From 750 fake European media outlets to AI-doctored video of Pakistan’s prime minister to a coordinated India-Afghanistan propaganda network operating right now, the case against Pakistan is not built on facts. It is built on fabrications. And the people running those fabrications have been caught by independent Western researchers, not by Islamabad.
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with being the subject of a lie that has been told so many times, in so many places, that it starts to feel like established fact. Pakistan knows this frustration well. For decades, a carefully constructed image has been projected onto Pakistan in international forums, Western media, and multilateral institutions. That image portrays the country as a state that exports instability, shelters terrorists, and cannot be trusted as a partner. What rarely gets said is that this image was not formed organically. It was manufactured, and the manufacturing operation has been caught on record.
The good news, if it can be called that, is that Pakistan does not need to make this argument on its own. European watchdogs, Indian fact-checkers, international media institutions, and multilateral financial bodies have already made it. The evidence sits in publicly available reports. The task now is simply to make sure those reports are read by the audiences that matter.
The infrastructure: 750 Fake Outlets Across 119 Countries
In December 2020, EU DisinfoLab, an independent research organisation based in Brussels with no institutional connection to Pakistan or its government, published a report titled Indian Chronicles. The executive director of EU DisinfoLab, Alexandre Alaphilippe, described what his team had found in straightforward terms. He called it the largest disinformation network they had ever exposed.
Over a period of fifteen years, a network coordinated through the New Delhi-based Srivastava Group and distributed internationally through the ANI wire service had built and operated more than 750 fake media outlets using over 550 registered domain names spread across 119 countries. The goal was not ambiguous. It was, in the words of the EU DisinfoLab report, to discredit Pakistan internationally while shaping sentiment at the United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Parliament in favour of Indian positions.
The methods were not crude. They were designed to be invisible. The network created fake versions of respected international publications including Voice of America, The Economist, and the EU Observer. It set up a newsletter called EP Today designed to look as though it came from the European Parliament itself. It identified real Members of the European Parliament, cultivated their participation, and had them write opinion pieces that were then published on dummy websites. ANI then reported on these pieces as authentic commentary from European sources. Indian media picked up those ANI reports and presented them as independent international opinion. By the time the fabricated content reached the average reader, there was no visible trace of where it had actually started.
The network even made use of a deceased academic, placing his name and identity on manufactured content to give it scholarly credibility. When EU DisinfoLab first partially exposed the operation in 2019, the network did not close down. It reorganised and kept going. The 2020 report was a follow-up investigation into something that had already survived one exposure. That resilience tells you something about the resources and institutional backing behind it.
The New Axis: Afghanistan as an Amplification Channel
Something important has shifted in recent years. The anti-Pakistan information operation has added a second corridor, and it runs through Afghanistan. As tensions between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban government have intensified through 2025 and into 2026, India’s disinformation infrastructure has found a willing amplifier in Afghan state media and affiliated accounts. The result is a campaign that appears to come from two independent directions but is, in practice, coordinated.
In February 2026, Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting publicly exposed a fabrication that illustrated this coordination clearly. Following Pakistani military operations along the Afghan border, the Afghan Ministry of Defence released a claim that Afghan forces had shot down a Pakistani fighter jet over Nangarhar province and taken the pilot prisoner.
Indian media outlets spread the claim within hours. Pakistan’s response was direct. No aircraft had been lost. No international defence institution confirmed the loss. The image the Afghan authorities had released as proof was traced and identified as a photograph of a Russian aircraft that had crashed in Turkey in 2021, years before the alleged incident occurred. Once the fabrication was publicly dismantled, the Afghan Taliban’s official social media accounts deleted the posts they had used to spread it. This detail matters. Governments that believe their own claims do not quietly delete the statements in which they made them.
In December 2025, Pakistani security agencies identified a broader pattern. Coordinated networks on X were linking India-affiliated accounts, operating under the label Fitna-ul-Hindustan, with Afghanistan-based accounts to run what investigators described as a systematic propaganda operation against Pakistan. A substantial proportion of the amplification was automated, with bot networks inflating the reach of content seeded by human operators. Fake profiles and impersonation of Afghan Taliban accounts were used to make Indian-origin content appear to carry independent Afghan weight.
The logic behind this arrangement is not difficult to understand. India provides the operational infrastructure, the narrative direction, and the access to international media networks. Afghan-linked accounts provide the Pashto-language reach and the geographic credibility that content originating from India cannot achieve by itself. Together, they create the impression of a regional consensus against Pakistan. That consensus, on inspection, does not exist.
The AI Dimension: What Happened in May 2025
When India launched Operation Sindoor on 7 May 2025, a second offensive opened immediately in the digital space. This one used artificial intelligence as its primary weapon, and it operated at a scale and sophistication that researchers described as unprecedented in South Asian conflict history.
