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.
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser-Evilism (tags)
There is no question that the Bush administration's policies are "cruel and savage", but John Kerry (along with the majority of Democrats in the Senate) supported most of them, including the war on Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the war on Iraq, and the "No Child Left Behind" education act. As Marjorie Williams pointed out in the Washington Post recently, "Kerry voted for so many of Bush's major initiatives that in order to disown them now he can only argue that they were wrongly or dishonestly 'implemented.' This amounts to a confession that his opponent made a chump of him for the past three years. In fact, one might argue that Kerry is a poster boy for all the ways in which congressional Democrats have allowed themselves to be rolled by the Bush administration."
West Coast Anti-war Student Conference (tags)
Update on West Coast anti-war Student Conference at San Francisco State.