Juan Cole: Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2007. The surge? Reduced violence? Political unity? Economic progress? What do American troops have to do with it? Cole's daily reports cut through the propaganda.

Tariq Ali: A tragedy born of military despostism and anarchy. On the Benazir Bhutto assassination: "In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order - and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness." This strikes me as an apt general observation, where Pakistan is an especially obvious instance. It derives from the fact that it's getting harder and harder for militaries to control their own civilian populations -- let alone to occupy foreign lands.

One interesting sidebit is that Ali had a personal relationship with Bhutto -- it's hard to imagine any prominent US politicians similarly acquainted with Marxist critics. On Democracy Now, Ali talks further about Bhutto's first term:

And she told me very openly, "I can't do anything." And I said to her at the time in Prime Minister's house in Islamabad, "I understand that, but there are two things you have to do. One, you have to make it very clear to the people publicly that this is the reason I can't deliver my promises on land reform, on health, on education. They won't let me do anything. This is why I can't make any readjustments in foreign policy. They have imposed their own foreign minister, Yacoub, on me, who insists we carry on as before," etc., etc. She didn't do that.

And I think by this time she had become a very different person politically from what she had been earlier and had decided that she didn't want to be on the wrong side of history, so to speak. She more or less said that to me. And she realized or she thought that the only way to survive in this world was basically to do the bidding of the army at home and Washington abroad, two institutions which had led to the -- which had basically bumped off her dad in 1979 and which were not going to do her any favors.

One effect of the Bush Administration's constant meddling in Pakistani politics is that it's impossible to say that we had no responsibility for the assassination. But given how superficial our understanding is and how trivial our interests, it's also impossible to assign any deliberate reasoning behind our fateful acts.

Ahmed Rashid: The Void Left Behind. Some quotes:

Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People's Party were the closest anyone in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has ever gotten to espousing a secular, democratic political culture. [ . . . ] Her longest-running battle was not with the extremists but with the army, whose leaders never trusted her. She was too secular, too worldly and perhaps too wise. [ . . . ] Her death only exacerbates the problems Pakistan has been grappling with for the past few months: how to find a modicum of political stability through a representative government that the army can accept and will not work to undermine, and how to tackle the extremism spreading in the country.

Stephanie Zacharek: Charlie Wilson's War. We saw the movie this weekend. I'll say something about it when I get around to writing about movies again, but for now I want to capture a quote from Salon's review, with a story from the book that didn't show up in the movie:

Crile, in his book, tells how Oliver North and Richard Perle tried to persuade [CIA agent Gust] Avrakotos that instead of sending weapons, the United States should urge Soviet soldiers to surrender to Afghan rebels. Their plan, harebrained by any stretch of the imagination, was to plant loudspeakers in the mountains of Afghanistan, announcing, "Lay down your arms! There is a passage to the West and to freedom."

According to Crile, when Perle and North refused to hear Avrakotos' objections, he brought in five photographic blowups, one showing "two Russian sergeants being used as concubines," another with a castrated Russian hanging from the turret of a tank. Avrakotos said to Perle, "If you were a sane fucking Russian, would you defect to these people?"

I haven't read Crile's book, and distrust its focus on Wilson -- he certainly kicked up the dollar level, but the idea of trapping the Soviet Union in "its own Vietnam" goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who started funding the covert war before the Soviets marched in to help an allied but largely incompetent regime -- indeed, US funding was intended to set the trap. As such, the movie's line that Wilson et al. were inspired by the heartbreaking plight of Afghan refugees runs counter to the extreme cynicism the US actually practiced, and the reckless disregard the US always had for the Afghans. (Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to suffer the same disregard today.) But one thing I do credit the movie for is that they didn't make anyone in the movie look flat-out stupid -- not Wilson, not the CIA, not even Wilson's "jailbait" staff. Obviously, they couldn't have done that had they included the North-Perle story.