On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Tariq Ali's article in the most recent London Review of Books was cited by link in its entirety:
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/ali_01_.html
This is very good and very detailed. But it's also very long, and not quite as witty as Tariq usually is, so probably only central Asia nerds will keep at it the whole way through. So just for entertainment value, I wanted to note an amusing memoir detail that is is by no means representative of this long and serious article:
<quote>
[Why did Musharref declare an emergency when a deal had been already
been done? He began to think things like:]
What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his re-election by a
dying and unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the
ISI had been preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of
the Supreme Court judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf
become that even the sight of judicial venerables in bed might not have
done the trick. It might even have increased their support. (In 1968,
when a right-wing, pro-military rag in Lahore published an attack on
me, it revealed that I had attended sex orgies in a French country
house organised by [my] friend, the Jew Cohn-Bendit. All the fifty
women in the swimming-pool were Jewish. Alas, this was totally false,
but my parents were amazed at the number of people who congratulated
them on my virility.)
<unquote>
Michael