* Kashmir Terrorist Attacks: India & Pakistan Vie to Control Narrative

* von Clausewitz: “On War” & the U.S.-Chinese Trade War 

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

Kashmir Attacks

The Pahalgam attacks have sparked one of the worst crises between India and Pakistan in years.

Beyond the simmering conflict on the ground, a battle to control public perception is also being waged in the mass and social media.

The Pahalgam attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir, in which 26 tourists  [including one Nepali] were shot and killed by Islamist militants, have sparked a new crisis between Indian and Pakistan (DW/Deutsche Welle, Murali Krishnan, May 2).

In addition to cross border firings and mutual accusations, the incident has led to a spike in press censorship, as authorities in both countries look to control the narrative after the deadliest incident involving civilians in the disputed region in decades.

Both countries were deemed to have “very serious” concerns about press freedoms, according to the Reporters Without Borders’(RSF) annual Global Press Freedom Index ahead of the UN-designated World Press Freedom Day on May 3.

India controlling the narrative at home and abroad

In India, the government of Narendra Modi has used a controlled narrative--to shape domestic and international perception of the crisis.

A senior government official told DW on condition of anonymity that Indian authorities were deploying these measures to counter narratives that undermine the government’s position.

 “At this time, there is a need to maintain public unity and safeguard national security. There is no overreach as we see it,” the official said.

India has asked foreign media organizations to adopt terminology that aligns with the Modi government’s narrative.

The Ministry of External Affairs last week wrote to outlets including the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters to protest their use of the term “militant” instead of “terrorist” in their reporting.

The government has blocked 16 Pakistani You Tube channels and restricted access to social media pages of prominent Pakistani news organizations, such as Dawn News, ARY News, Geo News, across India and other regions.

India has also restricted reporting on defense operations, instructing the media to rely solely on official briefings, effectively curbing independent and critical coverage.

Media critic Sevanti Ninan told DW that it is not surprising that the Modi government is trying to control the international media narrative as it has a track record of penalizing Indians who are critical of its actions.

“Trying to shape perception does not work in an era of media saturation. It is not the foreign media’s job to use terminology that suits the Indian government,” said Ninan.

Indian Government using Pahalgam attacks to silence critics

While India says these measures protect national security and unity, critics argue they are just the government’s latest attempts at stifling dissent and freedom of expression.

“Long before that dastardly attack on tourists in Pahalgam, the government was working on ways to stymie freedom of 

“When it happened, the government used it as an opportunity to tighten censorship and clamp down on what it frames as “ant-Indian” dissent,” Pamela Philipose, a media analyst and public editor of Indian outlet The Wire, told DW.

Last week, police in Uttar Pradesh filed cases against folk singer Neha Singh Rathore and a university professor, Madri Kakoti, alias Dr. Medusa – both social media influencers – under charges of “endangering the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India” for posts that were critical of the government’s response to the attacks.

Ananth Nath, president of the Editor’s Guild of India, told DW that in recent years, the government has increasingly blocked online content by invoking constitutional exceptions to free speech.

“Events such as the Pahalgam attack offer the government an opportunity to invoke national security and greater force often as a pretext to silence uncomfortable or dissenting voices,” said Nath.

“In an environment where the mainstream media has grown increasingly deferential in questioning the government, many independent digital platforms have emerged as critical sources of reportage and dissent,” he added.

Pakistan’s “reactive’ approach

The coverage in neighboring Pakistan following the attacks has also been heavily influenced by the country’s authorities, particularly the powerful military establishment, Imtiaz Gul, Executive Director of the Center for Research and Security Studies, told DW,

“Nobody in India dares take a different line, and Pakistan’s media obviously crafts its narrative the way India does, so it’s nothing unusual, very typical attitudes on both sides,” Gul said.

Forget Mao, von Clausewitz is a Better Guide to the Real U.S.-Chinese Trade War

The South China Morning Post’s columnist Alex Lo is inspired by Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s treatise “On War”  and writes: “Trade wars, like real wars, are an implicit bargaining tool before the start of formal negotiations” (May 4).

He also poses the question: Is a trade war a real war, or is it only a metaphor?

Going by Chinese state media, the country is drawing inspiration from Mao Zedong’s series of speeches, collectively published as the famous “On Protracted War”.

In it, the Great Helmsman counsels against both optimism for a quick victory and defeatism.

Rather, there is a need for a realistic assessment of the stages that must be reached before a decisive battle can be risked to achieve ultimate victory.

That, of course, means readying for a long drawn-out and arduous struggle – in his case, against the invading Japanese, and in Xi Jinping’s case, against Donald Trump and his trade warriors.

One can easily see why Chinese state-funded commentators love the Maoist rhetoric.

After all, President Xi Jinping has repeated called on the Communist Party to relearn from Mao, but especially On Protacted War, to find enlightenment and confidence on the way forward.

Beijing clearly wants to portray itself as standing firm and ready to fight to the end against Washington’s “bullying” tariff tactics.

