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.

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.

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.

But Israel voiced a nearly unanimous agreement that the punishing military offensive in Gaza was the right thing to do.

Now as the real votes are counted in Israel’s national parliamentary election, it’s results are more mixed and more nuanced.

Until a government is formed, it’s hard to see what this pivotal election will mean for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle to reassemble a peace process that lies buried under the rubble in Gaza.

It looks like the current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is ahead in the early returns.

But it remained very unclear as to whether Livini’s party would have enough seats in the Knesset to put together a government. And most analysts put their money on the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu as the candidate most likely to build the coalition that will land him back in the Prime Minister’s office.

The king maker in all this might well be the far-right Israeli nationalist and former minister Avigdor Liberman who is widely viewed among Israeli Arabs and many left leaning Israeli Jews as a seething anti-Arab racist.

Nadav Tamir, the Israeli Consul General for New England, came by GlobalPost headquarters here in Boston today and we spent the late morning discussing the election and what it all means. Tamir is a wise observer and a very skilled diplomat who avoids talking the raw math of politics. But he offered these observations:

“Right now the fear in Israel is very real … Israelis saw that incremental steps in the peace process did not work. They saw that a bold approach only created the intifada. A unilateral pullout from Gaza also failed. … So there is fear of what to do next. And when there is fear, Israel usually turns to the right,” he said.

“Eighty percent of Israelis see a two state solution as the only way to go in the future,” he said. “But the problem is they don’t know how to get there. As Shimon Peres said recently, “There is light at the end, but there is no tunnel.”

GlobalPost’s Egypt correspondent, Theo May, finally landed inside Gaza. Using his Blackberry to file because he couldn’t get any internet connection through his laptop, he has just filed a riveting account of what it feels like on the ground tonight under the Israeli air strikes.

Getting inside Gaza makes him one of the few Western reporters who has managed to get on the ground to document the devastation and the killing that has gone on during three weeks of an Israeli offensive. Many Palestinian reporters and photographers have been the only ones documenting the conflict. The Israelis have blocked the Western media from going inside Gaza. But Theo was able to enter from the Egyptian side of the border at Rafah.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that broke the ceasefire and began rocketing southern Israel. Israeli officials say those Hamas rocket attacks provoked their overwhelming display of force which has killed more than 1,100 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians. Theo is now in a place to be our witness on the ground and he will be bringing you his live reports from the field all weekend.

We have also put together a photo gallery of Reuters images from the Israeli offensive. The images show the massive destruction and the horrific suffering of the Palestinians under this offensive. It also shows the Israeli military carrying out what it believes is a necessary offensive to put an end to the Hamas attacks on its civilians. Some of the images are disturbing. But then again so is war.

REFLECTIONS ON A BIG WEEK FOR GLOBAL NEWS AND A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9-11 IN NEW YORK.

I wanted to take some time before the trip to Hong Kong to reflect on what was a pivotal week in the formation of Global News Enterprises. The team is truly starting to come together now.

We brought on board two key editors. After a job search that attracted a flood of great candidates for the senior editing positions, we are thrilled to announce that we have hired Barbara Martinez and Thomas Mucha to serve as Managing Editors.

Barbara comes to us from the Politico where she was a Deputy Managing Editor. For us, she will serve as Managing Editor – Web. She was a strong asset at Politico and one of the driving forces that helped make the website for political junkies the excellent news source that it is today. We look forward to having her strong skill set and her passion for web-based news organizations and breaking new ground in new media to our team. She honed her skills as executive editor of the Harvard Crimson and worked for three years as a reporter at The Washington Post.

Thomas will be Managing Editor – Correspondents. He comes to us after working at Crain’s in Chicago where he headed up a multimedia team that focused on covering globalization. Thomas is a 17-year veteran of journalism and brings a unique blend of television and print experience to the table. He worked for 8 years at CNN mostly on the business desk and has worked for the last 7 years in print, mostly at Crain’s. He also has a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the University of Chicago where he studied the emerging markets of China and India. He has a great eye for a story and a keen interest in unraveling the complex themes of globalization.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired Andrew Meldrum as a Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa. For those who follow news in Africa, Andrew is well known for his courage and insight through more than 25 years as a reporter on the continent. He has worked in Africa for both the Economist and the Guardian and other publications. Most of his work has been in Zimbabwe where he has courageously uncovered and challenged the injustices of the Mugabe dictatorship. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University last year.

We have had some other stellar hires on the editorial team, including Amy Jeffries who worked for many years in public radio and recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley in its News21 program, which is seeking to train a new generation for the skills they’ll need to break new ground in multimedia journalism. She will be our Web master. And Sarah Liebowitz will be joining us as a Deputy Editor. She worked most recently as a political reporter for the Concord Monitor. Before that, she worked with me in London as a bureau manager and then as a correspondent who played a crucial role in our coverage of the London bombings in July of 2005.

