It was the striking picture of Mao Tse-Tung--with ‘slashes’ of black paint across his face--that caught my eye as I was perusing the CS Monitor this morning. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the image is actually from the cover of the latest book by Denise Chong, from my hometown of Vancouver.

Chong, an economist working for the Canadian government, changed careers in the 1980s and ended up an award-winning writer. She is also the author of The Girl in the Picture (2000), a biographical and historical account of Kim Phuc, the young girl whose screaming and naked image taken during the Vietnam War is still known around the world.

Chong’s much anticipated latest book is Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, and it has already been getting some good reviews.

The Montreal Gazette calls the book a ‘gem,’ saying, ‘While telling this highly charged political story, Chong never loses sight of the human factor, nor of the toll that an authoritarian society takes on the individual.’ Meanwhile, the Quill and Quire also praises the book, noting: ‘Chong is a masterful storyteller. . . .Egg on Mao is a lovely and fascinating look at not only China, but also the power of friendship and human decency.’

Egg on Mao is, like The Girl in the Picture, a historical and biographical tale centered on Lu Decheng, a rural bus mechanic who in 1989, along with two friends, infamously defamed a portrait of Mao Tse-tung in Tiananmen Square with paint-filled eggs. The Canadian Newswire describes the account as an exploration of ‘whether repression and imprisonment, or even time itself, can douse the flame of desire for human rights.’

I managed to catch up by e-mail last night with our Pakistan correspondent, Mustafa Qadri, who’s been trying to find a way into the Waziristan region to cover the big military offensive by Pakistani forces that started last weekend. He says he hasn’t been able to enter the area so far as there’s a blanket ban on journalists. But he said there seem to have been some early signs of successes. He told me:

‘Already security authorities have managed to get key Taliban leaders from neighbouring North Waziristan Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur to defect to their side, along with many rank and file members of Pakistan Taliban Movement now headed by Hakimullah Mahsud.

‘But the country is under the grip of extreme tension as the Army commences its most anticipated of operations. The Army has fought several wars in Waziristan over the past five years, only on each occasion to be given a bloody nose and compelled to sign ceasefires that emboldened the Pakistani Taliban. But this time there’s a sense that things will be different.’

 But he also cautioned:

‘South Waziristan is a guerrilla fighter’s dream turf. With its jagged peaks, densely wooded forests, and remote location, Waziristan has proved to be the ideal place for the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamist fighters from around the world, and especially from Arab countries and Uzbekistan, to train and prepare for their attacks.

‘I’ve been in close contact with government and humanitarian agencies in an attempt to understand what is going in over there, but authorities have placed a blanket ban on journalists visiting the region. Still, in Pakistan, nothing stays secret for too long...’

I’ll keep you posted when I hear more from him.

Agus Purnomo, considered a rising young star in Indonesia’s abstract art scene, is going international--including to Tokyo, where his work is currently on display. His accolades already include the Nokia Art Award, the Jakarta Art Award in 2007 and being selected for the International Print and Drawing Biennale in Taiwan in 2006.

For some captivating details on Purnomo’s background, there’s no better person to turn to than Asian Collection gallery owner Robert Tobin. Tobin, who also goes by the moniker ‘Tokyo Art Guy’, explained to me recently how an ill-fated trip by Purnomo to the supermarket some years ago actually became the catalyst of the young artist’s career.

According to Tobin, after being overcharged for his groceries, Purnomo went back to the store to complain, but couldn’t get his money back. ‘He thought “everything is being reduced to numbers today”--and then took out his frustration on the canvas,’ Tobin told me. ‘At [that] time he did more figurative works [but] the irony is that the numbers in his work are now a way for us to rediscover our humanity.’

Tobin added that Purnomo uses his pieces to express a wide variety of emotions, and says the process is both cathartic and like a diary for him. Visitors also have said they find his work joyful and engaging.

And Tobin says some of his own assumptions have proven wrong when it comes to Purnomo’s art. ‘I thought they would be most popular with people in banking and finance--numbers people,’ he said. ‘But they’re much more universal. Some people don't notice the numbers until we point it out.’

Purnomo’s work is currently on display at Asian Collection in Tokyo.

Some interesting post election news today. First up is Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off following the controversial August election. This seems like the only credible thing to do with a UN-backed commission having said as many as a third of Karzai’s were fraudulent. It should also make it easier for the US to align itself with him if, as is almost certain, he wins the run-off.

One of the most interesting elements of this story, though, is not that Karzai gave way and agreed to a run-off (that was pretty much inevitable under such heavy US pressure), but who was putting the pressure on--US Sen. John Kerry and not the special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke.

Jamie Fly, blogging for The National Review, has a good look at why Holbrooke has apparently been marginalized:

‘The subtext here appears to be that Holbrooke, who reportedly engaged in several shouting matches with Karzai in recent months, has so undermined the US relationship with Karzai that he had to be sidelined.’

But he goes on to say that despite Kerry’s apparent shuttle diplomacy success, the fact that it was Kerry and not Clinton mediating suggests some real underlying problems with the Obama team’s civilian efforts in the country:

‘Clinton’s notable absence on Afghanistan policy has led many experts to express concerns that the calibre of the US civilian team working on Afghanistan does not match that of the likes of Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and other military leaders handling this issue. There has been no comprehensive civilian assessment or plan put forward by Ambassador Holbrooke and his army of staffers on the seventh floor at State to accompany General McChrystal’s assessment. US political goals for the country are unclear.’

Still, credit to Kerry for getting the job done this time. Though this of course begs the question of where this leaves Obama’s Afghan diplomacy. This isn’t going to be the last time someone is going to be needed to put out a fire there. So who’ll do it next time?

Shifting focus to Southeast Asia meanwhile, the re-vamped cabinet of re-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has disappointed reform-minded analysts, according to a New York Times piece that suggests politics has trumped expertise:

‘With the liberal former general having won re-election in a landslide victory in July, anticipation had been high that he would fill his cabinet with effective technocrats who could tackle persistent issues like endemic graft, crumbling infrastructure and an unreliable judicial system.

‘Instead, the president appears to have reserved only the economic posts for technocrats, while doling out others, like the key Ministry of Law and Human Rights, to members of the handful of political parties that supported his re-election bid.’

Five times as many people have died from heroin overdoses in NATO nations over the past 8 years than the total number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan, according to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This week the group released their report on the issue: ‘Addiction, Crime and Insurgency: The transnational threat of Afghan opium.’

It says 100,000 people die from opium abuse each year, out of an estimated 15 million users worldwide. Europe tops the user list, with China, Pakistan, India and other parts of Asia also ranked as major consuming nations. Aids/HIV are cited as a closely related problem.

In quite a vivid statement, UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa describes the situation in the region: ‘The Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world's most strategic yet volatile regions.’

Afghanistan now produces 92 per cent of the world's opium in a market worth around $65 billion, and the production of the substance has surged in the past decade, exceeding worldwide consumption levels.

The report also notes an interesting fact: there is an unaccounted stockpile of 12,000 tons of opium believed to be stored in Afghanistan and possibly also in transit.

But in an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal some time back, Theodore Dalrymple questioned the conventional wisdom on opium consumption (‘Poppycock’). He basically argued that quitting opium is perhaps not as tough as some would like to make it out to be, and came up with some unique perspectives to try and back this up, including one which actually credits Chairman Mao as a drug therapist for the masses:

‘Thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam, where they had addicted themselves to heroin, gave up on their return home without any assistance whatsoever.’

‘…In China, millions of Chinese addicts gave up with only minimal help: Mao Tse-Tung's credible offer to shoot them if they did not. There is thus no question that Mao was the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history.’