Officers received training biased against the United States at a
prestigious Pakistan army institution, according to Wikileaks,
underscoring concerns that anti-Americanism in the country's powerful
military is growing amid strains with Washington.
A U.S. diplomatic cable said the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan
Anne Patterson found officers at the National Defense University (NDU)
were "naive and biased" against the United States, a key ally which
gives Pakistan billions of dollars of aid to help fight Islamist
militants.
Fears the military could be harboring Islamist militant sympathizers
have grown since U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden this
month in a Pakistani garrison town, where the al Qaeda leader had
probably lived for several years.
Pakistan's military also controls the country's nuclear arms, and a
series of attacks against military installations has heightened fears
about the safety of these weapons.
"The elite of this crop of colonels and brigadiers are receiving biased
NDU training with no chance to hear alternative views of the U.S.," the
Wikileaks cable, which was published in the Dawn newspaper, quoted
Patterson as saying.
"Given the bias of the instructors, we also believe it would be beneficial to initiate an exchange program for instructors."
Some of the officers believed the CIA was in charge of the U.S. media, the report said.
Anti-Americanism runs high among much of Pakistan's mainly Muslim
population but it has deepened after bin Laden's killing in a secret
U.S. raid which many Pakistanis see as breach of their sovereignty.
Patterson said the United States must target a "lost generation" of
military officers who missed training programs in the United States
after Washington slapped sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s for
its nuclear program.
The cables also documented the account of a U.S. army officer, Col.
Michael Schleicher, who attended a course at NDU and corroborated the
views expressed by Patterson.
"The senior level instructors had misperception about U.S. policies and
culture and infused the lectures with these suspicions, while the
students share these misconceptions with their superiors despite having
children who attended universities in the U.S. or London," the cables
quoted Schleicher as saying.
Hamayoun Khan, a teacher at NDU, however denied that anti-Americanism was being taught at the university.
"I haven't seen bias which she has mentioned here," he said.
Dawn said dozens of cables from U.S. embassies around the world also
showed that the United States continued to intensely monitor Pakistan's
nuclear and missiles programs.
In 2008, the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in
Ankara, Nancy McEldowney, detailed her discussions with Turkish
authorities about the U.S. desire to see action taken against
suspicious shipments to Pakistan.
U.S. officials, according to the cable, "urged the GOT (government of
Turkey) to contact the governments of Japan and Panama to request the
shipment be diverted to another port and returned the shipper."
Pakistan's nuclear program came under increasing international scrutiny
after the 2004 confessions of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of
Pakistan's atom bomb, about his involvement in sales of nuclear secrets
to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
The government pardoned Khan but put him under house arrest. A court in 2009 ordered his release.Reuters
