Introduction
When a crisis breaks, states reach instinctively for narrative. Within hours of an attack or an invasion, and even of an accident, speeches are drafted and press conferences convened. Satellite channels are briefed. Social media accounts are activated. The premise behind this reflex is the settled wisdom of a growing literature. International politics is partly a competition of stories. The state that frames events first and most coherently will shape how they are understood. It will also shape who is blamed and what the international community does next. In an information age, politics “may ultimately be about whose story wins”. The premise is largely sound. What it overlooks is the condition that makes it work. A strategic narrative persuades only if its audience finds it credible. Credibility in international crises is not generated by the communication itself. It rests on three prior resources. Audiences must be able to verify the evidence. The attribution must survive scrutiny. And the communicating state must have accumulated trust.
This essay argues that strategic communication without strategic credibility is a different phenomenon from effective communication that happens to be weaker. It can actively damage the interests it was deployed to advance. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first step establishes the conceptual foundations of strategic communication and strategic narrative. It shows that the literature already concedes, at least implicitly, that credibility is an audience-side variable rather than a producer-side achievement. The second step examines the three pillars of strategic credibility in turn. Each can collapse under the pressures of an international crisis. The third step tests the argument against a single sustained case study, the India–Pakistan crisis of April and May 2025. India attributed the Pahalgam attack to Pakistan without placing verifiable evidence before domestic or international audiences. The essay traces how that attribution-without-evidence shaped escalation and media dynamics as well as diplomatic outcomes. The fourth step turns the diagnosis into a four-stage, credibility-based framework for strategic communication in crises. A conclusion then draws out implications for states and for scholars of the “war of narratives.”
Strategic narrative and the credibility problem
Since the mid-2000s, security communities have used “strategic communication” to denote the coordinated use of messages and themes, images and actions, in pursuit of long-term policy objectives. One synthesis describes it as a set of plans and programs, messages and themes. These are “synchronized with the elements of national power to achieve the required results and benefits vital to the state”. Another strand stresses that it is “mainly to do with the harmonizing of themes, ideas, images and actions.” On this view it is a process of orchestrating word and deed rather than dispatching a single message to a passive receiver. The American military doctrine that institutionalized the concept made consistency its keystone. National interests were said to depend on “accuracy, consistency, veracity, timeliness, and transparency in words and deeds”.
The strategic narrative literature supplies the framework this essay applies. Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle distinguish three moments. Formation is how actors construct narratives. Projection is how those narratives are disseminated. Reception is how audiences receive and understand them. The reception stage is analytically independent of the other two. Its own components include the credibility of messages for audiences and the effects of competing narratives. Reception is where credibility lives. Roselle, Miskimmon and O’Loughlin concede as much. They observe that transparency and media literacy “may generate as much cynicism as engagement.” They add that “events that people experience or know happened can counter the most sophisticated strategic narrative”. Szostek puts the point most bluntly. Credibility “is not an objective property of a source or message, but a receiver perception.” Audiences assess projected narratives against yardsticks shaped long before the message arrived.
The crisis communication literature reaches the same conclusion from a different direction. Leadership communication during interstate crises seeks narrative dominance. That means shaping perceptions “about the attribution of blame for the cause of the conflict.” It also seeks a rally effect around the leadership. Yet audiences now “compare sources and attribute credibility” across an abundance of alternatives. States compete for credibility with other governments. They also compete with news media and corporations. NGOs and intergovernmental organizations join them, as do scientific networks. Politics has become “a contest of competitive credibility”. Nye’s formulation is the classic one. Information that appears to be propaganda may be scorned. It may even prove counterproductive if it undermines a country’s reputation for credibility. Nye adds that “the most effective propaganda is not propaganda. It is a two-way dialogue among people”.
A further strand is more radical. Jantunen’s critique of American military strategic communication argues that the concept’s official texts treat persuasion as projection rather than dialogue. The unofficial micronarratives of soldiers and citizens, by contrast, carry “truthfulness and authenticity, which is something Strategic Communication cannot offer”. On this reading, the discipline’s chronic credibility problem is structural rather than a failure of execution. Communication engineered for strategic effect is perceived as engineered, and audiences discount it accordingly. This essay accepts the force of the critique. It holds, however, that credibility can be reconstructed, because its components are identifiable and, up to a point, governable.
The three pillars of strategic credibility
The first pillar is evidence. Jamie Shea’s reflection on NATO’s Balkan experience draws the foundational link. The “consistent evidence-base of a narrative” and the relative credibility of the actor projecting it stand or fall together. Where narratives lack that evidentiary base, Zaffran observes, they amount “to little more than manipulative communication.” The post-2000 media ecology has added fake news and viral conspiracy theories. These derail governmental messages and leave citizens “warier of their representatives”. Two features of the digital age sharpen the problem. Open-source intelligence and digital archives mean that “a state risks having its narrative contradicted by evidence emerging on the internet.” Practitioners are therefore warned not to let a say-do gap develop. Saturation tactics add a second difficulty. Described as the firehose of falsehood, they deliberately “dilute truth” and “erode trust in democratic institutions.” They also “impede collective action by flooding the information environment with uncertainty”. Even truthful official evidence now competes in a space already polluted by doubt.
