Sombre New York Times assessment of the implications of Benazir Bhutto’s murder.

The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The assassination has brutally highlighted the inability of the United States, despite its wealth and power, to manipulate the internal political affairs of a small but complex society.

“We are a player in the Pakistani political system,” said Wendy Chamberlin, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, adding that as such, the United States was partly to blame for Mr. Musharraf’s dip in popularity. But, she added: “This is Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very dangerous and violent place.”

There’s a lovely quote later in the piece, referring to the US policy of trying to force an alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto as a way of pushing the former onto a ‘democratic’ path. Trying to get them to work together was, one Bush official acknowledged, “like putting two pythons in the same cage”.

So, now we’re one python down, and one to go. I can’t see Musharraf containing the crisis. Which means another military coup. What’s astonishing about the Bush administration is that it never seems to have a Plan B.

Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece about the public spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn.

The feud is escalating into philosophy’s equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. In one corner is McGinn, 57, West Hartlepool-born professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and the self-styled hard man of philosophy book reviewing. In the other corner is Honderich, 74, Ontario-born Grote Professor Emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, and a man once described by fellow philosopher Roger Scruton as the “thinking man’s unthinking man”. They are using all the modern weapons at their disposal – blogs, emails, demands for compensation from the academic journal that published the original review, an online counter-review, and an online counter-counter-review…

Walking down Magdalene Street this evening I was depressed to find that one of my favourite establishments — a lovely secondhand bookshop — had gone. I guess its lease was up and the landlord (Magdalene College in all probability) proposed a whopping increase. This is why Cambridge is increasingly being denuded of ‘real’ shops and is now crammed with the kind of ludicrous boutiques which are the only enterprises that can pay the exorbitant rents demanded by the colleges.