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Business Recorder
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Recorder
Who won the war?
'In war, truth is the first casualty.' This quote is commonly attributed to the great Greek philosopher Aeschylus, but US Senator Hiram Johnson is purported to have uttered these words sometime in 1918. However, Aeschylus' name has been hammered so much while using this quote that the truth has taken a back seat. The same applies to history, especially the war history, where 'we' always win and 'you' lose. The brief four-day Pakistan-India conflict of May 2025 is yet another example, where the truth appears to have vanished in the poisonous fog of claims and counterclaims, allegations and counter-allegations. Interestingly, the two archenemies have huge claims not just about the war, but ceasefire too. The masses on both sides of the great divide stand confused about how to separate facts from fiction. Let's try to make sense of this short clash, having repercussions not only on the region but beyond it. Who won this 'war'? A simple answer: China Although China did not directly take part in it, the Chinese technology did prove its mettle. In fact, it was the first time that advanced Chinese weapons were tested in a real conflict against cutting-edge western technology. And indeed, the Chinese impressed friends and foes alike. Now along with the economic rise of China, the US-led Western bloc will also have to worry about its technological advancement. As far as Pakistan and India are concerned, they both are claiming victory. But the fact is that, India failed to cower down Pakistan. India's hardline Hindu extremist government, suffering from an acute megalomania, thought Pakistan would prove a pushover. But the game turned the other way. Even the international media acknowledged Pakistan's air superiority – thanks to the Chinese technology – and its kills. While the Indian side is mum about its losses, the Pakistanis boast downing three French-made Rafael and three other combat aircraft. There are no two opinions about the losses suffered by the Indian side. Independent sources also confirm that at least two Rafale fighter planes have been shot down, but this does not mean that there are no others. Both Pakistan and India claim that the rival approached the United States for a ceasefire. The US leadership, which in the wake of simmering tensions in South Asia, had maintained that it had nothing to do with conflict, suddenly jumped to act as a peacemaker. President Donald Trump took the lead and took the credit of brokering a ceasefire, though he did not provide any details. For many, an incomplete truth is more dangerous than a lie. CNN's Nick Robertson reported that India requested a ceasefire from the US President after the intensity of Pakistani counterattack. But the Indians now deny this. Chinese technology proves its mettle: a cyberwar Can fighter planes' navigation systems be hacked? Can missiles or UAVs be blinded and re-guided? Has China's mysterious technology left the West behind? Is it a non-kinetic warfare era, or we may call it Cyberwar? After the latest Pakistan-India clash, many big questions hover before the world, especially the western powers. On the Pakistan side, J-10C and PL-15 missiles and on other side Rafale fighters and Brahmos missiles with S-400 system. In the wee hours of May 7, the world witnessed the biggest battle in the skies after World War-II, that would long be reviewed and scrutinised by defence experts the world over. This was the first time in history that the Chinese weapons were used in a war. The state-of-the-art Chinese technology and the skills of the Pakistan Air Force stunned the world. China is all set to emerge as a major player in the global arms market, challenging the monopoly of the US and European weapon manufacturers. Beside terms like 'soft kill' and 'hard kill,' many relatively new phrases including 'electronic warfare', 'spectrum warfare operations', 'cyber and space domains', 'stand of weapons', 'microwave weapon', 'spoofing & jamming', the 'multimodel warfare' – all became the buzz words on the traditional and new media. We also learnt that this technological warfare was just a glimpse of the actual super-tech cyber warfare era. Journalist versus jokers The Indian media, which usually remains successful in creating a global narrative against Pakistan, badly flopped in this round. The kind of madness and hysterics witnessed on the Indian news channels find no place in serious journalism. Its anchorpersons and analysts appeared more like inexperienced jokers who even can't perform their acts of folly in style and convincingly. The theatrically and propagandist style of the Indian media failed to convince the world or build even a logical narrative. Performers including Arnab Goswami, Amish Devgan, Rubika Liaquat, Anjana Om Kashyap, Smita Prakash, Sudhir Chaudhry and Barkha Dutt put up a bad show as they plunged into shallow emotionalism and blurted out fake news. Despite their limitation and absence of English-language news channels, it is for the first time that Pakistan's mainstream and social media made an impact on the global forums. The same kind of difference was witnessed in the military briefings of both the countries. The Pakistani appeared confident, logical and mature compared to their Indian counterparts. Actions speak louder than words Many hidden facts about this conflict would emerge with the passage of time, but whatever is available bust the Indian narrative and claims. Firstly, India's global position has suffered a serious blow. India, which is the World's fifth-largest economy and vying for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, failed to emerge as a decisive force in its own backyard. Its ambitions to be seen as a counterweight to China on the back of the support of the US-led Western bloc also lies shattered. Going forward, India's western sponsors would be wary of putting all their eggs in the Indian basket. India, doused in anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistan hate and carrying the banner of the extremist Hindutva ideology, has proved that it is no match to China. Setbacks for India India always took a stance that Kashmir remains an internal affair and refused any mediation on this issue. But its misadventure has internationalized the Kashmir issue once again. To the much chagrin of India, it is now clear that ceasefire has been brokered under the US pressure, and President Trump has offered his good offices to settle the Kashmir issue. Now Washington is also pushing for negotiations between the two countries at a neutral venue. Obviously, Pakistan will make the best use of this opportunity to internationalize the Kashmir issue, while India would resist and focus only on the alleged cross-border terrorism which Islamabad firmly denies. Secondly, India's status as a regional power vis-à-vis China has severely been damaged. As India's military capability against Pakistan stands exposed, China has proved its superiority from the shadows. The third important point is that India has increasingly become isolated even in its neighbourhood. It