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.

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.”