peagle
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The wrong battlefield
Fahd Husain 08 Aug 2020
WE are fighting on the cheap and expecting to win. Someone somewhere is not thinking right on Kashmir.
If Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is struggling to achieve quantifiable objectives, one of the key reasons is this: a failure (or refusal) to recognise the location of the battle to be fought. In today’s world, this battle for Kashmir has to be fought on seven places. Pakistan is not among them.
The seven battlefields: Washington D.C., New York, London, Moscow, Paris, New Delhi and Srinagar. Here’s why:
The situation on the ground in occupied Kashmir has worsened in the last one year. India may claim normalcy in the region but the reality — as acknowledged by independent voices (the few that are left in India) — is that repression is on the up, as is defiance by the people. Pakistan’s core objective is to ensure the world knows the reality of the situation. But the world, in this context, is really just the members of the United Nations Security Council. These countries, the so-called P5, wield power to make a difference in Kashmir. Among these five — United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia and France — China is already engaged in the Kashmir issue and hardly needs any convincing. The New York battlefield refers to the United Nations headquarters.
Our battle for India-held Kashmir, for now, has to be fought through diplomacy and strategic communication
Preaching to the converted is easy. It is also lazy. No one has to do anything out of the ordinary and no one has to think anew. The state machinery has these events stored in its muscle memory. Banners, placards, walks, armbands, speeches, programmes, seminars and a few glitzy productions (in Urdu), this is standard operating procedure. Routine stuff, routine results.
Focusing on the domestic Pakistani audience means nothing except burnishing nationalistic credentials of leaders for political reasons. This is perhaps why an increasing number of officials are today heard asking what more they can do on Kashmir than what they have done. Well plenty, actually. To start off, they have to recognise the futility of fighting for Kashmir on the wrong battlefield.
The next phase is planning and executing the diplomatic and communications war simultaneously on all seven battlefields. While diplomacy has a well-entrenched system in place, the strategic communications arena requires special attention. With occupied Kashmir being Ground Zero, a brief outline of a strategic communications plan would include the following steps:
1) Facilitate and equip Kashmiris to capture raw video and audio content on devices;
2) Create a way to have this content relayed to Pakistan;
3) Establish a Kashmir strategic communications organisation that can process this content into various formats for all types of formal, informal and social media platforms as well as for official presentations;
4) Translate all content into the languages of the six battlefields;
5) Dissect and tailor content into two categories: for governments and for people;
6) Create a system for distribution of this content on broadcast, print and digital platforms that make it reach the target audience;
7) Construct a system to monitor and measure the reach and impact of the content in terms of viewership and readership including demographic analysis of the audience reached;
8) Create and train the official manpower needed to manage this strategic communications infrastructure;
9) Institutionalise and budget a permanent financial pipeline for Kashmir strategic communications; and
10) Aim to shape opinion through this content in a way that it translates into pressure on official policy.
This is the mere tip of the iceberg. So much is doable. But first, let’s stop fighting on the wrong battlefield.
Twitter: @fahdhusain
Link to the full article.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1573255/the-wrong-battlefield
@Mangus Ortus Novem @Pan-Islamic-Pakistan @PAKISTANFOREVER @Pakistan Space Agency
Fahd Husain 08 Aug 2020
WE are fighting on the cheap and expecting to win. Someone somewhere is not thinking right on Kashmir.
If Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is struggling to achieve quantifiable objectives, one of the key reasons is this: a failure (or refusal) to recognise the location of the battle to be fought. In today’s world, this battle for Kashmir has to be fought on seven places. Pakistan is not among them.
The seven battlefields: Washington D.C., New York, London, Moscow, Paris, New Delhi and Srinagar. Here’s why:
The situation on the ground in occupied Kashmir has worsened in the last one year. India may claim normalcy in the region but the reality — as acknowledged by independent voices (the few that are left in India) — is that repression is on the up, as is defiance by the people. Pakistan’s core objective is to ensure the world knows the reality of the situation. But the world, in this context, is really just the members of the United Nations Security Council. These countries, the so-called P5, wield power to make a difference in Kashmir. Among these five — United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia and France — China is already engaged in the Kashmir issue and hardly needs any convincing. The New York battlefield refers to the United Nations headquarters.
Our battle for India-held Kashmir, for now, has to be fought through diplomacy and strategic communication
Preaching to the converted is easy. It is also lazy. No one has to do anything out of the ordinary and no one has to think anew. The state machinery has these events stored in its muscle memory. Banners, placards, walks, armbands, speeches, programmes, seminars and a few glitzy productions (in Urdu), this is standard operating procedure. Routine stuff, routine results.
Focusing on the domestic Pakistani audience means nothing except burnishing nationalistic credentials of leaders for political reasons. This is perhaps why an increasing number of officials are today heard asking what more they can do on Kashmir than what they have done. Well plenty, actually. To start off, they have to recognise the futility of fighting for Kashmir on the wrong battlefield.
The next phase is planning and executing the diplomatic and communications war simultaneously on all seven battlefields. While diplomacy has a well-entrenched system in place, the strategic communications arena requires special attention. With occupied Kashmir being Ground Zero, a brief outline of a strategic communications plan would include the following steps:
1) Facilitate and equip Kashmiris to capture raw video and audio content on devices;
2) Create a way to have this content relayed to Pakistan;
3) Establish a Kashmir strategic communications organisation that can process this content into various formats for all types of formal, informal and social media platforms as well as for official presentations;
4) Translate all content into the languages of the six battlefields;
5) Dissect and tailor content into two categories: for governments and for people;
6) Create a system for distribution of this content on broadcast, print and digital platforms that make it reach the target audience;
7) Construct a system to monitor and measure the reach and impact of the content in terms of viewership and readership including demographic analysis of the audience reached;
8) Create and train the official manpower needed to manage this strategic communications infrastructure;
9) Institutionalise and budget a permanent financial pipeline for Kashmir strategic communications; and
10) Aim to shape opinion through this content in a way that it translates into pressure on official policy.
This is the mere tip of the iceberg. So much is doable. But first, let’s stop fighting on the wrong battlefield.
Twitter: @fahdhusain
Link to the full article.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1573255/the-wrong-battlefield
@Mangus Ortus Novem @Pan-Islamic-Pakistan @PAKISTANFOREVER @Pakistan Space Agency
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