The scent of war in South Asia and beyond isn’t carried only by tanks or fighter jets this time. It’s in the markets, manipulated narratives across social feeds, and shifting alliances echoing Cold War tactics. For sure, this time, the battlefront is smarter, subtler, and potentially more devastating.
As tensions spiralled between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of cross-border exchanges and retaliatory air and missile strikes, the world watches familiar allegiances resurface, with one notable difference: the strategic centrality of artificial intelligence (AI)-backed fifth-generation warfare (5GW), the growing overt Chinese support for Pakistan, both digitally and militarily and India getting the backing of the US, Israel, France and Germany. The echoes of 1979, when Pakistan, backed by the US and its European allies, helped drain Soviet power, resound again, but with inverted roles.
This time, China and Pakistan are attempting to subvert a Western-led international order, while India is increasingly standing as the preferred partner for the United States, Israel, and economic-leaders of Europe (if not the whole of the EU), seeking to contain Chinese expansion.
China’s Quiet Storm: Testing Fifth-Generation Warfare
Fifth-generation warfare goes beyond bullets and borders, it’s about perception, data, narrative, influence, and technological dominance. China’s experiment in 5GW isn’t new, but South Asia now appears to be its most visible stage. The theatre provided by Pakistan due to Indian aggression was perhaps the one China was waiting to display its prowess. In what once used to be the sole domain of the US and its allies, the downing of an Indian-operated French-made 5th-generation fighter jet (Rafale) in a dog fight with a Chinese 4.5-generation (J-10CE) fighter jet flown by Pakistani pilots over Kashmir skies has proven Chinese supremacy over US and its allies, at least for now. Always considered as an underdog in the technological race, China has made the US and its allies halt the Indian assaults to help them regroup and reconsider their options, commented one senior military strategist seeking anonymity, which potentially means the game is not over, yet.
Internal assessments from cyber-monitoring groups in Singapore and France, seen by this journalist, indicate a 370% spike in Chinese-origin disinformation campaigns in Indian and Pakistani digital spaces since January 2025. This includes deepfake videos of Indian military atrocities (discredited later), AI-manipulated footage of alleged Pakistani war crimes (widely shared on Indian platforms), and coordinated hashtag flooding across Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
According to the European Union Disinformation Lab, up to 2,800 bots linked to state-sponsored Chinese servers have been traced to TikTok and Telegram campaigns targeting Indian youth with anti-Western, pro-China messaging under the guise of “non-aligned resistance.”
“This is China’s digital battlefield,” said a senior analyst with NATO’s StratCom Centre in Riga. “They are seeing how far they can go without triggering an overt kinetic confrontation. The goal is to control the narrative before anyone fires the final shot.”
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Pakistan: The Geopolitical Fulcrum Once Again
In 1979, Pakistan was the quiet launchpad for the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, which helped bleed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Four decades later, Islamabad again finds itself as a geopolitical pivot, but this time aligned with Beijing, not Washington.
Leaked intelligence from regional sources confirms recent secret visits by senior Chinese PLA (People’s Liberation Army) officers to military installations in Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan. Satellite data shared by private defence contractor Maxar Technologies indicates deployment of at least two Chinese-made JY-27A counter-stealth radar systems in northern Pakistan, a potential warning to India and a testbed for Chinese hardware under real-time conditions.
“Pakistan is once again where the world is recalibrating,” said a retired ISI officer living in North America. “The question is, are we aiding the rise of a new hegemon, or being used as a proxy for its ambitions?”
Beijing has ramped up military transfers to Pakistan by 42% over the past 18 months, according to SIPRI data. This includes J-10CE fighter jets, complementing its JF-17 Thunder fleet, Wing Loong II drones, upgraded air-defence systems, and AI-based battlefield surveillance systems tested near the Line of Control.
India: Courted and Armed
India’s alignment with the West has become increasingly transactional yet strategic. With the US cutting back its military presence in the Middle East and focusing on Indo-Pacific containment of China, New Delhi has emerged as Washington’s most significant defence partner in the region.