The most widely documented example involved a deepfake video of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The video was constructed using AI voice cloning and lip-sync technology. It showed the Prime Minister appearing to acknowledge military defeat and expressing regret at the absence of support from China and the UAE. The actual footage, which the deepfake had been built from, showed Sharif doing something entirely different: praising the performance of the Pakistan Air Force. The International Federation of Journalists examined and documented the fabrication in June 2025, noting that the May 2025 conflict represented the first major South Asian confrontation in which AI-generated content played a decisive role in shaping how international audiences understood events.
Indian mainstream television channels produced claims during the same period that were so far removed from reality that the criticism came from within India itself. Times Now Navbharat told its viewers that Indian forces had entered Pakistan. Zee News reported that the Indian Army had captured Islamabad and that Pakistan had surrendered. Aaj Tak broadcast reports of a suicide attack on Indian Army units that had not taken place. The Al Jazeera Media Institute documented all three cases. A spokesperson for the Indian National Congress published a list of the fabrications on social media and wrote that all sensible people in the world had lost faith in the reports of India’s mainstream media. That assessment was made by an Indian political figure, not by Islamabad.
BOOM, which is one of the most respected fact-checking organisations in India, reported that 68 per cent of all its verification work during the conflict period was being consumed by claims related to Operation Sindoor. General Anil Chauhan, India’s Chief of Defence Services, acknowledged at the Shangri-La Dialogue that 15 per cent of his military’s operational time during the conflict had been spent on countering disinformation. This was disinformation produced overwhelmingly by India’s own media ecosystem. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, which monitored false claims on X from 6 to 11 May 2025, documented a consistent pattern of decontextualised footage from unrelated conflicts being redistributed to misrepresent what was happening in Pakistan.
The FATF Question: What Is Left Out
Few elements of the anti-Pakistan narrative are cited more consistently than the country’s placement on the Financial Action Task Force grey list in 2018. The grey-listing appears in diplomatic conversations, academic papers, and news commentary as though it were a fixed and current condition. What is rarely mentioned alongside it is what happened in October 2022.
FATF removed Pakistan from its grey list at its Paris plenary meeting, and the decision was made by consensus, meaning every member state agreed. FATF President T. Raja Kumar stated at the closing press conference that Pakistan had completed all 34 action items across both the 2018 and 2021 action plans. He noted that the second action plan had been finished ahead of its own deadlines. He praised the country’s high-level commitment and described the reforms as sustainable. The removal took effect immediately.
None of this is a Pakistani assertion. It is a formal finding of the international body whose specific mandate is to assess terrorism financing. To continue citing the 2018 grey-listing as though the 2022 removal never happened is not a neutral act. It is a decision to use an outdated data point while ignoring its resolution. That decision is made regularly, and it is made for reasons that have nothing to do with accuracy.
The Case for Evidence Over Argument
The most important strategic asset Pakistan has in this information environment is the fact that the most compelling evidence in its favour was produced by people who have no reason to favour Pakistan. EU DisinfoLab is based in Brussels and serves European policy interests. BOOM is an Indian organisation. The International Federation of Journalists is a global body with members across the political spectrum. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue is British. FATF is multilateral. When each of these organisations independently arrives at findings that contradict the narrative being built against Pakistan, the combined weight of those findings is something that no Pakistani government statement could replicate on its own.
The practical implication is straightforward. Pakistan’s communication strategy should be built around making these findings visible, accessible, and repeatedly cited in every forum where the disinformation circulates. When the February 2026 fabrication about the downed aircraft was exposed within days using forensic image analysis, that was exactly the right response. The challenge is to institutionalise that response, so it becomes the default, not the exception.
What Pakistan must avoid is the trap of matching the tactics of those working against it. The moment Pakistan responds to manufactured narratives with its own unverified counterclaims; it surrenders the one advantage it genuinely holds. The documented record, produced by independent international institutions, is the strongest argument Pakistan has. Cluttering that record with anything that can be challenged weakens it.
What the Record Already Shows
The disinformation campaign against Pakistan has not gone unnoticed or unexamined. It has been investigated and documented by serious institutions working entirely independently of Islamabad. EU DisinfoLab found and named what it called the largest influence operation it had ever seen. FATF found and certified that Pakistan had met every counter-terrorism financing obligation placed before it. India’s own defence chief confirmed that disinformation during the May 2025 conflict was costly enough to consume a meaningful share of operational attention. The Afghan government removed its own propaganda posts when the fakery was exposed.
This is the record. Pakistan did not write it. Pakistan’s task now is to make sure the world reads it.
