Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six US attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the US in connection with the 1998 attack two US embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in Northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The US intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

An early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are scrambling to move base and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened now eight years after the September 11th attacks.

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

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.

HDS Greenway knows GroundTruth. He’s lived it through five decades of reporting and editing.

If you have not yet read Greenway’s 5-part series for GlobalPost on The War Hotels please link now.

The series tells of Greenway’s own journey across five decades of reporting on conflict from Vietnam to Iraq and many war-ravaged points in between from Cambodia to Lebanon. By taking readers inside the legendary hotels where he and so many other journalists have covered these conflicts, David Greenway is unpacking the history of foreign reporting itself. He speaks of a time of great camaraderie among the foreign press corps and brings back to life its gritty reporting, its proud irreverence, its legendary drinking and its acerbic humor. He shares sketches from a time when there were many more foreign reporters than there are today.

From 1962 to 1978, David worked in the field in Southeast Asia and the Middle East for Time-Life and the Washington Post. In 1978, he created the Globe’s foreign desk and as foreign editor established a noble tradition for international reporting at the Globe. Greenway still writes a foreign affairs column for the Globe. He is largely responsible for the Globe’s reputation for punching above its weight class in international reporting. But sadly, that era is over. The Boston Globe no longer has any correspondents posted abroad and no longer has a foreign editor.

There are other great newspapers suffering economically that have been forced to similarly shrink their view of the world and the coverage they provide in it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and the list goes on. Other great newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, which recently declared bankruptcy, have only a handful of foreign correspondents still on staff. The television networks long ago gave up on serious foreign coverage with a few notable exceptions such as NBC News, where Richard Engel has done outstanding work on Iraq and the Middle East.

There are still a handful of newspapers — The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor among them — who have maintained foreign desks and still have great talent. But who knows how long even the strongest newspapers can survive?

I hope you will take some time to read Greenway’s series and witness a glimpse into the once-great history of newspaper reporting abroad. Between the lines and the great stories, you can also see the history of how so many correspondents have filed. For a younger generation, there is a history time line of technology embedded in the series.

It’s a journey that takes you from the days of the Telex through to the lingering middle ages of ATEX systems where we used to use rubber couplers on phones to file simple text from an analog line. And then it brings you up to more recent years, just before the Boston Globe foreign operation shut down. At the Globe’s old Baghdad bureau we used to file with the BGAN, a mobile satellite phone that can provide a reporter anywhere in the world with broadband quality connections. That Greenway is now writing for America’s first fully web-based international news organizations illustrates how his career is bookended from the great era of newspapers to the digital revolution of today where he is helping bring shape to a new way of delivering international news.

We at GlobalPost feel lucky to have the wisdom and the talent and the voice and the many years of GroundTruth that David Greenway brings to our site every week.

Today’s exclusive story is bold and insightful GroundTruth.

Our correspondent in Pakistan, Shahan Mufti, has broken a news story that is a must read. Mufti knows Peshawar, Pakistan well. He’s been in and out of there and has great contacts on the ground in the rugged, ancient Silk Road town that lies near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was there covering the attacks on US military supply routes last month when he stumbled upon a market which is essentially a fencing operation for stolen US military equipment, including computers with restricted information. The theft of this property imperils the US troops in Afghanistan. And so he began to investigate.

We decided to send him into the market with a wad of cash to pose as a buyer. He was sold a US military laptop packed with sensitive information on US military equipment and logistics for about $650. He took photographs of the laptop and studied and in some cases photocopied the material that was on it. He then contacted the military attache at the US Embassy in Islamabad and eventually returned the laptop to its rightful owner: the US government.

The Pentagon tells us it is looking into how it was stolen, but clearly the military has a problem on its hands with a growing black market in Pakistan and Afghanistan for stolen US military goods. It’s supply routes are getting hit regularly. So America is learning what so many empires before it have learned: the Khyber Pass is the Achilles’ heel of armies that dare to invade a terrain as hostile and forbidding as the mountains that lie between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Throughout the ages, from Genghis Kahn, to Alexander the Great, to the British and the Soviets and now the Americans, the lesson of Afghanistan is written in stone: This place is a graveyard for invading empires.

I can see why so many of my foreign correspondent colleagues are drawn to this posting, this enormous, vast country full of so much promise and so many contradictions and complexities. You can feel the great hope for India’s future everywhere but on the next corner there is the relentlessly depressing face of poverty and despair seen in the street kids who beg for change and the deformed and deranged who hold out their hands. To unpack the story of India for American readers — to capture the essence of this place – takes talent and knowledge and the only way to do it is to live here. I spent some time with Indian reporters at the Press Club of India, where they gather and drink warm beer on hot nights in a dusty garden. It’s a great club and the press corps is alive and crackling here.

I also hung out for an evening at the Foreign Correspondents Club at the invitation of my friend and colleague Phil Reeves, who is the NPR correspondent here. I talked to reporters from British and American papers and heard a persistent complaint. That is that their newspapers have one staffer here in New Delhi and that too often their editors expect them to cover the whole region, which pulls them away constantly from one of the best running stories in the world, which is India. We are hoping to change that by having at least three correspondents who live in India and write only about India.

So while I was here I met with a long list of candidates — good story tellers and reporters and photographers and videographers who have applied to Global News Enterprises. Between interviews, I’ve become obsessed with going out to the newsstands here and marveling at the booming newspaper industry. Hundreds of English and Hindi newspaper mastheads cram the shelves of the news kiosks. India is the world’s most vibrant and growing newspaper market. I buy up the papers even the Hindu language ones that I can’t read and devour the English language editions. The papers are crackling with news in the last few days. There are new angles coming out about the Islamic fundamentalist bombers who struck last month. There are big headlines on a probe ordered into the stampede at the Hindu temple in Jodhpur that killed 215 people. And there are horrific and chilling accounts from the southern district of Orissa about a spate of attacks by Hindi fundamentalists on scores of Christian churches

By far the biggest headlines are on the nuclear deal with the United States and large photographs of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is in town to finalize the deal. It is one of the most important economic and security relationships India has established in the post Cold War era and it is a huge topic of discussion. Although the media here does not make much of this fact, I thought it was meaningful that it was approved by congress on Gandhi’s birthday.

One of the most important aspects of my trip to India has been an awakening to the fact that this country more than any other is where we need to flood the zone. There is a vast horizon here not only for important news stories, but also for business opportunities for our syndication team at Global News Enterprises.

There are 1.2 billion people in India and an estimated 250 million of them read in English. English language newspaper circulation is up a steady 5 percent a year across the board. The Times of India has the largest circulation (2.2 million daily) of any English language newspaper in the world — a splashy, brash paper that has taken the country by storm. The Hindustan Times, which is widely considered by old school journalists to have the edge editorially, comes in a close second at 1.7 million. The reason English language newspapers are growing at such a stunning rate is that the population is aggressively learning English and literacy rates across the board are growing as the middle class expands. The middle class understands that English is the language of globalization and they are doing whatever it takes to be sure their children are fluent in English. It is a perfect storm for a wild growth of newspapers, and it opens a huge market possibility for us.

But most importantly this country provides stories that need to be told. And I’m thrilled to be putting together our team of correspondents here who will help us get our arms around the Elephant.