A lot of these people have spent years telling us all that Indian involvement/influence/support to much of the troubles that we have been facing is a figment of our imagination. The nervous ticks of a paranoid security state.

They maintain that even the face of this exposure.

The Pakistani state's security component has been calling this 5th Generation warfare and/or Hybrid Warfare being waged against us.

And to many English language Pakistani journos that's become a punchline.

Everything humans have done or continue to do has evolved. War is no different. So I've always found this out-of-hand dismissal of the concept a country waging hybrid war or being subjected to 5th generation warfare as really strange.

We've just seen how real it is.

Anyone who studies conflict and war can tell you it's not the same business as it was 20 years ago. The GWOT, tech and social media being the accelerants to this evolution.

Even the word 'battlefield' which was self explanatory for millennia has become incredibly complex.

War and Peace used to be binary states. That's just not the case anymore - certainly not in the broken world the GWOT has created for us.

Politics, demographics, data, tech and their intersectionality- now stands weaponised in what professionals call hybrid war.

Hybrid war isn't a punch line.

It just means that war remains a useful means to achieve policy objectives, but that the deployment of extreme extreme violence must be managed - along with many non kinetic weapons - for it to be a useful tool of coercion.

Since Pakistan, in my opinion, has been at the receiving end of a hybrid war for some time - question is how should we be responding to it - and are some of the attacks we've been under designed to make us react in ways that'll make us dig a deeper hole for ourselves.

And here in lies the challenge. Aspiring to be a better democracy we can't afford to criminalize every act of political dissent - nor does that mean that every act of dissent is automatically pure in it's intent.

There'll always those that will look at 2+2 = 3, i.e., simply deny the obvious arithmetic of Indian ops vs Pak and say it's nothing but smoke and mirrors .......but we equally can't look at 2+2 = 22 and find enemies and threats where none exist.

We're under attack in some of the most sophisticated methods at the adversary's disposal.

Our response and counters must be equally so.

PS: There's actual literature on this being churned out by those for whom war is a profession and how to view hybrid war via the Clausewitzian trinity etc..

Just b/c you haven't read it doesn't mean it's not a real idea that's under various models of deployment across the globe.