Anti-Americanism rife in Pakistan army institution: WikiLeaks

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 US diplomatic cable said the former US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson found officers at the National Defence 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 harbouring Islamist militant sympathisers have grown since US 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 US," 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 programme for instructors."

Some of the officers believed the CIA was in charge of the US media, the report said.

Anti-Americanism runs high among much of Pakistan's mainly Muslim population but it has deepened after Laden's killing in a secret US 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 programmes in the United States after Washington slapped sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s for its nuclear programme.

The cables also documented the account of a US 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 US 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 US 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 US embassies around the world also showed that the United States continued to intensely monitor Pakistan's nuclear and missiles programmes.

In 2008, the US deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Ankara, Nancy McEldowney, detailed her discussions with Turkish authorities about the US desire to see action taken against suspicious shipments to Pakistan.

US 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 programme 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.