be self-sustaining and profitable.

DAVIES: Well, good luck Charles Sennott. Thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. SENNOTT: Thank you.

DAVIES: Charles Sennott is executive editor of GlobalPost.com. The Web site is featuring a series this week on the Taliban. Taliban leaders continue to dispute reports that Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was killed in that U.S. drone missile attack. Several news report say U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources are confident he was killed. Coming up, Geoff Nunberg on how the g-word, government, came to be used as a pejorative term. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.