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| Anne Patterson, former US Ambassador to Pakistan |
The Pakistani daily Dawn says that according to Wikileaks, in 2008, Anne Patterson, who was then US Ambassador to Pakistan, wrote a memo in which she described instructors at Pakistan's National Defence University (NDU) as "naive" about and "biased" against the USA.
Dawn says Ambassador Patterson attributed this "bias" to the "distance" that had crept in between Pakistani and US military officers following "the discontinuation of the IMET (International Military Education and Training) programmes" during the years when Pakistan was under sanctions because of having developed nuclear weapons.
Dawn quotes the memo which quotes a US army officer, Col. Michael Schleicher, who attended a course at NDU, and who, according to the cable, told Ambassador Patterson:
"One guest lecturer – who is a Pakistani one-star general – claimed the US National Security Agency actively trains correspondents for media organisations. Others thought the CIA was in charge of US media (and that MI-5 was in charge of the BBC)."And not only that, but:
Students in the junior course ... shared "many of the biases prevalent in the Muslim world, including a belief the US invaded Iraq for its oil and that 9/11 was a staged 'Jewish conspiracy,'"You can see the bias right away, can't you? Everybody who has done honest research has found that the staged conspiracy of 9/11 was not entirely "Jewish." It contained "Christian" elements as well. And so, of course, does the continuing torrent of nonsense about it.
The problem, according to Dawn, according to Wikileaks, according to Ambassador Patterson, was that the Pakistani military had been been insufficiently propagandized, although she would never think to express herself in such terms. But clearly this is her understanding, and clearly this is why she wrote:
"We need, in particular, to target the 'lost generation' of Pakistan military who missed IMET opportunities..."The word 'target' is particularly apt in this context.
Ambassador Patterson also wrote, according to Wikileaks:
"Given the bias of the instructors, we also believe it would be beneficial to initiate an exchange program for instructors..."An exchange program would double the propaganda benefit, of course, because the Pakistani instructors would be whisked off to be indoctrinated in the US, leaving their students to be indoctrinated by visiting Americans.
It goes without saying that if and when all this indoctrination came to pass, the Pakistani military would be even more naive with respect to the United States, and even more biased -- but for rather than against, which after all is the only thing that matters to the masters of the American Empire.
And then, diplomatic tensions would be eased, because future ambassadors would write cables in which Pakistani military officers were all well-informed about American actions and motives, and loyal and keen supporters of the American Imperial Project as well.
The properly trained Pakistanis would have been instructed never to admit that the NSA would be negligent if it failed to actively train correspondents for media organisations; that the CIA would be aghast if it lost charge of the US media; that the Bush-Cheney administration would have lost the support of its "base" had it failed to invade Iraq for its oil; and that MI5 would go ballistic if the BBC ever admitted the obvious truths about these things, or explained to its viewers exactly why Britain came along for the ride.
And then, if the IMET programmes could continue for long enough, eventually nobody in the Pakistani military would ever again be "naive" or "biased" enough to give voice to any of this, or any of the other truths about America which are, shall we say, politically inconvenient to acknowledge.
This is what we would call "winning hearts and minds." And it's a shame that the US neglected to keep the propaganda machine running on the Pakistani military during the sanctions, because had it done so, hoaxes such as the big one nine and a half years ago, and the almost-as-big one earlier this month, would have been a good deal easier to sell.
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