Daily Times

The government and Pakistani institutions are installing a firewall at the internet gateway to control social media and websites.

After the installation of the firewall, it has become somewhat easier for the government to delete controversial content and identify users who upload it. Those elements that target Pakistan and our security institutions from social media will find it harder to escape.

It is said that this technology has been provided to Pakistan by a friendly country and is already being successfully used in an Arab country in the Middle East.

The government’s two objectives in installing the firewall are to identify those who upload inappropriate content and to restrict access to such content for the general public.

Because the enemies of Pakistan are now waging war not with tanks and missiles but by sitting on the internet and controlling the minds of ordinary people.

The enemies of Pakistan are now waging war not with tanks and missiles but by sitting on the internet and controlling the minds of ordinary people.

A few years ago, I wrote in my column that the primary weapons of fifth-generation warfare are not planes, tanks, and missiles but diplomacy, TV, radio, newspapers, social media, film, and the economy.

This fight is not fought on the ground but through people’s minds; it targets people’s minds rather than their bodies. In this, the adversary does not deploy its armies in any country but achieves its goal by using the people of that country against it.

Now this game is being played openly, and for the past few days, our youth have been taught that absolute freedom on the internet is their weapon, and through it, the Pakistan Army is being targeted. The enemy is very cunning; it knows that if we fill the minds of the youth with poison against the Pakistan Army, then it will not be difficult to subdue Pakistan. Because it is clear that the Pakistan Army is the one that protects our borders and is the guardian of the Two-Nation Theory.

Minds are being manipulated, and the youth are being misled, now that it will be easier to identify such elements after the installation of the firewall, they have remembered freedom of expression, and they are now afraid of being caught.

On the other hand, if we look at freedom of expression in Pakistan, it is much more compared to many countries in the world, so much so that you can say anything to anyone. For example, if we look at India, which claims to be the champion of democracy and the world’s largest democracy, it has recently imposed restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, and even raided Twitter’s office.

In Nigeria, the government has completely banned Twitter, and in China, neither Facebook nor Twitter nor any such app operates; they have their own system under which people use social media. When we look at the countries around us, it becomes clear that, comparatively, people in Pakistan have freedom of opinion, but some people are misusing it.

Freedom of expression does not mean that you should tell your household matters to outsiders and call it freedom of opinion. If we look at international media, it portrays Pakistan as a failed state and tries to present it as a dangerous country for journalists and ordinary people, while the reality is the opposite. This is also part of the fifth-generation war, where so much propaganda is done against someone that it seems like the truth.

Propaganda is also a tool of the fifth-generation war and its key weapon, and the fifth-generation war is a war of ideologies, where efforts are made to dominate false ideologies. Because this war is not fought with ammunition but through the promotion of thought and narrative, whoever has a stronger narrative and can propagate it more effectively will succeed in this war.

In this, the strategy is not to kill the enemy’s soldiers but to incapacitate them, and the enemy’s effort is to fill the Pakistani public with so much filth and hatred against its army that they start hating their army, but this conspiracy of the enemy will fail, God willing.

Because people have understood the enemy’s tricks, and they will not fall into their trap, God willing, the proud people of Pakistan will always support their army as their backbone, and this fifth-generation war will backfire on the enemy itself.

The writer is an old Aitchisonian who believes in freedom of expression, a freelance columnist, entrepreneur and social activist.