*Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa received her doctorate from King’s College London in 1996 and has worked on issues varying from military technology, defense decision-making, nuclear deterrence, arms procurement, arms production to civil-military relations in South Asia.Dr Siddiqa has been a civil servant for 11 years during which she was asked to work as the Director of Naval Research with Pakistan Navy making her the first civilian and a woman to work at that position in Pakistan’s defense establishment.She also worked as a Deputy Director in Audit Defence Services Lahore Cantt .She is also a Ford Fellow and was the ‘Pakistan Scholar’ at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington, DC for 2004-05.Her recent book, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy , was released in April 2007. *
**Conspiracy Theories Galore **
By Ayesha Siddiqa
Friday, 26 Feb, 2010
*I COULDN’T believe my ears when responsible quarters informed me of an American-Blackwater conspiracy to isolate Pakistan.
According to this heinous plan the objective will be achieved by infiltrating the media, specifically through placing people in responsible positions in the print and electronic media. These plants will then be made responsible for freaking out ordinary people.
While some Blackwater agents are said to be responsible for making people paranoid about a secret plan to destroy Pakistan and take away its ‘crown jewels’ — its nuclear weapons — others have been given the task of exciting the populace with the idea of fighting some kind of holy war against neighbouring states and more.
This is called psy-ops, the art of instilling fear in the hearts of citizens and making them lose touch with reality and faith in their own capabilities. The biggest tool of course is the rumour mill, which is constantly in action churning out half-lies and half-truths. Anyone who cannot be bought off by the company is immediately termed a foreign agent. Such tricks are also useful in hiding the fact that it is in reality these people, who are working to isolate Pakistan, that are on Blackwater’s payroll.
There is evidence of using psy-ops in the past against ordinary folks and making them believe in some outside force conspiring to destroy them. The Germans before the Second World War are a prime example. The entire nation had lost touch with reality to a point that they stopped using rational thinking to assess the behaviour of their own leaders and held a certain kind of people responsible for the malaise they suffered from.
Resultantly, there was the famous witch-hunt through which the Jews, the ‘gypsies’, the physically disabled, homosexuals and non-conformist intellectuals were killed or forced to leave. Very soon, the Nazi military machine managed to get rid of people who would have proved to be an asset for the Third Reich.
Apparently, one of the secondary objectives of the conspirators is to create an environment which kills creative minds and pushes them to leave, hence the brain drain. It didn’t occur to ordinary Germans that their leaders, who were responsible for the First World War as well, were caught ‘with their pants down’ in the process of using military power against the rest of the world, and as such were equally responsible for the tragic state of affairs. In fact, the real conspiracy was to take away the rational faculty of the ordinary citizen.
In Pakistan today ordinary persons are being fed fear and paranoia so that they cannot think about the mistakes made by their own leadership. This is not to suggest that other nations do not make questionable plans but the fact is that painting the world in shades of black and white is in itself a conspiracy against the people.
For instance, the story about the historic American let-down does not mention that our own leadership was equally responsible for serving the interests of foreign states in return for both ‘cash and kind’. Publicly asking Hillary Clinton questions regarding the control of the ISI, for example, is nothing but superimposing the idea of the Pakistani nation’s EQ (emotional quotient). So Washington — rather than Islamabad — decides everything in Pakistan.
I haven’t been informed as yet but I suspect that there is even a larger conspiracy afoot to impair the minds of Muslims all over the world. This is done through instilling the fear of some ‘foreign hand’ behind everything that happens in their countries. Spreading such rumours gradually weakens and ultimately deadens their capacity to think of themselves as people who can control their destinies.
According to this plan, the answer for everything bad or unpleasant lies outside. The bulk of the mentally de-capacitated citizenry then gradually looks up to a certain set of leaders as ‘knights in shining armour’ who will protect them and the state.
The absence of systems in what is called the Muslim world is an eye-opener. The conspiracy deepens since people are also made to believe that their lives will only improve through installing a certain kind of programme on their national hard drive.
