I know, shocker.
Via USA Today:
Filed under Good Intentions and Good Money for Naught: the U.S. television ad campaign last year in Pakistan to persuade locals to stop hating America.
Steve Tatham, a British military officer and expert on propaganda efforts, penned a report on U.S. “information operation and strategic operations” that the Army War College published last week. One of his case studies involved television ads the U.S. government purchased in September 2012 on Pakistani national television to denounce The Innocence of Muslims, a video offensive to Muslims. The ads featured statements by President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Sounds reasonable, right? Perhaps to an American. Not so much to a protesting Pakistani, Tatham points out:
“In assessing the Pakistan TV advertisements, a number of questions arise, chiefly about accessibility and reach,” Tatham writes. “First, of the large body of people who chose to riot, probably only a very tiny percentage had actu ally seen the offending video. The video is 74 minutes in duration and a little over 400-megabytes (MB) in size. ‘Highlights’ could therefore have been available to smart phones, but it would be next to impossible to view properly without access to the web. While In ternet penetration in Pakistan is undeniably growing, literacy in Pakistan is still less than 55%, and around 30% to 40% of the population live beneath the poverty line, which suggests limited access to the Internet via computer. At the same time, viewing the U.S. response required both access to a TV set and the ability either to understand English or to read the superimposed Urdu script. It is a reasonable supposi tion, therefore, that many of the rioters had probably never seen the original video, nor the presidential ad dress that followed, and that their knowledge of its ex istence was largely second hand, transmitted through trusted community leaders and/or social networks such as mosques.”
Tatham suggests that anger over the video was intensified by the perception that the “U.S. hates Muslims” based on the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and desecrations of the Koran both intentional and accidental.
“In this context, it seems optimistic that a few words in a TV advertisement from the U.S. Presi dent, the embodiment of the western ‘infidel,’ could appease an enraged mob,” Tatham writes.
And, unsurprisingly, they didn’t.