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........

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