IS there a way to reassure the American print media that if left to itself, Pakistan can manage its domestic security situation very well? “We have the capacity to tackle our internal security environment”, reassured Pakistan’s former chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, while speaking at a recent launching ceremony of a book that dispels many myths about the genesis of South Asian nuclear deterrence.

Gen (retd) Ehsanul Haq, who has also been Pakistan’s top spy, was confident that this can happen if Pakistan is unburdened from some external loads — the situation on the Afghan border and Afghan refugees; Predator attacks by the US and sermons to ‘do more’; the lingering Kashmir dispute and India’s interference in Balochistan and along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The general, however, missed another overload on Pakistan’s endeavours to gain stability and in turn prop up the troubled American-led Nato forces in Afghanistan. That burden on Pakistan-US relations is an unbridled segment of the American ‘free’ media that flails Pakistan occasionally for the safety and security of its nuclear arsenal. Though Pakistan’s policymakers and the American administration do not take the hostile segment of American media seriously, the latter somehow manages to antagonise the general public sentiment in Pakistan and rock the fragile relationship between the ‘disenchanted allies’.

In a way this media offensive serves well to fuel anti-Americanism in Pakistan, a sentiment even Hillary Clinton’s charm and persuasion could barely mollify. It may be possible to understand the motives behind this animus if one closely scrutinises the profiles of these journalists and sees how they make their living.

If it is not in the American administration’s interests to demonise Pakistan then who benefits from this act? J.K. Rowling’s phrase ‘you know who’ can help readers guess who the culprit is.

Explaining why he criticised Gen Pervez Musharraf in that morning’s paper while he actually liked him, a senior columnist of the most popular American daily made an off-the-record remark to a staff officer who accompanied a senior member in Musharraf’s entourage. He explained, “sir, after all I have to write for someone to make a living”.

The matter is not as simple as it seems. The American media’s hostility goes back to before 1947. The latest in the volley is Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker that sent Ambassador Anne W. Patterson rushing to Pakistani TV channels to clarify that her government does not endorse such insinuations about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. While there’s no evidence to prove that Mr Hersh works for ‘you know who’, his penchant for anonymous sources brings the Pulitzer Prize winner under a negative light. Recounting the American media’s pro-‘you know who’ tilt, Dennis Kux quoted Henry Luce, Time magazine’s editor in August 1947, that the people of Karachi, “...did not welcome Pakistan with the wild enthusiasm that swept the new dominion of India. After all, Pakistan was the creation of one clever man, Jinnah; the difference between a slick political trick and a mass movement was apparent in the contrast between Karachi and New Delhi”.

In the pre-partition days Washington clearly supported the British and Indian stance of a united India. If the State Department was cool towards the idea of Pakistan, some US media commentators were positively hostile. The cover of the April 22, 1946 issue of Time pictured a grim-looking Jinnah and carried the caption, ‘His Muslim tiger wants to eat the Hindu cow’.

Commenting that “the Indian sun casts Jinnah’s long thin shadow not only across the negotiations in Delhi but over India’s future”, Time acidly described the political rise of Jinnah as “a story of love of country and lust for power, a story that twists and turns like a bullock track in the hills” (Kux, 2001).

Interestingly, there is a pattern to Pakistani statesmen’s level of comfort vis-à-vis the Americans and the masses’ disenchantment with the latter and their media. On May 1, 1947, while sharing his views on future relations with America Jinnah told a US diplomat that although he did not personally share the view, most Indian Muslims thought the United States was unfriendly. They had the impression that the US press and many Americans were against Pakistan (Kux, 2001)

The fresh wave of the media attack reinforcing the misperception that Pakistan’s nukes are unsafe came in the backdrop of last month’s militant assault on GHQ. One wonders why Washington-based journalists didn’t squeak about the safety and security of the American nuclear arsenal when the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11, or the safety of the British arsenal after London’s 7/7 terrorist attack, or that of India’s atomic bombs after last year’s Mumbai episode, or even that of Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant that is within reach of Hezbollah?

On the contrary, relatively informed people in the United States and even in India endorse Pakistan’s claim that the initial vulnerability of Pakistan’s strategic assets is over and nuclear weapons are fully secure under multi-layered safeguards.

The people and leadership of Pakistan should not go for a knee-jerk reaction to such media offensives. Pakistanis can bear with Seymour Hersh and David Sanger for occasionally demonising Pakistan and learn from American administrations that have come under the former’s fire many times. As Dr Hasan Askari recently said, “nuclear weapons are not a source of instability, insecurity and arrogance for Pakistan. They are rather a source of confidence and responsibility”. Pakistan is a nuclear power and should behave like one.

The writer is a scholar of Strategic Stability and Nuclear Studies at the Faculty of Contemporary Studies, National Defence University, Islamabad.