11 May 2016

Pakistan Is A Country That Cooks And Relishes Conspiracy Theories

May 9, 2016

Almost the entire Pakistani media is obsessed with the assumption that “Pakistan is a target of international conspiracy”. 
Hawks portray the bad state of Pakistan to be due to a grand international conspiracy designed and executed by almost the entire world. 
If the Pakistani media does not introspect and continues to inject society with such slow poison, Pakistan will never be able to take corrective measures. 

Can anyone imagine Bollywood film director Kabir Khan under the control of National Security Advisor Ajit Doval? Would you believe that Khan’s movies such as Phantom are funded by RAW? Or that Khan’s visit to Pakistan during the last week of April 2016 was for a ‘purpose’, that he was given a task by his ‘handlers’ (Ajit Doval and RAW) to calm down voices raised in Pakistan after the capture of an alleged Indian master spy – a serving Indian Naval Officer Commander Kulbhushan Yadav? (In fact, Kabir Khan was invited by the Marketing Association of Pakistan for an event ‘Marcon’ in Karachi.)

You would never have imagined that the United States used its High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) technology to trigger a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan in April 2016. Yet, all these and many more groundbreaking revelations can easily be found on Pakistani news channels. The Pakistani media sees everything through a special prism, claiming to understand the importance of the “timing” of any event and connecting the dots to understand the “whole game”.

Media plays a big role in shaping the psyche of a community or nation.

And most often, the media also reflects the thinking or thought process of the nation. If one follows Pakistan’s media (both state-owned and private), he will be compelled to note that, barring few exceptions, almost the entire media is obsessed with the assumption that “Pakistan is a target of international conspiracy”. It does not matter if they are discussing an act of terrorism or war, the poor state of Pakistan’s economy or Pakistan’s deteriorating law and order situation; media analysts invariably conclude the debate by blaming an “international power” for conspiring against the sole nuclear power of the Islamic world – Pakistan.

There are around 30 news channels in Pakistan which hold talk shows every day. In most of these talk shows, there will be at least one retired army general or air force officer in the panel of experts who would comment on just about everything – from politics and geopolitics to terrorism, security, the economy and sometimes, even sports.

The media in most parts of the world chooses its panel experts based on their expertise in the subject at hand. Experts discuss pros and cons, argue in favour of the subject or against it and discuss every aspect, good or bad. But this simple logic seems to fail in Pakistan, where any one from the ‘establishment’, or a supporter of the establishment, is treated as a master of all trades. Sometimes, the entire panel is handpicked and represents a particular mindset, which will drive the discussion in a desired direction.

Let see how Pakistan’s hawks try to shape public opinion by covering up their country’s mistakes and projecting the bad state of Pakistan to be due to a grand international conspiracy designed and executed by almost the entire world, except all-weather friend China. 

Terrorism

Hawks blame the RAW and the CIA for almost all terrorist activities in Pakistan. They claim with conviction that RAW and the CIA created the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). 

In reality, the Taliban were created by Pakistan itself during the Afghan War. The militants were massively funded by the CIA to fight against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. America wanted to train and fund native militia to resist USSR forces. Saudi Arabia had promised to match America’s budget allocation in this regard. Pakistan secretly used a lot of these funds to prop up separatist groups of Punjab and Kashmir.

In the Taliban, the Pakistan Army found a cheap and secure tool to bleed and defeat India. A significant number of militants were shifted from Afghanistan to Kashmir. Pakistan thereby preserved the jihadist culture, nurtured during the Afghan War.

After 9/11, President Pervez Musharraf looked to gain support from the US to consolidate his position as the head of state. The Afghan Taliban hence stopped getting the same kind of economic, moral and logistic support from Pakistan which it used to get. A faction of the Taliban then separated out and formed the TTP, making Pakistan’s KPK province (then the North West Frontier Province) its base. The TTP declared war on the Pakistani regime, which it saw as a partner in the killing of Muslims in general and the Taliban in particular by the US – an occupying force.

But hawks in the Pakistani media portray a different picture. They blame the US for abandoning Pakistan after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. They claim to have been fighting America’s war in the region since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. For America’s war in Afghanistan, they say, Pakistan created the Taliban and allowed millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan. Refugees brought in a culture of narcotics and Kalashinkovs, they claim, which tore apart Pakistan’s social fabric.

