Who Is Behind the Anti-Pakistan Information War and Why It Is Failing

I have been covering Pakistan’s media and security landscape long enough to recognise a coordinated campaign when I see one. There is a texture to it — the same talking points appearing across unrelated platforms within hours of each other, the conspicuous absence of named sources, recycled footage dressed up as breaking news, and beneath it all an urgency that smells less like journalism and more like a deadline someone else set. What we have witnessed over the past several days is not reporting. It is a campaign. And like most campaigns, once you strip away the noise, the motivation is not particularly hard to find.

Let me be direct about what I mean and who I mean it about, because vagueness serves the very people I am describing.

The infrastructure for what is being done to Pakistan’s reputation did not materialise overnight. Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has been tracking and documenting this for years. Its Digital Media Wing published a 135-page Deep Analytics Report on anti-state trends covering 2019 to 2021 — a forensic study of how coordinated hashtag campaigns originate, who runs them, and what they are designed to achieve. That document identified five recurring strategic themes: discrediting Pakistan’s government and armed forces, fanning sub-nationalism along ethnic lines, targeting CPEC, keeping Pakistan on the FATF grey list, and manufacturing a narrative of state-sponsored terrorism to be amplified at international forums. Every single one of those themes is traceable in the current wave of negative content. Nothing has changed except the sophistication of the tools.

The numbers, when you look at them, are not subtle. The hashtag #SanctionPakistan alone was used over 730,000 times according to data compiled by social media analytics firm Talkwalker, with 37 percent of those tweets originating from Afghanistan. A separate count cited by then-National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf put the figure at 800,000 tweets, with 20,000 attributable to a single political organisation inside Pakistan whose social media activity was being coordinated with external campaigns. NSA Yusuf was explicit at his August 2021 press conference: “These hashtags are initiated through 40 percent of bot activity.” He added that senior Afghan officials including the Vice President, the National Security Adviser and the Defence Minister had personally participated in these campaigns. This was not conjecture. The government released the data.

Then there is the documented network operating far beyond social media. The Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab, in its 2019 investigation, identified 265 coordinated fake local media websites operating across 65 countries, all traced to a single New Delhi-based entity called the Srivastava Group, with the explicit purpose of undermining Pakistan internationally. By 2020, the follow-up report titled Indian Chronicles found the network had grown to 750 fake websites across 116 countries, having run continuously for 15 years. The actors behind it registered more than 550 domain names covering fake NGOs, fake think-tanks, fake European Parliament groups, fake imam organisations and fake publishing companies. They impersonated The Economist, Voice of America and the EU Observer. They used European Parliament letterheads. They provided fabricated addresses to the United Nations. They resurrected the identities of dead academics to give their fake organisations a veneer of history. EU DisinfoLab called it, without qualification, the largest disinformation network they had ever exposed.

I want to pause on what this actually means, because the scale can obscure the intent. This was not a propaganda operation designed to win arguments. It was an operation designed to manufacture the appearance of an international consensus that had never existed — to make it look, in Brussels and Geneva, as if the world’s think-tanks, NGOs and media organisations had independently concluded that Pakistan was a dangerous, destabilising actor that deserved institutional censure. The content produced by hundreds of fake European and American outlets was not aimed at European or American readers. It was designed to be laundered through Indian news agency ANI, repackaged as credible foreign coverage, and redistributed to millions of readers. The information minister at the time, Fawad Chaudhry, specifically flagged that 845 websites had been identified as having direct ties to ANI for the purpose of spreading disinformation against Pakistan. At that same press conference, he noted that trends related to the Karima Baloch case were tweeted 20,000 times with two out of every three tweets originating from India, and that a trend was manufactured around the alleged death of a child in Balochistan — a child who turned out to be perfectly alive.

By the time the May 2025 military confrontation arrived, the machinery was running at a scale that I think caught even seasoned observers off guard. When India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, 2025, a second war broke out almost immediately — one fought entirely in pixels and propaganda. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which monitored X from May 6 to May 11 using the analytics tool Brandwatch, documented how a single Hindu nationalist post claiming that “the entire port of Karachi is in ashes” accumulated 2 million views and 60,000 likes over four days, despite being entirely fabricated. Posts amplifying that same false claim with misattributed footage from the January 2025 Philadelphia plane crash received 2.9 million views and 23,000 likes. Stock photos of an Indian aircraft carrier firing a missile from an old press release were circulated as evidence of the destruction of Karachi port, drawing over 500,000 views.

BOOM Live, India’s own independent fact-checking organisation, found that 68 percent of all its fact-checks for the entire month of May 2025 were related to Operation Sindoor. Think about what that number means for a moment. An independent fact-checker in India dedicated more than two-thirds of its entire monthly output to correcting fabrications generated during a four-day military confrontation. And at the Shangri-La Dialogue, India’s Chief of Defence Staff made an admission that I found remarkable and revealing: 15 percent of India’s operational time during Operation Sindoor was spent countering fake news. One in seven hours of a military operation consumed not by fighting across the border but by battling the fabrications circulating in India’s own media ecosystem.

