iWar

Capital suggestion
Pakistan is under attack - an unconventional attack to be certain. Perception warfare is the new battleground. Perception management and reflexive control are the new weapons of war. And the media is the new medium of this new war. Pakistan’s adversaries – both state and non-state – are bombarding specially designed, targeted and premeditated messages in order to induce Pakistanis to undertake ‘voluntary’ actions and decisions the very actions and decisions that are favourable to Pakistan’s enemies. It is all about making Pakistanis act according to a deliberate, calculated plan which is favourable to Pakistan’s adversaries.
Pakistan’s adversaries are active in explicitly military undertakings – albeit non-lethal ones – to influence and manipulate the ‘hearts and minds’ of Pakistan’s civilian population. The implementation platform of this new war is television, newspapers, internet forums (including online discussions and chat rooms), social blogs, microblogging (Twitter, Facebook), social networks, picture-sharing, wall postings and crowd sourcing.
To be sure, there are military commanders on the other side of our borders who are now exercising non-lethal choices to achieve their war objectives. Under this new doctrine, military commanders use disinformation as an element of combat power and target concisely defined audience by treating our televisions and our newspapers as their war theatres (this is like getting behind the enemy line and consuming the enemy from within).
The Pak-India conflict has two distinct dimensions – the military battlefield and civilian ‘hearts and minds’. The Pak-India conflict is in essence a ‘struggle of wills’ in which the attitudes, narratives and the behaviour of the civilian population will play the central role in determining the final outcome of the conflict. For Pakistan’s leaders and the Pakistani population, understanding the motivation of military commanders across the border will be the critical first step towards denying the adversary an opportunity to shape public perception that allows an outcome desired by the adversary.
At a more technical level, “perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception and psychological operations.” In this information-dominated global environment coupled with low-cost information technology, Pakistan’s adversaries are bent upon communicating directly to their intended target.
This communication is taking place in two forms: Black propaganda, which is “inherently deceitful information attributed to a source that was not responsible for its creation”; and grey propaganda whereby the objective is to “advance viewpoints that are in the interest of the originator but that would be more acceptable to target audiences than official statements.”
There is evidence that Pakistan’s adversaries intend to use every possible thought-influencing technology to achieve their military objectives. There is evidence that the ‘secret agenda of hidden persuaders’ is landing in Pakistan. There is evidence that subliminally embedded messages by Pakistan’s adversaries are being bought at face value by unsuspecting Pakistanis.
The British army is “creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.” The Israel Defence Forces are “active on 30 platforms – including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram – in six languages.”
Has Pakistan’s leadership recognizsd our vulnerability to perception control by foreign actors? Do we have an institutional mechanism which detects and then counteracts the perception management capabilities of our adversaries?
“The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities. It is best to win without fighting.” – Sun Tzu
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad. Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com. Twitter:@saleemfarrukh