InsurgencyWatch comes to True/Slant

Oh, hello there. I’m Christopher Allbritton, and you may know me from such blogs as Back-to-Iraq.com and InsurgencyWatch.com.

I’m pleased and honored to now be part of True/Slant, joining some of my old colleagues such as Phil Zabriskie, Brian Bennet, Stephan Faris and Josh Kucera. These guys are good and if you’re not following them, you should be. I’m especially grateful to Phil for putting me in touch with the True/Slant team. And speaking of these guys, they’ve been nothing short of great. Let’s hope this experiment in “Entrepreneurial Journalism” (Which, I humbly add, I helped jumpstart back in 2003 with Back-to-Iraq.com and its then innovative funding model) succeeds. The world needs more professional journalists out there and the journalists need more support from the world.

Ground Zero for Insurgency

So. About this page and where it comes from. I’m a journalist with almost 20 years experience in the business, with expertise ranging from technology to war to business. Much of the last few years have been spent in the Middle East, with brief trips to Africa and elsewhere. Recently, I was a Fellow at Stanford in the Knight Fellowship program, which is concerned primarily with the future of journalism and how to keep it going. I’m a firm believer in mainstream newspapers as a source of great information, but I’m also realistic. With fewer and fewer newspapers sending staffers overseas (or even using stringers and freelancers), the ability for Americans to get good foreign news and analysis is suffering.

On my first site, Back-to-Iraq.com, I was 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.

My second blog, InsurgencyWatch.com, primarily dealt 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.  In the past, I have reported on pirates off the coast of Somalia, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Sunni jihadists in Iraq and rubbed shoulders with money launderers in Dubai. I came to that all of this insurgency/criminality was related and I originally termed it “Jihadistan.” But I realized that it was more than just Islamic militancy. The inhabitants of this mental geography included not just al Qaeda terrorists, but also Russian mobsters, Lebanese diamond smugglers, Chinese cybergangs and those Somali pirates I mentioned. This lawless area stretches from the no-man’s land of Waziristan to southern Lebanon all the way to the tri-border area of South America. Really, though, it’s not a place, it’s a state of mind, and it encompasses conflict between what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls the “Functioning Core” and the “Non-Integrated Gap.” All of these brushfire wars and criminality are existing in this fuzzy border zone between the two.

And now, True/Slant. I hope to bring the same level of reporting, analysis and energy from my previous sites to this experiment in journalism and I welcome the opportunity to tell some of the less well-known stories of Pakistan and the region to readers.

If you have any questions, story ideas, complaints or suggestions, please drop me a line at chris@insurgencywatch.com.