Gauging the “Threat” of Islamism in Central Asia

I’ll happily defer to others more knowledgeable of this topic than I am (ahem, ahem, Noah) but what’s with the State Department claiming the Ferghana Valley is about to fall to Islamist terrorism? Not only is this not a particularly new story—various forms of it have been circulating for well over a decade—but Joshua Kucera noticed that the State Department was oddly silent on the same terrorist groups and human rights issues it worried about at length in 2007. What gives?