If you flood foreign television, wires and diplomatic circles with your version first, your claims become the reference point before anybody has satellite imagery or proper BDA in front of them. Pakistani ministers and diplomats were doing interview after interview across US, British, European and Middle Eastern media while Indian embassies were largely asleep at the wheel.
And then you get this loop: Pakistan makes a claim. Intl media reports “Pakistan says…” using Pakistani officials and regional sources. Pakistani media then comes back home waving the foreign headline around as “international confirmation.” Suddenly one original claim has acquired ten different logos and people start calling that “the whole world.”
But missiles leave holes. Narratives don't fill them. There were Pakistani origin journalists and writers covering the conflict for major intl outlets.
You don't even need to believe some giant media conspiracy to understand what happened. Pakistan simply got its narrative into the international media much faster and much more aggressively than India did.
The problem came afterwards.
Satellites don't care who gave the better press conference. When Washington Post analysts went through satellite imagery and aftermath footage, they independently identified Indian strike damage cross multiple Pakistani airbases. BBC Urdu actually spoke to people around Bholari. Pakistani locals explained the huge explosion and black smoke rising from inside the airbase. An emergency responder described the blast shaking the building he was in. Heavy smoke, the smell of explosives and a hangar burning. Wounded personnel were being moved for treatment.
So, what exactly am I supposed to believe here? Pakistani eyewitnesses, satellite photographs and physical damage, or whichever narrative won Twitter during the first 24 hours?
And then the Chinese side of the information campaign started getting exposed too.
French authorities later documented a coordinated campaign around the Rafale story unsupported claims, misleading/recycled imagery, newly created amplification accounts and Chinese/Pakistani networks pushing the narrative.
A US congressional commission later went even further and documented Chinese-linked fake accounts, AI generated material and even VIDEO GAME imagery being circulated while claims about Rafales and Chinese weapons were being amplified.
French intelligence also reported that Chinese defence attachés were taking the same narrative directly to countries that operated or were considering buying Rafales.
So no, Pakistan didn't fool the entire world.
Pakistan and China were very good at winning the EARLY INFORMATION WAR. There's a big difference.
Get your version out first. Repeat it everywhere. Put your officials on foreign television. Push it through social media. Get international newspapers to report your claims. Then bring those same foreign headlines back home and say:
“Look! The whole world agrees with us!”
Very clever information warfare. India was embarrassingly slow at countering it.
But then the satellite imagery arrived. Western investigations started exposing parts of the Chinese information campaign.
That's why I don't care how many foreign headlines you can collect from the first few days of the war. You can push the same narrative through 100 newspapers.
You still can't make a 60 foot hole disappear from Bholari's hangar roof.
Even by August 2026, satellite imagery showed Bholari's damaged hangar still undergoing reconstruction, roughly 15 months after the Indian strike.
