US Propaganda War in Afghanistan And Its Implications For Pakistan
- Multiple ongoing preplanned social media campaigns with varying degrees of coordination between the Afghan poster boys and the ‘orchestrator’ (US propaganda machinery consisting of state-controlled media as well as SM giants like Facebook and Twitter, and aided by Indian disinformation blitz)
- The ‘actors’ were told exactly what to do, and when; Following a timeline.
- The purpose is to malign Afghan Taliban and Islam internationally by creating and controlling the narrative to an extent where completely denouncing Taliban/Jihad becomes the only option for governments (including Pakistan’s) and individuals.
- Overwhelming international support and backing already arranged at the behest of the US.
- The information spectrum of operations was already prepared months in advance to make the chaos that will ensue from the US troops withdrawal from Afghanistan the Achilles’s heels for all of them; Taliban, Pakistan, China.
- Shaping of the battlefield by the US/ Indians to engulf Afghanistan into chaos and trickling it down to Pakistan, especially Balochistan and erstwhile FATA.
- Setting up of a field to engage China. Balochistan initially and then the whole of Pakistan.
- Pressuring China ostensibly at the South China Sea and hitting its physical interests in West Asia.
- Punishing Pakistan for trying to shift blocks.
- Fake news at its peak. Internationally, it will make the Afghan regime look both wronged and innocent, thus giving credibility to their existence. Locally, it will create a political divide in Pakistan.
- The way forward: the world needs to be told that the fake Afghan accounts on social media aren’t the representatives of the Afghan people. Afghans are the least represented people on SM. Those Afghans who are speaking up aren’t living there but in the west.
- The Taliban should be referred to as freedom fighters. After all, they are the ones who are resisting foreign aggression and occupation, and their local facilitators.
- The educated youth of Pakistan, especially the Pashtuns, needs to understand that this is not a religious war, nor should it be viewed in that context.
- Need to create new lines of operations.
- Explain that this new regime is not the same as the Taliban of the past, they have learned and evolved.
- The Afghan regime is equivalent to the South Vietnam regime of ’75. A puppet regime. When America withdrew, the government legally fell to NWA. Here credibility is being wrongly given to the Kabul regime.
- Though we won’t let Pakistan or Afghanistan become battlegrounds for bigger international games, but it doesn’t mean that we (both Pakistanis and Afghans) should endorse the Ghani regime. Instead, it is the other way around. If peace is to prevail, the traitors and puppets of the Kabul regime need to step down. They have already killed a lot of Afghans by supporting US forces.
