Narratives now move faster than armies and Pakistan cannot afford to march behind them. In 1917, a single leaked telegram helped push the US into war. In 2025, during a flare-up with India, thousands of synthetic videos, deepfakes and bot-driven hashtags flooded screens within minutes, shaping military movements, colouring diplomatic debates and even swinging public opinion.
The contrast is telling. Where once days separated disclosure from decision, today minutes can decide the tempo of conflict. Pakistan must confront this truth with urgency: in the wars of our age, information has become the primary weapon and without an anticipatory information shield, the nation will always fight blind.
Information is no longer a neutral commodity. It is any signal – an image, video, statistic or scrap of metadata – that alters what people believe or how institutions act. In the hands of an adversary, it can be weaponised, designed to distort perceptions, force rushed choices or undermine legitimacy. The modern battlefield is therefore not just land, sea, and air but the ceaseless torrent of feeds, hashtags and broadcasts where narratives are fought over in real time. And the reality is grim: corrections come too late, fact-checking lags behind virality and influence-for-hire firms proliferate while our regulatory tools remain fragmented.
The recent Pakistan-India escalation illustrated this vividly. False reports of Pakistani naval assaults on Mumbai, spread through social feeds and recaptioned footage, forced India to redeploy naval assets for 36 hours – an operational fog that delayed de-escalation. Deepfakes of Pakistani troops ‘surrendering’ trended in European capitals, dominating early UN Security Council conversations before debunks caught up.
And bot-driven hashtags like #StrikeBack coincided with spikes in public polling for escalation, manufacturing consensus that spilt into genuine sentiment. In all these cases, information dictated decisions, diverted resources and framed diplomatic conversations. The absence of rapid, credible, provenance-backed responses left Pakistan reacting late, defensive and diminished.
This should not surprise us. Journalism, mass media and social media have always shaped wars and politics. From muckrakers in the early 20th century to Walter Cronkite’s Vietnam verdict, from 24-hour cable wars to the rise of influencers, the media has always been a battlefield. But the rules have changed. Anyone with a phone can now publish instantly. Algorithms, not editors, decide what goes viral. Influencers, trusted as peers, sway the young more than newsrooms.
Verification itself has become an engineering discipline, with geolocation tools, deepfake detectors and open-source intelligence carrying as much weight as traditional reporting. Yet these advances bring their own dilemmas: do you reveal the coordinates of a strike at the risk of civilian lives? Can you present a probabilistic ‘truth score’ without eroding trust further?
Pakistan cannot afford to remain a passive victim of these dynamics. The country must build an anticipatory information-security ecosystem, an architecture of resilience that treats the information domain as a matter of national security. At its core, a Joint Information Operations Coordination Cell should be established within the National Security Council, linking the ISPR, Pemra, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and digital rights entities. It must be supported by an AI-powered detection stack, monitoring viral spikes and synthetic anomalies in Urdu and Hindi.
Verification labs must partner with open-source intelligence collectives and GeoAI tools to fact-check at speed. Pre-authorised SOPs must allow prebunks, embassy-level clarifications and press kits to be released within an hour of a major incident. Legal guardrails must guarantee transparency and civil liberties while preserving the ability to counter foreign disinformation. The country must also invest in digital literacy, embedding ‘verify before share’ habits in schools, public broadcasting and influencer training, so that resilience is societal, not just institutional.
This effort cannot happen in isolation. Pakistan must build alliances – data-sharing agreements with regional partners, collaborations with international verification desks and joint simulations with media, military and tech platforms. Stress tests that mimic hostile campaigns must be rehearsed quarterly. Above all, credibility must become Pakistan’s strongest weapon. If audiences, both domestic and international, come to see official communication as reliable, timely and transparent, the life cycle of hostile fabrications will shrink.
The larger point is stark. In 1917, one leaked telegram swayed a superpower in five days. In 2025, manipulated videos swayed opinion in five minutes. The difference is not just technology, but preparedness. Pakistan has so far been reactive. That is no longer tenable. An anticipatory approach – where threats are forecast, responses rehearsed and credibility built in advance – is the only way to turn the information space from a vulnerability into an asset.
Wars are no longer won solely on battlefields; they are won in the narratives that shape public resolve, diplomatic choices and military tempo. The side that controls the information space controls the room where decisions are made. For Pakistan, the choice is clear. Either remain reactive or build the shield that anticipates, verifies and protects. In the age of weaponised information, survival depends not just on the strength of arms but on the strength of narrative.
The writer is a development professional working on intersectional issues in
society, economics and climate. A former World Bank staff member,
he is currently running his own social impact advisory, Reenergia.