For me, this big week ended with a a trip on Thursday, September 11th and Friday, September 12th to New York for the Service Nation forum which brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, the two senators vying for the White House put aside the petty political bickering that too often marks our national politics and joined together to offer their ideas on how the country might raise a call for public service among young people.

Both men noted that seven years ago, President George W. Bush missed an opportunity to call the country to service in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11. If you remember, in the days immediately following 9-11 when the country and the world were still in shock, Bush delivered a speech where he literally encouraged Americans to “go shopping” and to go back to doing what they were doing.

Both candidates criticized Bush for that response and said their presidency would be very different. They said they would face the tremendous challenges that lie ahead — from terrorism to climate change and from the after effects of Katrina in New Orleans and the slow slide of standards in too many public schools — by calling on the skill and energy of young people in this country. And they would ask them to serve their country. Not only in the military.

But both candidates urged them to join Teach for America or City Year or the foreign service to help the country in a time of tremendous challenges. The forum was a tremendous success and was organized by a dear friend of mine, Alan Khazei, the co-founder of City Year and now of a new organization called “Be The Change.”

You might ask what a conference on national service has to do with our venture at Global News Enterprises. GNE is not a public service institution, it’s a for-profit media company. But still it is our great hope that our correspondents work in the field of international journalism will be of service to the country.

At Global News Enterprises, we want to give young reporters a chance to take up the calling to be foreign correspondents, to go out in the world and cover it. We want them to pursue a passion for international reporting and help bring stories to light that are currently going uncovered in so many corners of the world. We think our mission fits in with the goals of Service Nation and the call to action that the forum highlighted.

I was in New York for two days for the forum, and it was great to be back. I worked as a reporter in New York City for many years for the New York Daily News before I landed at The Boston Globe. And on this trip on this somber and sacred anniversary, I went to Ground Zero and felt the powerful emotions that are still there for all Americans when they think about what happened that day.

For me, September 11th opened a long 7-year journey of reporting in Afganistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and then in Madrid for the train bombings and in London for the underground bombings. I reflected back on that reporting journey and I thought about how many of my colleagues who worked — or are still working — in Afghanistan and Iraq are now struggling to find work as foreign correspondents.

So many news organizations have cut back on or in many cases abandoned their mission to cover the world. And it makes me realize that Global News Enterprises has an incredible opportunity to fill a void in international news coverage for Americans that is glaring. The challenges before us in creating a new web-based international news organization are extraordinary, but we are pulled along by the feeling that what we are trying to do is important.

And the team we are building is all passionately dedicated to making it a success. It won’t be easy, but I feel a hell of a lot better trying than I did at a newspaper where every day you could feel the energy draining from the mission. It’s a big decision to have left my life in newspapers and to have taken on this new startup, but it is also exciting as hell. I think we have a real chance to radically redefine international reporting in the digital age. There is a revolution going on and I guess I just want to be out there — and want to build a team that wants to be out there — whipping molotov cocktails and storming ramparts for the cause. (Not literally, of course.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

THE LAST DAY OF A GREAT RIDE IN NEWSPAPERS …

I guess the first post on this blog should be about the last day of what I call one of the “last great rides in newspapers.”

On my last day in the newsroom of The Boston Globe, the huge rolls of newsprint pounded off the trucks onto the loading docks down in the press room as they always do at the end of the week before the big Sunday run. The thud shakes the newsroom. I always loved that sound. It represented the heft of a big city newspaper. The weight of the organization and the importance of what it does.

But on that last day in March of 2008, that thud sounded more like distant thunder. It sounded ominous. And there are indeed dark clouds on the horizon for the newspaper industry, and an ominous feeling is setting in in far too many newsroom. It is a pervasive feeling from the highest realms of management to the cubicles of reporters in the newsroom that the current economic model simply cannot sustain the level of excellence in journalism that it always has. I hope that is not the case, but the feeling in newsrooms like the Globe is palpable. It is felt most intensely at going away parties for veterans. And at the Globe there had been far too many of them in recent years. They usually are a congregation in the middle of the newsroom of editors and reporters huddled around a sheet cake and coffee where stories are told — funny, touching, heartfelt stories — about the work of a great reporter. Lots of talk of the good old days. They felt like Irish wakes without the drinking. The metro editor Brian McGrory said the rectangular sheetcakes had in his mind come to resemble “tiny coffins.” I didn’t want to have one of these maudlin gatherings and I , like just about everyone at the Globe, had grown to hate sheetcake. So instead we gathered at Doyle’s, a great old pub in Jamaica Plain, and raised pints of Guinness and I listened to my editors and colleagues rip me apart with great humor. Some of them were true.

