How Exiled Activist Networks Are Used By Hostile States – OpEd
In today’s hybrid battlefields, the war is not fought with the bullets only. The targeting of the nation is happening by the means of narratives, disinformation, and weaponized human rights claims.
Pakistan, which had previously been on the mainstream of international counterterrorism efforts, is now forced to confront a new form of attack, not only mounted along its borders, but also through diasporic actors, exiled media apparatus, and digital cells that are supported or boosted by hostile nations. These networks masquerade as voices in civil society yet they move with calculative political motive, to undermine legitimacy of the state, undermine trust of the people in institutions and create internal dissent.
The threat is not in terms of words but in the synchronization among propaganda and terror. Internationally classified terrorist organizations such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) had been used previously as proxies of regional intelligence agencies. They have a history of targeting civilians, civilian infrastructure and civilian healthcare services as well as security forces. Parallel to their violent actions they have a digital propaganda in which they depict terrorists as the victims and aim at criminalizing actions by the state to maintain law and order.
Such campaigns are supported by human rights reporting and op-eds that literally parade campaign militant talking points. These accounts are usually created by the individuals in exile, some of them have families or ideological connections to proscribed groups, and they find access to Western media where they are automatically exempted of critical examination. They challenge the integrity of the judicial system in Pakistan, discredit its military and introduce the show of constitutional enforcement as the persecution on the part of the state without acknowledgment of the fact that the constant threat of terroristic activity is still in place within the region.
Financing traces and electronic forensics suggests more and more that such campaigns are not natural. India has been accused more than once of sponsoring anti-Pakistan services by using undercover aspects such as diplomatic cover, local media proxies, and outreach projects based in consulates. The example of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an officer in the Indian Navy who was detained and sentenced to terrorism and espionage in the province of Balochistan, demonstrates that the handlers of the state contribute to both sides of the conflict, the kinetic and the information one. It is not a one-off but part of a broader infrastructure aimed at systematically undermining Pakistan through a nested proxy war.
Meanwhile, global social media platforms, under the guise of free speech, have become enablers of content that glorifies violence, encourages desertion, and stokes ethnic fragmentation. Voice of the expelled that purport to represent suppressed people tend to trespass into the red lines because they know that their digital strength is boosted by expatriate networks based on antagonistic ground.
Pakistan has been mixing military success with social integration. Safe havens of hundreds of terrorists have been neutralized, and deradicalization programs are assisting in reintegration of past militants back into the society. Communication with the local communities has been maintained as a priority and the reform of the national institutions has been consistent yet under the stress of the digital subversion. Armed forces, judiciary and civil society institutions such as NADRA and education sector are operating amidst a never-ending attack of the narrative meant to discredit them.
Freedom of speech is a democratic value, but it cannot serve as a license to promote groups that seek to destabilize sovereign states through violence or ideological warfare. They have to be subjected to uniform standards by international forums and rights-based institutions. When a voice is unable to speak up against terrorism with a clear voice and participates to analyse it with the same as moral equivalence then it is to be interpreted with a certain amount of suspicion. The difference between activism and insurgency is on the matter of motive and effect one seeks change and the other seeks collapse.
In the case of Pakistan, the menace is real, not abstract but imminent, and it is existential. The manipulation of a nation through propaganda coordination brings the same strategic results as an outright aggression. It undermines the spirit of a nation, separates societies, and strengthens the enemies. Organizations such as BYC and PTM, purported to be some type of rights movement, have been known to engage in rhetoric closely aligned and even overlapping that of the banned organizations, and at some times have been used as force multipliers in narrative by hostile power.
The world needs to quit the hypothetical treatment of the use of propaganda as a special field. It is a war zone with serious consequences. Pakistan can and will respond to this on every level, factually, institutionally and nationally. International community should quit chanting selective indignation and recognize the changing ways of destabilizing states under the guise of rights, speech and dissent.
It is time to consider this new front in the global war as it is, a proxy war that is conducted not with rifles but with the hashtags and that is no less dangerous. Pakistan will and has to carry on the fight in this war in the same spirit in which terrorism has been crushed on land, as one nation, speaking the truth and rejection of lies.
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