Washington, Jan 3: America has "wasted" at least 10 billion dollars in funding to prop up the Musharraf government justified by its "war on terror", the San Francisco Chronicle says in an article.

"While the war on terror is used as the justification for US meddling in Pakistan's politics and wasting at least 10 billion dollars in funding to prop up the Musharraf government, it is rarely noticed that the general-turned-dictator and his key opponents are all more or less equally compromised by past support of the Taliban," Daily Times quoted Freelance journalist and university professor Robert Scheer, as saying in the article.

Scheer notes sardonically that the mass media is all too enthusiastically celebrating former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, while her son, Bilawal, the new chairperson of Pakistan People's Party, "spent his formative years in the United Arab Emirates which, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, were the only three countries to diplomatically recognise the Taliban."

On Benazir's husband Asif Ali Zardari assuring that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, as the 19-year-old is known after Benazir's death, would spend a few more years at Oxford, Scheer writes: "It is hoped that the curriculum will include some reference to Pakistan's key role, abetted by American visionaries like Charlie Wilson, in spawning the current terrorism menace."

Scheer also dismissed former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as a "religious-based opposition leader," who is "clearly the most sympathetic to the fundamentalists, as are his Saudi backers, who bear the most responsibility for funding Islamic extremism."

He added that the "democratic alternative" of Bhutto, whom the United States sought to broker back into power, was as compromised on this issue of support for the Taliban as she was on the matter of the Islamic bomb.

Scheer notes that Benazir, in her second term as Pakistan's Prime Minister, "oversaw funding of the Taliban and concealed that fact from the United States."

He was also critical of "those geniuses in the US government who talked her into returning home without planning for the consequences." (ANI)