CNN

When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, China's first premier Chou En-lai famously replied: "It's too soon to tell." What role did the Internet play in the Egyptian Revolution? People will be arguing about the answer to that question for decades if not centuries.

Wael Ghonim, the Google executive whose anonymous online activism helped bring people into the streets for those fateful protests on January 25, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "the revolution started on Facebook," and "if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet."

"They want to see structural change," Parag Khanna of the Global Governance Initiative told CNN Saturday. "They want to see a change in the constitution. ...

But CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen said he does not see evidence of Iranian influence in Egypt's largest opposition movement. ...

... "There's a good reason that the Egyptian military is held in pretty high esteem," said Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst, author and fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security. ...

Since the WikiLeaks scandal exploded at the end of last year, many commentators have declared this episode marks "the end of diplomacy." Nonsense.

For almost two centuries, even world leaders have feared that communications technology would marginalize diplomacy's special role in international relations.

When Lord Palmerston received the first diplomatic cable at London's Whitehall in the mid-1800s, he proclaimed, "This is the end of diplomacy!"

A report published earlier this year by the New America Foundation think tank calls the Pakistani agency of North Waziristan "the most important springboard ...

The much-touted July 2011 date for the beginning of a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, a center piece of the administration's "AfPak" strategy announced by President Obama in December 2009, now seems unlikely to amount to much.

According to a senior U.S. administration official, there is presently "no judgment on the scale or pace of those reductions." Translation: Don't expect a significant drawdown of American forces in the summer of 2011.

Despite tangible military progress in Afghanistan in recent months, the success of the Obama administration's strategy for Afghanistan will be determined by the measure of political and economic progress it brings.

For the last two years, American strategy in Afghanistan has followed the framework of "fight then talk." Under this thinking, the Taliban needed to be weakened before negotiations would begin.

... "While the authorities can't control the news from getting to people really looking for it, they can prevent the vast majority of people coming across it so that Liu Xiaobo isn't so much of a household name in China as he might have been," said Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on Chinese censorship with the Washington-based New America Foundation. ...

SNOW: And Maya MacGuineas, the head of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, says the US doesn't have a lot of time to act. ...