The US has approved over $15 billion in military sales to India since 2022, including the sale of MQ-9B drones, F-21 fighter upgrades, and enhanced satellite collaboration under the BECA agreement. An Israeli-Indian venture has also produced laser-based border surveillance systems recently deployed in Ladakh. As per SIPRI’s arms transfers database, India is Israel’s second-largest defence client. Between 2018–2023, bilateral defense deals exceeded $4.5 billion, focusing on missile defense, drones, and cyber-security systems.
Meanwhile, Europe, particularly France and Germany, has quietly supported India’s defence manufacturing push under the “Make in India” scheme to reduce China-dependent supply chains. French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to New Delhi in early 2025 culminated in the signing of joint AI and space warfare development initiatives. France has supplied 36 Rafale jets to India since 2019, integrated with Meteor air-to-air missiles and Scalp cruise missiles, a high-tech 5th-Gen edge in the subcontinent.
But the alignment is not just military. India has become a digital democracy counterweight to China’s surveillance-state model. A leaked EU memo in March 2025 acknowledged India as a “strategic democratic tech partner,” signalling efforts to draw New Delhi deeper into the Western bloc. In the same breath, Europeans are also weary of the fragmented, yet consistent pattern of rising ethnic and religious divide across India and the ability of China to exploit it further.
Resting on borrowed and home-grown 5GW capabilities, India’s weaponisation of water, especially through treaty suspension, represents an evolution in itself, where resource denial, legal ambiguities, and psychological signalling replace conventional confrontation. As King’s College’s 5GW report notes, “Control of water flows in hostile terrain could become a 21st-century equivalent of siege warfare, slow, deniable, and devastating.”
Why the Stakes Are Bigger Than Borders
This confrontation is not just about Kashmir waters, drones, or proxy groups, it’s about the global order. China sees an opportunity to chip away at US-led dominance through calibrated escalation and narrative warfare, using Pakistan as a strategic partner and proving ground. If successful, Beijing could establish a model of influence expansion without direct war, a hallmark of successful 5GW.
For the US, backing India means not just regional containment of China but sustaining a global liberal order where data, narratives, and democratic partnerships remain Western-led. Though a senior diplomat who has served under the Obama administration put it aptly to this correspondent that Trump 2.0 has created some fissures due to economics, but the defining and controlling principles remain the same.
“South Asia is no longer a periphery. It’s the proving ground for the world’s next governing principle: whose system will dominate in the age of AI, disinformation, and asymmetrical strategy,” said a Pentagon policy advisor on background.
The Possibility of a Superpower Shift?
There’s historical irony in Pakistan once again playing a midwife to a potential superpower. If in 1979 it was the cradle of America’s strategic success against the USSR, 2025 could be remembered as the year Islamabad helped China take its rightful seat at the head of the table, or dragged itself into another cycle of instability.
With foreign reserves at historic lows and internal political fractures, Pakistan’s future hinges on how deep this Chinese partnership goes, and whether it leads to strength or servitude. As one former Pakistani diplomat told this reporter: “We’re in danger of becoming a strategic swing state. That gives us leverage. But it also makes us a battlefield in a war most of our people never signed up for.”
This is not just India vs. Pakistan. This is the digital-first Cold War’s newest frontier. Following Trump’s dramatic tweet, the jets might stop roaring over Kashmir, but alliances of like-minded continue sharpening their edges, because the real war is still being fought in algorithms, alliances, and ambitions, and everyone’s watching if China can finally outmanoeuvre the West without a single missile fired.
Note: Recent escalation in a never-ending India-Pakistan conflict has re-emerged not merely as a border or water dispute, but as the symbolic front line of a larger, more insidious global contest where data, myth, deafening social buzzing, and AI-driven digital firepower increasingly govern the world. This investigative series by seasoned and decorated Journalist and Researcher Saeed Minhas peels back the layers of rising hostilities between the two nuclear neighbours, exposing how geopolitical ambitions, religious prophecies, cyber warfare, and economic stakes intersect in what Saeed analyses as the first full-spectrum Digital Cold War between China and its allied rivals (US and the Europeans).
All named sources have been anonymized for security. Information herein is compiled from multi-national intelligence assessments, defence contractor briefings, and regional diplomatic correspondences.
