Welcome to InsurgencyWatch.com

Wel­come to Insur­gen­cy­Watch, a new blog deal­ing with Pak­istan, Afghanistan and other hotspots in the so-called “war on ter­ror.” While that nomen­cla­ture may be on its way out, the need to under­stand the emerg­ing threats around the world most def­i­nitely is in.

Some of you may remem­ber me from Back to Iraq, a web­site I ran as the world’s first reader-funded war cor­re­spon­dent. On that site, I brought strin­gent report­ing stan­dards to the blo­gos­phere, draw­ing on my expe­ri­ence with the Asso­ci­ated Press, the New York Daily News and Colum­bia University’s Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, among oth­ers. It was a great suc­cess and changed my career and, I hope, jour­nal­ism in a small way.

But now it’s time to turn back to the real Ground Zero in the fight against al Qaeda, var­i­ous mafias, other transna­tional crim­i­nal syn­di­cates and ter­ror groups. This blog will look at the inter­sec­tions between jihadism, drug run­ning, weapon smug­gling, money laun­der­ing, human traf­fick­ing and plain old crim­i­nal­ity — just to name a few top­ics of inter­est. And it will focus pri­mar­ily on Pak­istan and Afghanistan, and the fuzzy bor­der between the two.

To sum up this men­tal and phys­i­cal space is the place where a whole lot of nasty stuff goes down, where bor­ders are mean­ing­less and clean divi­sions and well-defined cat­e­gories don’t exist.

As for sup­port and con­tent, for the moment, Insur­gen­cy­Watch will sub­sist on ad rev­enue, dona­tions and, inshal­lah, grant money. Its con­tent will be pri­mar­ily analy­sis, but come June, after I’m done with the Stan­ford Knight Fel­low­ship, I hope to be on the ground in Pak­istan and Afghanistan doing the shoe-leather report­ing that made Back to Iraq stand out. But where the orig­i­nal site was pri­mar­ily a tex­tual expe­ri­ence, on Insur­gen­cy­Watch you will see a lot more video, more pic­tures. Want to see the lat­est jihadi videos? I hope to be your go-to place. The intent is to take full advan­tage of the mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­i­ties of the mod­ern Web.

So I hope you’ll join me in this new adven­ture. When the jour­nal­ism indus­try seems to be col­laps­ing, and for­eign news is becom­ing scarcer, I hope sites like this — and oth­ers — will be able to fill a gap in the public’s knowledge.

As you can see, how­ever, things are a lit­tle rough around here right now. I’m still in the process of smooth­ing out some of the rough edges and hope to have all blog func­tions work­ing well shortly. In the mean­time, feel free to send me any sug­ges­tions at [escapeemail email=“chris@insurgencywatch.com”]