THE TALES OF TWO FAMILIES; PAKISTAN AND THE PHILIPPINES (tags)
It is interesting to study the tale of two political families in Asia. One in Pakistan. The other is the Philippines. The present president of Pakistan is the husband of martyr president Benazir Bhutto- Asif Ali Zardani while in the Philippines, the upcoming president is the son of the former president, Benigno Simeon Aquino III.
Using Bhutto for Imperial Gain (tags)
Bhutto killed for imperial gain
Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban (tags)
The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997.