A new 'war' outside the battlefield

When in the post-Cold War era ‘proxy war’ emerged as the new weapon by which an opponent could be brought down -- without an engagement in the ‘battlefield’ -- this basically had two connotations.

- DC PATHAK

One was the resort to planned ‘covert’ violence through the use of terror groups that could launch what is termed as an ‘asymmetric war’ against the enemy and cause a serious dent in the fighting power of the latter.

The other was a widening of the sphere of combat -- beyond the conventional warfare -- in which the opponent's economy would be damaged, the youth on the other side would be trapped in the evil consequences of narcotics and an organised campaign would be conducted to sully the image of the targeted country nationally and internationally.

Terrorism, particularly where it is based on exploitation of faith-related motivation, has now emerged as the global threat to the democratic world as a whole.

Terror groups make covert attacks but they had sophisticated weapons of the kind available only with the Army in the past -- this has happened because countries like Pakistan continued to blatantly use ‘Islamic Terrorism’ as an instrument of state policy, specially against India.

The advent of social media is now hastening a form of propaganda warfare in which organised attempts were made to float ‘narratives’ running down the opponent's regime in a manner that its people would lose faith in it.

'Influence Operations’ are now in full play as an extension of ‘proxy war'.

In 2020, Facebook took down a network of more than 300 accounts that were being run from China -- they were posting content about US elections and also on Covid epidemic and working together to make it more convincing for the American public than all the claims of the party in power or the government of the day, could do.

Since then Artificial Intelligencedriven pro-China propaganda based on a deft exploitation of YouTube's algorithmic system for rapidly producing and publishing content, has been making a steady advance.