The field left open

War has always been, at its most fundamental level, a contest over what people believe. What is new in the twenty-first century is the scale at which that contest can be waged, the speed at which it operates, and the negligible cost of the tools required to wage it.

A state or non-state actor with a budget that would not sustain a single armoured brigade can today run an influence operation reaching millions of people across multiple countries simultaneously. A smartphone and a social media account are, in the right hands, weapons capable of what once required an entire ministry of propaganda.

Strategists call it Fifth Generation Warfare: conflict waged primarily in the cognitive and informational domain, targeting populations rather than armies. The progression from mass armies to industrial attrition to manoeuvre warfare to non-state insurgency arrives here: conflict in which the battlefield is the information environment, the weapon is narrative, and the objective is not to defeat an enemy’s military but to reshape what an entire population believes about its government, its institutions, and its identity.

A state successfully targeted by a Fifth Generation campaign does not fall to an invading army. Its citizens lose confidence in their institutions, its communities are turned against each other, and its sovereignty quietly dissolves while its flag still flies.

The mechanics of such an operation are consistent across contexts. First, an emotional frame is constructed before any specific claim is made: audiences are primed to feel a particular way about the Pakistani state before being told anything specific about what it has done. Once that frame is installed, supporting content is amplified and believed; contradicting content is dismissed as propaganda.

Second, the operation selects from the real: genuine governance failures, real instances of neglect or injustice, stripped of context and presented as evidence of systematic malevolence rather than what most of them are, which is the compounding result of administrative failure and elite capture.

Third, saturation: the goal is not to win an argument but to fill the information environment so thoroughly that alternative accounts feel exhausting to pursue. And fourth, identity: the most durable operations embed their claims within the target audience’s sense of who they are, so that contesting the narrative feels like an attack on personhood rather than a disagreement about facts.

Pakistan faces multiple actors simultaneously running operations of this kind. India’s intelligence apparatus, whose doctrine was articulated publicly by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in 2014 as “defensive offence” involving subversion of Pakistan’s internal stability, provides material and communications support to organisations operating in Balochistan. Afghan state actors, across administrations and under Taliban governance, have sustained claims about Pashtun identity that frame KP’s population as belonging to a Pashtunistan that Pakistan has no right to govern.

The BLA’s London-based media wing produces English-language content tailored for British parliamentarians, international journalists and human rights researchers who lack independent knowledge of Balochistan and rely on the BLA’s briefings to fill the gap. The TTP’s media operation produces video content of sophisticated technical quality, adapting its messaging to current events with a speed the Pakistani state has rarely matched. Some affiliated movements, whatever genuine grievances some of their members hold, have functioned as amplifiers of a narrative of state predation that serves armed organisations they formally disavow.

These operations succeed not because they are particularly compelling, but because the people most capable of contesting them have chosen, consistently and across party lines, not to try.

Pakistan’s political leadership runs two narratives. In government: the achievements narrative, development projects, economic indicators, promises met. In opposition: the grievance narrative, stolen mandates, rigged institutions, the establishment as villain. Between these two well-developed registers, the most important narrative space in contemporary Pakistani politics sits entirely unoccupied: the space where an elected leader would make the counter-argument to separatism and militant violence to their own constituents, in the language of political persuasion rather than official denial.

The calculation behind the silence is rational in the short term for each individual actor. A politician who names the BLA and contests its claims risks being labelled a military mouthpiece, a genuinely damaging charge among the social-media-active demographics that drive political momentum. A party that names the TTP as an enemy in KP takes on the electoral risk of seeming anti-Pashtun or supportive of operations that cause displacement. Every party here has found its own version of the same logic, and the cumulative systemic result is the abandonment of an entire narrative field to organisations that fill it every day.

This is precisely the mechanism Goebbels identified. A narrative does not need to defeat its rival. It needs to be present while its rival is absent. The BLA’s story of an occupying Pakistani state that extracts and kills has been circulating in diaspora networks, British parliamentary briefings and Baloch university campuses for two decades with essentially no authoritative political contestation. It has not won on the merits. It has won by being alone.

There is one exception, and it matters. Sarfraz Bugti became chief minister of Balochistan in 2023 and became, by the available record, the first holder of that office to contest the separatist narrative directly, to Baloch audiences, in the register of political persuasion. He has named the BLA. He has argued publicly that the diaspora operations claiming to speak for the Baloch people represent a project funded by external actors whose interest in Balochistan is not the welfare of its people. He has said these things while governing, while accountable, without waiting for a clean record that no politician ever has.

He has not been politically destroyed by doing so. He has demonstrated that the field can be entered and that audiences exist who are willing to engage a political leader who tells them the truth about who is instrumentalising their province’s hardship.

Every other political leader who continues to leave the field unoccupied now does so knowing that Bugti has proved the cost is bearable.

Fifth Generation Warfare cannot be answered by institutional communications alone. What contesting the BLA’s narrative requires, and what only elected political leadership can provide, is the authority of democratic mandate: a named politician, on the record, accountable to voters, making the argument to the people who chose them. The response will remain structurally incomplete until the political class decides that the narrative war is theirs to fight and that the cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.

That decision is available. The example has been set. The field is waiting.

The writer is a public policy expert and leads the Country Partner Institute of the World Economic Forum in Pakistan. He tweets/posts @amirjahangir and can be reached at: [email protected]

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.

Originally published in The News