AFP OFFENSIVES AS RAMADAN SETS IN (tags)
The AJLPP and the media sources including Luwaran.com of the MILF confirmed that the AFP offensive in Mindanao grounds into a halt as Ramadan, the holy month of the Muslim world sets in. More than 300,000 people have been dislocated by the fighting between the AFP and the MILF. The campaign by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to encircle and finally finish off MILF Commander Bravo Macapaar and his 102nd BIAF Base Command has been terribly foiled by the heavy losses in men and materiel on the part of the invading force. This was reported by the Luwaran.com This is notwithstanding the far superior manpower being utilized by the AFP in the campaign and the sheer air and ground firepower to back up the assaulting troops on the ground. According to ground information an initial of four infantry battalions have been thrown into the fray against Commander Bravo.
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.