The South Asian security environment remains heavily significant. This is shaped by the traditional competition of states, but another and growing facet has come to the fore: competition over perception, interpretation, and decision-making. This is referred to as “cognitive warfare”. It works by not only shaping attitudes towards social groups but also how they respond to uncertainty in times of emergencies.
In the context of the Indian-Pakistani strategic relations, cognitive dynamics are now directly related to crisis stability. Recent experiences show that the increasing interaction between digital stories, flows of information through platforms and hybrid information campaigns and military signaling. This leads to a situation of “perception as the environment of conflict”.
One of the important milestones in the information environment of SA is the development of the concept of crisis communication. In Kargil (1999) there was lack of flow of information and was centralized. A shift away from traditional platforms began to take place in public interpretation starting at Mumbai (2008). Narrative competition was immediate, decentralized and visible across the world within hours by Balakot (2019) and was reinforced during subsequent crises like Operation Sindoor (2025).
The recent reports of the crisis in India-Pakistan in 2025 further demonstrate the role of social media in magnifying uncertainty in the media environment. Several studies and investigations have reported both Indian and Pakistani online platforms were flooded with sensationalist statements, rehashed videos and AI visuals that had either extreme victory or swift wins on either side. This involved misinformation about territorial changes, leadership captures, and destruction of infrastructure, which spread prior to the ability of verification mechanisms to react.
Strategically, it is an important structural change: There are now competing perception architectures in addition to war as a way to fight a modern crisis. But it’s not a one-way street, it’s an important point. India and Pakistan are in the same digital fast lane, with accelerated narratives fuelled by the platform algorithms and incentives for engagement, not accuracy.
Alongside this, there has been a growing focus on coordinated Strategic Communication during crises in Pakistan’s information environment. Concurrently, in Pakistan, the information environment has been increasingly oriented towards coordinated strategic communication in times of crises. State-sponsored messaging, media engagement and diaspora-level digital engagement has helped to create alternative narratives around deterrence stability, damage control, and avoiding escalation. This is part of a trend that elevates Pakistan’s status as a player in the game of “controlled escalation management” and thus in situations of nuclear crisis, where restraint is crucial in the game, Pakistan has been able to position itself.
The Balakot episode is a classic example to illustrate this situation. The narratives started to form early, and were both fast and contested on every side, but as time went on, several different interpretations developed as information became more stable. Most important, it is not just that there is competition for claims, it is that perception came to differ from verifiable reality in an expeditious fashion. This “perception gap” is important as it plays a role in domestic pressure on the decision-makers in both states.
Another aspect is the development of “hybrid cognitive warfare. This includes the mixing up of state information, non-state actors, digital personalities and automated information systems. In the escalation scenario of 2025, investigations reveal that misinformation was not limited to one side’s digital realm, but instead information and unverified claims were inflated on a large scale both within India’s mainstream information system and through social information systems.
This is not just about fake news, it’s the reality of how fast information spreads in today’s conflict zones, compared to how much time it takes to verify it. Consequently, perception is split among audience—and there are multiple “parallel realities” of the same event.
In the contemporary era, neuro, security also plays an indispensable role in fortifying the layer in the process .Although it is still theoretical, a continuous flow of material related to crisis certainly deforms the brain’s cognitive systems. Exposure to emotionally charged narratives has an impact on attention, emotional reactions and threat levels. This affects increasingly over time societies’ perceptions of external actors and external risks.
These can be exacerbated in South Asia, where mobile penetration rates are high, news cycles are fast and national identity is well established. This leaves a space that is cognitively saturated, and where perception changes can happen within minutes and sometimes before institutional verification and diplomatic clarification is achieved.
The second dimension that is important is that of strategic restraint mechanisms. In various crises, Pakistan has acted in a manner that shows that it has tried to maintain a balance in escalating its response both through military preparedness and diplomatic messages and interaction with the international community. This is in keeping with the general deterrence stability logic in a nuclearized environment where one of the strategic priorities is the avoidance of escalation. The latter is particularly important to avoid kinetic escalation, which is a direct result of cognitive escalation, when responding in such a calibrated manner.
China has also been very important at the regional level as a stabilizing external actor. China through diplomacy and by emphasising de-escalation helps build the climate for controlling escalation in South Asia. This triangular strategic environment – India, Pakistan and China has formed a multi-layered stability structure such that the conclusions of a crisis are not just determined bilaterally, but also through regional diplomatic balancing.
Although the field of cognitive warfare has become more pertinent, there is less empirical research going on in South Asia. Existing theoretical frameworks are largely western derived and are not fully representative of how intensely and linguistically diverse South Asian information ecologies are, and how complex their politics are. Likewise, there is little evidence of measurable links between intensity of narratives, emotional amplification and decision-making on policy in crisis situations.
A strategic stability point of view, South Asia is now in a ‘double-layered’ condition. The first level is kinetic stability, decided through traditional military balance and nuclear deterrence, that lowers the chances of a “full-scale war.” The second layer is cognitive instability exemplified through the constant competition of narratives that influence the perception of the situation, domestic pressure, and interpretation of the crisis. They do not always match up in layers and create both stasis and flux.
Finally, SA’s cognitive warfare isn’t just a theoretical construct; it’s a reality that’s part of the current behavior of crisis. The recent crisis in Balakot and the 2025 environment of escalation proves that perception can outrun verification and in some instances, impact strategic points in different states.
The big challenges for South Asia will then not only be how to manage military escalation, but how to manage cognitive escalation as well. In a context of speed, saturation and narration competition, the balance between strategies and stability is increasingly based on calibrated communication, institutional credibility and the capacity of all regional actors to not allow the perception to go ahead of reality in the face of crises. ( Opinions expressed in this article are author’s own, not necessarily the WNAM). The author is student of BS Strategic Studies at National Defence University (NDU), Islamabad.