Those fabrications came from identifiable sources. Times Now Navbharat broadcast, with animated graphics, that Indian forces had entered Pakistan. Zee News told its viewers that the Indian Army had captured Islamabad and Pakistan had surrendered. Aaj Tak, whose anchors Anjana Om Kashyap and Sweta Singh were named specifically in subsequent accountability reporting, broadcast false claims of attacks that had not occurred before the channel issued a partial apology. NDTV was caught in a hot-mic moment where a reporter was heard complaining about newsroom pressure for fresh updates, after which the channel ran unverified content. News18, ABP News and India TV all reported that a Pakistani pilot had been captured. These were not fringe accounts or anonymous handles. These were prime-time television channels with audiences in the hundreds of millions, and their editorial decisions during those four days have been documented by the Reuters Institute, the Al Jazeera Media Institute, BOOM Live, and the International Federation of Journalists.

On social media the picture was no less documented. By December 2025, Deputy Interior Minister Talal Chaudhry was holding a press conference in Islamabad at which he presented what he described as documentary evidence that 19 specific X accounts linked to militant groups were being operated from India, and that more than two dozen additional accounts with apparent ties to the Afghan Taliban government were active from Afghanistan. “Kabul is not only sheltering militants but, in some cases, elements of the Afghan government are providing patronage to individuals spreading hate material and terror content against Pakistan,” he said. Pakistan formally asked social media platforms to act on this evidence. X, according to reporting by Dawn, declined to cooperate.

Pakistan’s own response throughout this period was grounded in something the other side largely abandoned, which is verifiable evidence. DG ISPR held press conferences during the May 2025 conflict at which doctored visuals were publicly debunked with source references. Media channels provided evidence of recycled footage from previous conflicts being presented as current material. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, in a single enforcement action on May 8, 2025, blocked 16 Indian YouTube channels, 31 specific video links, and 32 websites identified as spreading false information and anti-Pakistan propaganda. PTA was explicit about the basis for each action: the blocked content was “spreading misleading and harmful narratives aimed at manipulating public perception and undermining national unity.” IT Minister Shaza Fatima separately confirmed that all Indian cyberattacks during the conflict were thwarted, with not a single intrusion succeeding, while CERT issued public advisories warning citizens against suspicious links and unverified content.

It is worth noting that Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar addressed this very campaign directly on Wednesday evening. In a post that drew over 53,000 views within hours, he wrote that “a coordinated negative information campaign is being observed, initiated from outside Pakistan, with malicious intent,” and that “the objective is to create deliberate confusion and misinformation, quoting unnamed sources and officials.” He was pointed about the motivation: “This unprofessional intent to discredit Pakistan’s role for sustainable peace in the region speaks of the frustration of those who are weary of peace.” That a sitting information minister felt compelled to address this publicly, and that his statement resonated as immediately as it did, tells you something about how visible and how organised this campaign has become.

What the minister said publicly is what the evidence supports analytically. This is all happening at the precise moment when Pakistan’s standing in the world is stronger than it has been in a long time. On May 10, 2025, Pakistan and India reached a ceasefire after four days of military confrontation — 36 countries helped broker the truce according to Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar — with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly crediting US President Trump for his “leadership and proactive role for peace in the region.” The ceasefire has held through its first year. The field marshal and the prime minister visited the White House in September 2025, where Pakistan’s army chief was received, in the words of India’s own Congress party, with “extraordinary warmth” by Trump. By April 2026, Pakistan had emerged as the principal mediator between the United States and Iran, brokering a two-week ceasefire when Trump’s deadline for Iranian capitulation was less than 90 minutes away. Bloomberg called it Pakistan demonstrating its “central role in global politics.” Al Jazeera described it as the first time any country had simultaneously managed active conflict mediation between two adversaries under ongoing military escalation without direct contact between them. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs called Pakistan’s emergence as a major diplomatic player surprising to some, though noted it perhaps should not be.

A country that certain parties spent 15 years and more than 750 fake websites trying to isolate and discredit is now the country the world calls when it needs a trusted intermediary between Washington and Tehran. I understand the frustration that produces. What I find less understandable is the assumption that the same old toolkit — recycled footage, unnamed sources, manufactured hashtags launched with 40 percent bot activity — can still produce the outcomes it once did. The documentation is too thorough now. The fact-checkers are too fast. The institutional record is too clear.

I also want to say something about the standards that the critics refuse to apply to themselves, because the current information environment has a breathtaking double standard at its centre. The World Economic Forum ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation. This is not a Pakistani assessment. Indian right-wing X accounts with nearly 100,000 followers publicly stated during the May 2025 conflict: “In any conflict, the purpose of information warfare is clear: to confuse, mislead and break the thinking of the enemy. We will do this and do it again and again.” Some accounts openly praised each other for wilfully spreading false information. One right-wing military commentator referenced Joseph Goebbels approvingly to explain the strategy. These statements are documented by the Reuters Institute. Yet the same ecosystem that produced and celebrated this approach positions itself as an objective commentator on Pakistan’s credibility.

Pakistani journalists, digital fact-checkers, and the media organisations that have built rapid response capacity deserve acknowledgment for their work. The counter to a campaign this well-resourced and this persistent is not silence and it is not reciprocal fabrication — NSA Yusuf said it clearly in 2021 and it remains true today: “We won’t expose fake news through fake news.” The counter is documentation, speed, and persistence. Pakistan’s responsible media has shown all three.

The fog merchants are not interested in Pakistan’s genuine shortcomings, of which any honest editor would readily acknowledge there are real ones. They are interested in Pakistan’s genuine achievements, because those achievements make the investment in that disinformation infrastructure look like what the evidence increasingly shows it to be — a long, expensive, and ultimately failing project to manufacture a reality that Pakistan’s actual conduct keeps refusing to validate.

The fog is lifting. What lies beneath it is not what they wanted anyone to see.