But, argues Alex Lo, instead of actually following Mao, the two sides may already be practicing what the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz teaches in his classic On War.

One way to understand what is actually happening on the trade war front may be to recast the Prussian general’s famous but usually misunderstood statement as “war is negotiations by other means”.

Alex Lo prefers to call that “implicit bargaining” before the two sides can begin formal negotiations, leading to a ceasefire and ultimately a peace settlement.

In the US-China case, that’s a negotiated trade deal between two of the world’s largest economies.

U.S. & China at “Implicit Bargaining”

In fact, through implicit bargaining, Washington and Beijing are already climbing down from their maximalist positions, despite their headline tariff rates against each other of 145 % per cent and 125 % per cent, respectively.

By mid-April, Donald Trump had already waived his new steep tariffs on many types of smartphones, computers and other electronics imported largely from China. Car and aviation parts may be next up for exemption.

To reciprocate, some types of medicine, microchips and aerospace equipment from the United States have escaped retaliatory duties in China.

Reuters has reported that Chinese firms from dozens of commercial and industrial sectors have been asked to identify critical goods that they need to be levy-free, leading to speculation that more US import items may escape the worst tariffs.

The two sides are indeed bargaining back and forth, even if they have not yet formally sat down at the negotiating table.

This is a far cry from Trump’s vaunted Art of the Deal or Mao’s injunctions in Protracted War, but in line with Clausewtz’s On War.

While neither side wants to be the first to pick up the phone and lose face, it’s clear that at some point, they will have to reach an accommodation or settlement when enough pain has been inflicted on each other, writes Alex Lo.

Clausewitz Preaches “Limited’ NOT ‘Total’ War

That’s how most contemporary trade conflicts end, rather than the “beggar thy neighbor ” mercantilist policies that led to the outright trade wars of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and ultimately the shooting war – the First World War.

Just as most trade wars don’t aim to destroy your rival’s economy because you still need to trade with them, so most wars, as Clausewitz teaches, don’t aim for the total defeat or annihilation of the enemy.

This is at variance with the picture many people have of Clausewitz, who advocated “the maximum use of force”, full frontal assault, and absolute and total war – to seek the enemy’s overthrow.

That’s also why he has blamed for the mass slaughter of the First World War, a picture that holds, at least for the earlier version of his work.

That’s what he called the theory, or thesis of pure absolute war.

In the revised version of his masterpiece, for Clausewitz, despite its inhumanity as the ultimate form of organized violence, war is at heart a bargaining process.

The anti-thesis or the practice of actual warfare is that both sides eventually reach a point where they don’t want or can’t continue – or rather, one side or the other reaches the policy/political that has been the war aim, hence his famous dictum, that war is policy, or politics by other means.

That’s the opposite or antithetical movement of de-escalation, leading to the restoration of equilibrium and peace.

As opposed to pure theory, its primary purpose in real life – usually – is not total annihilation of the enemy, but to achieve political goals, as defined by policymakers, not generals.

In fact, von Clausewitz warned against giving generals the final say in the decision-making process, as they have a tendency to escalate towards total or absolute war, such as when the US General Douglas MacArthur advocated nuking the Chinese and North Korean Communists and openly criticized his ultimate boss, then President Harry Truman.

For von Clausewitz, the means and intensity of violence, as limited by your own available resources, are used to convey a message, intent, or desired outcome to your adversary, and to influence and dictate their behavior – and of course, vice versa with your opponent.

However, what message you send, and whether your enemy gets your message, misinterprets or just ignores it, is another profound question of military science or art.

The Pentagon and the White House used to wax philosophical about calibrating the intensity and frequency of their bombing of North Vietnam – surely one of the worst war crimes of the last century with its tolls on the civilian population and the environment [ also in allied South Vietnam and neighboring Laos and Cambodia ] – to “send the Vietnamese Communists a message” “teach them a lesson.”

But in this case, Ho Chi Minh learned from Mao’s protracted warfare rather than von Clausewitz.

Hanoi got the message all right, and that was why it ultimately won.

However, while Trump has been either exaggerating or lying [ or both ] about already negotiating with the Chinese over trade, (unknowingly) he is not entirely wrong in a von Clausewitzian sense.

By adjusting and exercising waivers on a select but expanding pool of goods and products, the two sides are indeed bargaining, even if they have yet to sit down across each other.

Von Clausewitz today would have no trouble working out the dynamics of the US-Chinese trade war, writes Alex Lo.

In fact, the Prussian general often uses investing or throwing good money after bad as analogies to analyse commiting or withdrawing troops in battle.

Some analysts talk about how much pain China and America could take to see which side would blink first.

That is the language of war.

Clearly they are trying to find each other’s pain threshold.

By quoting Mao, the Chinese are telling the world that they can take a lot more pain than spoiled Americans, though they are clearly not following him exactly.

This is a clever ruse and a good thing, writes Alex Lo.

The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com