When I joined the Globe in early 1994, the paper was flush with cash. It was truly in the heyday of newspapers which had soared in revenue and circulation throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. They had come of age out of big cities like Boston with a brash confidence. The newsrooms had swagger, and they had solid revenue to back it up. I grew up in Massachusetts and the Globe was a part of my daily life. In many ways, my family was the core of its readership. Every morning, the Globe was on the breakfast table and there was push and pull over the sports page. We were a typical Boston Irish family that through one generation after the next had drifted out to the suburbs. And in so doing we mirrored the demographic sprawl of the paper and we embodied the solid readership that the paper sought for its advertisers.

I came to the Boston Globe from the New York Daily News and for me it was truly a homecoming. It was the paper I had always wanted to work for. And a big part of the draw to the Globe — beyond the obvious hometown pull — was that it was a news organization that had foreign bureaus and where I could live out a long-held dream to become a foreign correspondent. I got the chance in 1997 when the Globe named me the Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem. My wife, Julie, and I went to Jerusalem together with our newborn son, Will. he was only three months old when we left in the summer of 1997 to move into an old stone home in Jerusalem. The title “Bureau Chief” looks good on a business card, but it’s a preposterously grand title considering I was the only Globe correspondent in the Middle East. My wife, Julie, would tease me about this. She’d say, “Whoa! You’re the bureau chief … and (pause for ironic effect) you’re the entire bureau!” Or she would call me in the office and quip, “Is this the bureau chief? Sorry, am I interrupting you in the middle of a meeting with all of your personalities?”

Behind the humor was , of course, truth. The Globe was a small paper to have seven foreign bureaus. But I loved that it aspired to be a paper that covered the world for its readers. And in doing so, it punched above its weight class. We had a tradition of great foreign correspondents form Curtis Wilke and David Greenway to Ethan Bronner and David Filipov. Often, our correspondents were known as the best reporters and most talented writers in their patch. I was very proud to be part of that tradition.

I was the Globe’s Middle East “bureau chief” for four years and covered the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through the height of its greatest hopes and good intentions. And I was there when it all came crashing down and the two sides descended back into violence. I covered the intifada on the frontlines from the moment it began. And through it all our family was growing. We had two children born in the Holy Land. Riley was born in Jerusalem in 1999. And Gabriel was born in Bethlehem in 2000. When Palestinian suicide bombers would strikes Israeli buses or the Israeli tanks would pound a Palestinian village, we would hear the carnage in our garden. The bombings in particular would rattle the windows they were so close. When this happened, birds that would congregate in a lemon tree in our yard would flutter up out of the three and fly away. And our oldest son, Will, would ask, “What’s that Dad?” We would always tell him it was thunder. One day after a bombing and the usual question and the answer which was a lie, he asked, “Dad, if that’s thunder how come it never rains?”

That moment underscored a growing and undeniable feeling that Julie and I shared that having a family in Jerusalem was becoming untenable for us. We felt great sadness and great guilt at the idea of leaving a city we loved and friends on both sides of the conflict behind as we prepared to leave. We arrived in London in early September of 2001. Our moving truck dropped our boxes on September 11, 2001. I was unpacking my office when the news came on the radio that changed the world forever.

I spent most of the next five years covering the dramatically unfolding events of September 11 and its aftermath through the start of the US air strikes in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Qala-i-Jangi unprising in Mazar-e-Sharif which was probably one of the most wild battles of the first war of the 21st century. That was the place where hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda being held in prison, rose up and seized the prison and fought against US and British special forces for several days. It was the battle where the American Taliban John Walker Lindt emerged from a basement of the fortress to tell a tale of how a California kid ended up taking part in a “jihad” against America.

After Afghanistan, I covered the trans-Atlantic divide that led up to the war in Iraq and then I covered the war itself. I was in the north waiting for the war to begin and covered it from the north down as Baghdad fell and the front lines pushed from Kirkuk and the Mosul and Tikrit and finally the entire regime of Saddam Hussein. For the next several years, I would be in and out of Iraq and covering a spate of bombings in Madrid and London and then looking back and realizing that I had become a war correspondent. I never thought of myself that way, but indeed that was we were covering.

By 2005, I was fairly burned out and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, which is an extraordinary opportunity to have one year to explore literature and history and art and music and to throw open all the doors of learning that Harvard has to offer. It was a great year.

But in the spring of 2006 I returned to the Globe and could feel that it was a changed place. It was battered by the economic realities of running a big city newspaper and was struggling to find its way. Within a year, the Globe made the decision to cut its entire foreign staff After 22 years in the daily newspaper business and 14 years at the Globe, I have left traditional media and set out on a new venture.

And so now, as you know if you have been reading this blog, we are starting the first fully web-based international news agency. The company is called Global News Enterprises and we will announce the domain name of the website closer to the launch which is set for February 2009.