The hawks therefore hold America responsible for the creation and continuous existence of Taliban, which eventually led to 9/11 and then to the US invasion of Afghanistan and its fallout in Pakistan. They hold RAW responsible for creating and funding the TTP. In other words, they hold the rest of the world responsible for the present law and order situation of Pakistan.

Hawks never mention that Pakistan was the first country to recognize Taliban rule in Afghanistan and provided the regime moral, economic and logistic support (Pakistan used to supply the Taliban regime 50,000 litres of oil every day). 

Kalabagh Dam

Few people outside Pakistan know that the last major dams built in Pakistan were the Mangla and Tarbela dams, built during the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, Pakistan has not built a dam for four decades and has been trying to build consensus for the construction of the Kalabagh dam. The project is often derailed by political parties or states which show reservations over the rehabilitation of displaced people, share of electricity generated, distribution of water and so on. 

While some blame Pakistani authorities and politicians, media hawks blame India instead. They claim that India has bought politicians and NGOs in Pakistan who have been working against the construction of the Kalabagh dam. Indian RAW is hell bent on ensuring that the Kalabagh dam plan does not turn into reality, they say, because the dam will change the face of Pakistan and generate power to fuel Pakistani industry. 

Hawks claim that India considers an economically strong Pakistan to be more dangerous than a nuclear Pakistan. India has violated the Indus Water treaty and has started building over a hundred small or large dams, they claim. India’s aim is to ensure that not a drop of water enters Pakistan, thereby gradually turning Pakistan from a water-stressed country to a water-scarce country and finally, “into a desert”.

Whenever a flood hits Pakistan, media hawks would not blame Pakistan’s bad planning and rather blame India, claiming that “India is building illegal dams and releasing extra water, which cause floods. India has waged water terrorism on Pakistan and the global community is quiet.”

Earthquakes And Floods ‘Made By America’?

Pakistan is probably the only country where one will find experts on national television blaming America’s HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) for most natural disasters. 

HAARP is in fact jointly funded by the US Air Force, US Navy, University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its purpose was to check the layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere for radio communication and surveillance. 

Pakistani experts claim that the US uses HAARP to send radiations through the ionosphere which cause weather changes, resulting in heat waves, floods and earthquakes. Elementary school books would instead tell you that earthquakes are the result of the movement of tectonic plates and that humans have no ability whatsoever to influence them. Yet, one can find a number of such bizarre groundbreaking revelations in the Pakistani media.

Purpose Of The International Conspiracy

But why is the entire world conspiring against Pakistan?

Conspiracy theorists have a ready answer. It is because Pakistan is the only nuclear armed Islamic country in the world and all major covert and overt powers (America, India, Israel, the West in general, CIA, RAW, Mossad and others) want to denuclearize Pakistan. 

According to Pakistan’s media experts, Pakistan is the only Muslim country in the world that has both nuclear weapons and missiles, and it is Pakistan’s duty to provide nuclear protection to all Muslim countries. This makes Pakistan the most powerful country in the Islamic world and a natural leader of the Islamic world. And this is the ‘fact’ which they claim haunts foreign powers who are hell bent on stopping Pakistan from becoming the leader of the Islamic world – a dream that ZA Bhutto saw in the 1970s. 

Because of the military might of Pakistan, hawks claim that foreign powers cannot afford to invade Pakistan, thereby forcing them to resort to such conspiracies. Foreign powers have ganged up against Pakistan. TTP’s terrorism, Indian sponsored insurgency in Baluchistan, law and order problems in Karachi, the sectarian war in Pakistan, water terrorism by India etc are all well-coordinated methods to achieve one aim – denuclearization of Pakistan. 

Hawks claim that the aim of these conspiracies is to weaken Pakistan internally (economically, politically and militarily) to such a degree that the international community is convinced that Pakistan is a destabilised/failed state whose nuclear weapons should be handed over to the IAEA, failing which these weapons could fall into terrorists’ hands.

If the media does not introspect and continues to inject society with such slow poison, Pakistan will never be able to take corrective measures. They will continue on the same path that leads to religious extremism, militancy and conflict with neighbouring countries. After all, such propaganda gives much needed oxygen to anti-India and anti-US sentiment, which is necessary for the rule of the ‘establishment’ in Pakistan. If there is no anti-India sentiment, the Pakistani establishment fears that it will lose its relevance and political power.

If patriots in a country poison society with lies and conspiracy theories, does the country really need an external enemy?

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