Juan Cole is an American expert on Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs. In addition to writing a regular blog and column for Salon.com, he’s also the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

He has an excellent post up today looking at Pakistani military activity in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. He notes that, on the one hand, American politicians speak of vital American security interests which are imperiled by Taliban activity in these areas; on the other hand, ongoing fighting in that area is barely making a ripple in the US media.

In his post, he questions whether the US truly has a compelling national security interest in what’s happening in this part of the world:

Although both candidates tie the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan to US domestic security, I personally have difficulty understanding exactly how that works. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were planned by Arab expatriates in Hamburg, Germany, and Pushtun tribespeople had almost nothing to do with them (did the Taliban even know what Bin Laden was planning?)

Both McCain and Obama have adopted Bushspeak on this issue, allowing W. and Cheney to frame the national debate into the next four years. Bushspeak works by contiguity, by things being next to one another, rather than by causality. Al-Qaeda was in Khost, which was controlled by the Taliban, so ipso facto the Taliban are related to 9/11, and since the Taliban were largely Pushtuns, the Pushtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan are, whenever they rebel against their local government, a dire threat to the US mainland. There are roughly 28 million Pushtuns in northwest Pakistan, and 12 million in Afghanistan. The ones in Pakistan recently rejected the fundamentalist parties for the most part in favor of a secular-leaning Pushtun nationalist party. Many of the ones in Afghanistan are part of, or back, the Karzai government. In my view, tying US national security to Pushtun local politics is magical thinking. The stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important, but framing that stability in the terms of a “war on terror[ism]” ignores the dynamics of secular and religious forms of Pushtun national self-assertion.