Adolf Hitler
“It has to be the Indians, I tell you,” he said. “Look at the details of this attack: the target inside the base was a technology specifically designed to counter the Indian forces.”
This is the view inside most military circles — the argument I heard most often when I visited Islamabad this month, arriving on the same night as the PNS Mehran Base attack. My conversations with military officials centered around terrorism, and these discussions brought to light the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW).
A research paper at the National Defense University focusing on 4GW contends that Pakistan is facing a war on a front most of us can’t even analyse correctly. According to the paper, war theorists all over the world say that warfare has entered into a new phase where “an evolved form of insurgency uses all available networks — political, economic, social and military — to convince the enemy’s decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit.” It characterises 4GW as a scenario where the distinction between war and peace is blurred so that war becomes non-linear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts.
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