is at odds not just with Pakistan and China, but beside Afghanistan and Iran, Bangladesh has also taken an independent line. Its relations with Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives are also challenging. While, clear stance of Türkiye and Azerbaijan during the war is an indication that China's allies in the world are increasing. Fourthly, Pakistan's image in the region and in the global context has improved significantly, while India's reputation has taken a major jolt. The Modi government also faces a growing tide of opposition within the country as secular Indians, including key religious minorities, are out to challenge Hindutva politics. The upcoming Bihar elections will prove an acid test for this phenomenon. On a concluding note, the remarks of Indian Gen. P.R. Shankar (retd) that the Pakistanis used the Chinese weapons better than the Chinese should bring a smile on the faces of many Pakistanis. The Indian general said: 'I always said (that) between the Chinese and Pakistan, I (would) prefer to fight the Chinese because Pakistanis are good at fighting, even you can see it now.' There can be no greater success than winning a praise from the enemy. But aren't the Indians misjudging the Chinese as they misjudged the Pakistanis? A point to ponder. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
Mint
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Truth is the first casualty of war: Old wisdom with a new twist
I first read the maxim that truth is the first casualty of war many years ago, in high school. In order to write this column, I did a 'fact check' on the origins of the adage. I was not at all surprised to see that there are multiple possible sources: US Republican Senator Hiram Johnson in 1918, Samuel Johnson in 1758, and, most popularly, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus around 550 BCE. It's a sign of the times that there are multiple truth claims on a saying about truth. The argument in the axiom is simple and persuasive. Information is a powerful weapon at all times, but especially so during war. All parties in a conflict, governments in particular, seek to show themselves in a favourable light and make claims about the moral justifications for their own actions and the moral inferiority of their enemies. Also Read: Reality check: Political polarization makes people fall for fake news The tools that governments use are also well known. Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and the suppression or censoring of facts. This manipulation of information has two audiences: the international community (which requires a whole other discussion) and, even more important, their own populations (for without public support, it is hard to sustain a war or ask the people to sacrifice). Hermann Göring, the Nazi war criminal who was the supreme commander of the Luftwaffe (the air force of Nazi Germany) declared during the Nuremberg trials that to get the public to acquiesce to war, 'all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism… It works the same way in any country." Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural psychologist and Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote that a 'reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact." Also Read: Research: Who's afraid of the truth about fake news? What we have come to call 'fake news' about war is not recent. For example, the infamous 'Black Hole of Calcutta' came to signify for the British the cruelty and lack of civilization and morals among Indians. It became a public justification for empire. Later, it became a rallying cry for Indian nationalists. The story was certainly hugely exaggerated, if anything had happened at all. The Gulf of Tonkin lie launched the US war on Vietnam and the Saddam Hussein 'weapons of mass destruction' lie launched the US invasion of Iraq. One of Vladimir Putin's key justifications for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is his contention that the government of Volodymyr Zelensky (president of Ukraine and a Jew) runs on Nazi ideology. It's not hard to find big lies (such as the justification for an invasion) and small lies (so many enemies killed, so many fighter jets shot down) that litter the literal battlefield. Also Read: Deepfake distortion: Has Indian politics fallen prey to it? Historically, it is the state that creates propaganda and falsehoods. The actual disseminators of information, the media—newspapers, radio, TV, and now the internet—often simply repeat what they have been told. The media rarely, if ever, has independent means of verifying war claims. Media representatives are never in the rooms where national security decisions are taken and almost never at the scene of the action. They can therefore easily become loudspeakers of the state. But something newish appears to have emerged in last week's conflict with Pakistan. Social media forwards of purported TV screenshots suggested all manner of wild claims made by some TV channels with subcontinental audiences: for example, Karachi port and Islamabad had been destroyed and Pakistan's Balochistan province had become independent, or that India's airfield in Bathinda had been destroyed and Pakistan's digital retaliation had both crippled India and inflicted major economic losses on the country. While I am reasonably sure that very little of what was said happened (certainly not to the degree claimed), it's hard to know what was actually reported by various channels and what was not. No individual could have possibly watched the many hours of war coverage on television. Were tales told that felt true (in the sense of Stephen Colbert's ingenious term 'truthiness')? Are feelings all that matter in such times? Also Read: Combating fake news: Staying away from Google can be a solution I also feel as if I am in the middle of a fun-house mirror in which each image I see has been so distorted by multiple concave and convex mirrors that the original is unreadable. If truth no longer matters in broadcast news and if consumers of news know that it doesn't matter and that what they are consuming is not the true truth but their truth (the narrative that will give them satisfaction), then we are indeed in a new information realm. In this realm, the product being sold and consumed is not news, but patriotism. The apparent goal is not to inform but to generate a dopamine rush of pleasure. The dangers of this are obvious. The state no longer needs to manipulate and distort the truth of war because the media will do it willingly. Media outlets that refuse to peddle patriotism could find themselves left behind in the news marketplace, their caution and scepticism finding few buyers because they fail to provide the heady brew of patriotism. Noam Chomsky, the renowned MIT linguist, had famously argued that the US mass media is an ideological institution that helps 'manufacture consent" for wars that benefit the US economic and political elite. We may have gone beyond that point now. Consent does not need to be manufactured because it is taken for granted. What is manufactured instead is war euphoria. The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.
