The current security paradigm of Pakistan is a logical conclusion of global and Afghan factors, fully exploited by India in the form of a multi-dynamic proxy war it has staged against Pakistan from across multiple borders. Accordingly, the national internal security policy of Pakistan envisages to create a safe environment where life, property, civil liberties, and socio-economic rights of citizens are protected, and the people of Pakistan are able to live and prosper in harmony, freedom, respect, and dignity as enshrined in the Constitution of Pakistan, while warding off all potential threats having internal ramifications for peace and security. Security of Pakistan is passing through its testing times as it simultaneously confronts more serious internal narrative threats than external threats. The external threats from India in the east and along Pak-Afghan border in the west have a direct and indirect bearing on the internal security situation of Pakistan. The internal threats are even more daunting as they impact stability, progress and national cohesion. The greatest challenges facing the nation today are extremism, terrorism and organised crimes, coupled with illiteracy, and the widening rich and poor divide. Both the law enforcement and justice system are overstretched and under-resourced, which exacerbates the problem. Though Pakistani state and society are grappling with internal security threats, with a great degree of success, a lot more is required in facing up to these internal narrative challenges. The state and society of Pakistan is already fighting hybrid warfare launched by India for destabilising Pakistan to push her to its terms on Kashmir, besides its professed hegemonic designs to have supremacy on the Indian Ocean ring countries, which due to mere nomenclature India believes to have in its natural sphere of influence. The enemy is targeting Pakistan from within through proxies by inflicting multiple cut strategies. Unearthing of spying network after Kulbhushan Jadhav was captured by Pakistan, and the current fiasco and some unjust demands of the Pashtun movement, show that there has been no shift of tactics from India in continuing to wage a strategic hybrid war against Pakistan as a constant factor of its strategy to deal with Pakistan, who is proving too stubborn to be made docile through conventional military means. The recent Pakistani rebuttal through air defence strikes in February 2019 is a clear example in this regard. The task of effectively winning wars of narratives in the arena of world opinion cannot be attained by formal diplomatic means alone. In the post-truth era where reality is less influential in shaping opinion in comparison with repetitive assertion of given agenda points, even foreign policy has become a battlefield of competing narratives. Projecting a country’s view abroad has become increasingly challenging owing to a void of requisite intellectual constructs for helping sell Pakistan’s rationale of policies adopted. No state has ever, in human history, succeeded to overcome hybrid wars, types of which we are confronted with, with the help of its armed forces alone Earlier, the shortcomings of requisite strategy in the very domain have proved highly deficient for countering the type of hybrid war we are continuously facing. Resultantly, Pakistan’s perspective of peace and security and its position vis-à-vis India, United States, and even in the eyes of its ‘permanent friends’, was underrepresented. Pakistan’s adversaries were exploiting the ideological and social differences among its body politic by simultaneously constructing alternative narratives about Pakistan’s state and security institutions for effectively harming Pakistan’s image abroad. One such little incident has also occurred during the Pak-Afghan World Cup match recently. Representation of a counter narrative on national and internal arena through human resource development (HRD) is a prerequisite for neutralising enemies’ hybrid wartactics used against Pakistan. An adverse narrative against Pakistan that feeds the opinion of policy makers abroad goes unchallenged. Quality HRD, especially intelligentsia, is necessary for effectively and institutionally calibrating and disseminating Pakistan’s perspective domestically and abroad. In modern nation states, armies are raised not solely for the security but for the strategy. They work as arms of politico-economic strategies of their respective countries. They help flex the political muscle of their nations and facilitate their states to create an environment on and beyond its borders, in which trade flourishes as per their advantage. When a state perennially fails to utilise its military power to elicit desired politico-economic strategic response in the international or regional arena to its benefit, it creates a vacuum that is destined to be filled by external interests. Such a situation further deteriorates when there does not exist clarity in the body politic of a nation state regarding its true objectives, and how it defines its security in the light of its supreme national interests. No state has ever, in human history, succeeded to overcome hybrid wars, types of which we are confronted with, with the help of its armed forces alone. Hence, the level of preparedness of Pakistan for countering a hybrid war is dismally low, as all security paraphernalia were developed to launch hybrid wars outside of its borders. Now hybrid wars are continuing inside of its borders in the form of the simmering propaganda by some misguided Pashtun elements, and low level insurgency with sporadic outburst of terrorists in Balochistan pockets and FATA areas, where military check posts are hit by miscreants. In a nutshell, the historical lesson on hybrid war is more pronounced than ever. No single strategy works for different situations, and every situation requires its own mix of strategies. Hence, developing an institutional mechanism to keep on calibrating and generating response as per the changing situations and challenges is a pre requisite to counter the hybrid war being faced by Pakistan. (Concluded) The writer is a freelance columnist