Islamabad: Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, has said that Pakistan needs to counter ongoing hybrid warfare effectively and timely. He made these remarks at a Conference on ‘Disinformation as a Tool of Strategic Warfare’ organised by the Institute of Regional Studies. Senator Mushahid Hussain, while chairing the panel on “Disinformation Campaign against Pakistan and its Impact”, referred to prominent American scholar Dr Noam Chomsky’s landmark study on propaganda, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, where he talks of a nexus between Media Ownership, Advertisers and Media Elites, which act in concert to demonise the ‘enemy’.
Senator Mushahid Hussain emphasized that it was a myth that propaganda was a prerogative of only dictatorships, in fact, today’s modern democracies are also engaged in disinformation warfare. Given this context, Senator Mushahid Hussain proposed the immediate establishment of a Joint Cyber Inter-Services Command to play a pivotal role in the emerging threat of an undeclared hybrid war by global players against Pakistan. He said, for Pakistan, ‘truth is the best weapon’ against fake news, propaganda and disinformation campaigns. On the occasion, he also quoted various examples related to fact checking, debunking and refuting suspicious news reports.
There was an animated discussion session, consisting of questions and comments. Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, in his remarks, also lauded the contribution of IRS President, Ambassador Nadeem Riyaz, for reviving the IRS as one of the preeminent Pakistani think tanks on regional issues.
PNP FactCheck, an initiative by the Press Network of Pakistan (PNP), is an independent unit to verify, debunk and refute fake news, propaganda and other disinformation about events in Pakistan being circulated in the media.