The second pillar is attribution. Crises demand that blame be assigned fast. Yet the strongest attribution claims are typically made when least is verifiably known. The doctrine of narrative warfare treats this as a feature rather than a defect. Competing causal explanations and attributions of responsibility are themselves weapons. Repetition, through the illusory truth effect, “increases perceived truthfulness” even when the claim is false. Attribution is also where the dynamics of mutual delegitimization operate. Yarchi calls the pattern mutually assured delegitimization. In crises, actors call one another’s adherence to norms into question, and “the mutual depletion of their international reputation” proceeds apace. Once two states have placed each other beyond the pale of credible narration, every later evidentiary claim is heard through that filter.
The third pillar is trust, the accumulated reputation that determines how any new claim is received. Communities cluster around credible cue-givers. Perceived credibility, in turn, reinforces the communities. Trust is slow to build and fast to destroy. The Iraq case is the canonical demonstration. Exaggerated claims about weapons of mass destruction helped mobilize domestic support, “but the subsequent disclosure of the exaggeration dealt a costly blow to American credibility.” Abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo then produced “perceptions of hypocrisy that could not be reversed by broadcasting pictures of Muslims living well in America”. The counterpoint is equally instructive. Strategic communication succeeds only where there is “a defensible policy” and “a respectable identity.” It also needs “a core value.” No stratagem, the source adds, “can pull a poor policy decision out of trouble”. One contributor to the same volume draws the corollary. Credibility is “the single most important word in the lexicon of successful influence activities,” and, unlike some losses, “it can be got back”. The question the 2025 South Asian case poses is whether it can be got back within the compressed time frame of a nuclear crisis.
Read More: Pakistan’s Diplomacy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Pahalgam and the politics of attribution without evidence
On 22 April 2025, gunmen killed twenty-six civilians at the tourist site of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. It was the deadliest attack on civilians there since 2000. The Resistance Front, described in the literature as an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility in a social media post initially. The post cited anger over the settlement of more than 85,000 outsiders in the Muslim-majority region. Within days, India had characterized the attack as “cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan”. It expelled Pakistani defence attachés and declared them persona non grata. It also began punitive measures that one account describes as the shift from reactive to pre-emptive hard power doctrine. The attribution was immediate and maximal. The claim was state responsibility, which goes well beyond Pakistani links on the part of the attackers. What the public record did not contain, in the weeks that followed, was independently verifiable evidence tying the attack to Pakistan’s direction or control. Pakistani media and officials raised “evidence reliability” and “attribution claims.” They also raised “timelines of reporting.” Together these constructed what Salih and Ali call “an epistemic frame of uncertainties” around the Indian claim. Pakistani leadership rhetoric dismissed the allegations as “entirely fabricated.” As Jamshaid and Tarar note, the formulation “signals total confidence and leaves no gray areas.” It also creates “a psychological barrier to any future ‘evidence’ emanating from India”.
The case illustrates the collapse of each pillar in turn. Evidence came first. When India’s Ministry of Defence briefed the press during the military phase, it used what one discourse-analytic study calls a “forensic register.” Radar slides and target images came with geographical overlays. Uniformed presenters delivered them. The arrangement built a visual grammar that “appeals to objectivity” and to “evidential authority.” It also projected “institutional maturity.” The study adds that audiences “are inclined to trust” such images as evidence. A forensic aesthetic, however, is not an evidentiary base. The briefing’s visual authority substituted for verification. The allusions to Pulwama and IC814 were joined by a reference to the 2016 surgical strikes. Together they wove the new operation into “an interconnected chain of justified retaliations and a precedent of strategic actions”. A narrative of precedent did the work that proof of the specific attribution had not. The two media systems also displayed an asymmetry. Salih and Ali’s comparative mapping of the crisis finds Indian media scoring low on evidentiary skepticism. It finds them high on moral polarization and emotional framing. Pakistani media scored high on evidentiary skepticism and high on diplomatic emphasis. The side making the strong attribution claim was the side least engaged in questioning evidence. An information-literate international audience could hardly miss the correlation. In an environment where, as Salih and Ali note, “shorter verification cycles” accelerate narrative circulation, unverifiable official certainty competes badly with demonstrable uncertainty.
