Sure.
Let me take your second point first. I believe as an historian that one of the lessons we've learned from history is that those governments that oppress their own people are most likely to commit aggression against others. I don't think it's a separate issue. I think they're two sides of the same coin. When we look at the great totalitarian dictatorships and aggressors over the last 100 years or so, we will invariably find that the ones that were the most dangerous to international order were also the ones that built prisons for their citizens on a large scale. I think they go together.
As for your first question, I have to put this in a careful way, but let me be very frank about this. I'm a military historian, so I get to do the job of looking back at military campaigns long after they have been fought, and often comparing the actual results of the campaigns against what was said at the time by military leaders, by political leaders, and by journalists. What I find very often is that there is a significant gap between what is being said at the time and what actually happened. Part of that arises out of this phenomenon, which we're all familiar with, called the “fog of war”. It simply is extremely confusing. Wars are very confusing, and not too many people really know very much about the real picture at any given time, and sometimes including those who are actually fighting it.
Does this mean that I believe NATO said everything that was right and everything that NATO said about the battle of Panjwai is true? I can't. If I was going to believe everything they were saying, I would give up my job as a military historian, but it doesn't mean that I don't think that the overall picture is not a relatively positive one. It's just that whenever I hear a general saying A or B or C, including our own beloved military leaders, I always say, okay, is that really what's happening or is there something else going on underneath, and is it something that's being hidden from me or is it just something they don't know about?