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.

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

We are all journalists who’ve come to get kidnapped and to trip landmines and get shot at and then to treat massive, life threatening wounds. All of it, of course, is an exercise. It’s not real. But it feels very real if you are heading to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan or even Juarez, Mexico where several of the photographers who’ve come here are working on a regular basis. In all of these places the risk level for journalists rises steadily every time you turn around like a treacherous tide coming up on you.

Jan, a former member of the British military’s special forces, who teaches the risk assessment class for Centurion, one of the best risk analysis firms in the business, is clicking through a power point presentation on recent kidnappings in Pakistan from where he has just returned.

“If you are taken hostage, remember you only have a five-minute window. Your best chance of escape is in the first five minutes. So fight for your life. Go for the eyes. Do what ever you can. Go all the way.,” he says with a crisp British military precision.

The line is delivered with a sort of casual sense of horror and is punctuated with a disconcerting grin. I still have fake blood caked in my hair from the field exercises in treating wounds. And there I am sitting in a folding chair listening to this briefing and thinking, “What the hell am I doing going to Afghanistan and Pakistan?”

Jan, who prefers that only his first name be used, has just returned from Pakistan where he says the risk for journalists is ratcheting up at an alarming rate. We break and Peter, a former Royal Marine in charge of the first aid portion, quips, “Okay, lads we’ll do head trauma right after lunch.”

Aren’t I just getting too old for this? I have a wife and four sons and a noble, aging yellow Labrador all of whom I love and with whom I cherish every minute. The newspaper on the breakfast table is almost daily filled with headlines about bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the worsening situation. I try to keep the sports page on top of the front page so my sons don’t see the news. My wife is smarter than that, but still understands on some level what I do. My mother, who is a great supporter of my career, believes the trip is insane and has taken to letting me know it in repeated early morning phone calls. But I’m still planning on going, and here’s why.

What reporters do in the field in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan matters. We need to keep reporting from there. We need to keep bringing home truths. At GlobalPost, we strongly encourage our correspondents who work in these places to take this hostile environment training and so I am here at the hostile environment class in part to live up to our own standards. The training is disturbing and the paper work is worse. For example, I just completed my KPP or “Kidnap Prevention Protocol.” These are difficult times to work as a journalist in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At GlobalPost, we have correspondents like Shahan Mufti in Pakistan and Jean MacKenzie in Afghanistan who risk their lives every day to report the stories you need to know from there. And I am proud of their courage and the service they offer to those who view our site and come there to find what we call GroundTruth. Most days I am safely ensconced in Boston editing the site. To be returning to the field is the best of what we do, the pursuit of GroundTruth, which put simply is the belief that you have to be there to get the story.

I have been in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan since the mid 1990s when I first started covering the Taliban. I was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks. And I feel like I have history and context to add to the reporting there and I hope it might add to the understanding of the Taliban for visitors to our site and the challenges that US and NATO troops face there. I hope my reporting might contribute something to the understanding of that complex culture and forbidding terrain, that place that is a graveyard for empires throughout history. I still believe in that kind of reporting and that is why I am going.

But even as I was washing the fake blood out of my hair and watching it pool in red and circle down the drain at the end of the training, the questions about whether I am taking too big a risk to be going don’t go away. They are always there.

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.