Attribution followed. India’s claim rested on a standing narrative infrastructure rather than on case-specific proof. For decades, Pakistan had been projected as “a terrorist state that is sponsoring terrorism” in Kashmir. The information infrastructure behind that projection is described as sophisticated and broadly influential. Standing narratives of this kind lower the evidentiary threshold for domestic audiences. The new event is received as confirmation of what is already known. That is their strategic value and also their strategic liability. The Pahalgam crisis showed “conflicting causal explanations” and “attributions of responsibility” running in parallel, along with rival interpretations, as Salih and Ali document. Evidence never settled the attribution question. Each audience settled it narratively, within its own pre-existing frame. The dynamic also exhibited mutually assured delegitimization. India’s attribution attacked Pakistan’s credibility as a state. Pakistan’s “entirely fabricated” counter-claim attacked India’s credibility as an accuser. Each move depleted both reputations.
Trust, and its interaction with deterrence, came third. India’s post-2019 doctrine had converted major attacks into occasions for military response. This put a different kind of strategic credibility on the line. Deterrent credibility, in Rubina Waseem’s terms, is the demonstration that threats to deny and punish are not empty. The case therefore carried a central paradox. The attribution narrative justified force. The use of force then had to be narrated. Both governments’ briefings aimed, in the literature’s summary, at “projecting military victory while being moral and righteous, and denying legitimacy to the opponent”. Operation Sindoor was launched on 7 May against nine locations that India claimed were facilities of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. India framed it as self-defence and pre-emption. Pakistan called it “a blatant act of war”. Days of direct air combat followed. A ceasefire came on 10 May. At every stage, communicative credibility was subordinated to deterrent credibility. The unproven attribution had to stand. The domestic and reputational costs of having struck without it, or of not striking at all, were higher than the costs of asserting it.
The outcomes are the most instructive part of the case. The expected pattern is that the state with the stronger attribution claim dominates. The analysis of the crisis concludes otherwise. India’s military responses achieved tactical objectives, but “early dominance of the narrative by Pakistan has shaped global perceptions and influenced diplomatic outcomes”. Pakistan’s narrative system was oriented toward diplomacy and contestation rather than emotional mobilization. It relied, as Salih and Ali show, on conditional rather than absolute attribution. It proved more legible to international audiences because it did not demand that they suspend evidentiary judgment. The same study’s functions table registers India as strong on domestic mobilization and international signaling but weak on narrative resistance. Pakistan registered strong on narrative resistance. This cuts against the intuition that resources and reach win information wars. A claim without evidence can be broadcast at scale. It cannot be defended under questioning. International audiences and multilateral forums are questioning audiences. So are neutral media. What remains after the guns fall silent is the retrospective battle over what happened. Rival retrospectives still describe the war as caused either by “Pakistan’s cross-border terrorism” or by India’s “erroneous allegations”. No shared evidentiary settlement was achieved.
Read More: From Recognition to Responsibility: America First 2.0 and India
From diagnosis to design
The argument so far is diagnostic. If credibility is an audience-side judgment resting on the three pillars examined above, it is also, within limits, a process a state can deliberately run. This analysis therefore proposes a four-stage credibility-based strategic communication framework. It derives from the failure modes identified in the case study.
1. Evidence. The first question is what the state can substantiate. Available information must first be collected and authenticated. It must then be corroborated and classified before any public claim is built on it. The Pahalgam record shows the cost of inverting this sequence. A forensic register of radar slides and target images created the appearance of evidential authority before the underlying evidentiary work had been placed in the public domain. The stage institutionalizes Shea’s insight that a narrative’s credibility rises with its evidence-base. Classification matters here, because not everything a government knows can be published. Intelligence sources must sometimes be protected. The stage demands an honest sorting. Some things are known. Others are only believed, and still others are merely alleged. When that sorting is skipped in private, governments are later forced to assert in public what they cannot defend.
2. Attribution. The second question is what the state can responsibly attribute. The core distinction is graduated. Perpetrators and networks, external support and state responsibility are different claims. Each carries a different evidentiary threshold. Conflating them is the most common credibility failure in terrorism crises. Pahalgam demonstrates the collapse of the distinction. The verifiable claim available in the attack’s immediate aftermath concerned a militant network. This was the Resistance Front, an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had claimed the attack itself. The claim India actually made was state responsibility, “cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan”. It was a maximal attribution asserted within days and defended thereafter by narrative precedent rather than by proof. A graduated attribution would have been defensible under international questioning even if later evidence had shifted. It would have named the network as perpetrator. It would have characterized state links explicitly as under assessment. A maximal attribution, once asserted, could be retracted only at prohibitive political cost. That is why it was not.
3. Communication. The third question is how verified and uncertain information should be presented. Findings should be released with their confidence levels. Limitations and supporting material should accompany them. This inverts the practice observed in both capitals during the 2025 crisis, where official certainty was absolute by design. Totalizing rhetoric has a tactical logic, since it “signals total confidence and leaves no gray areas”. Communicatively, though, it defeats itself because it forecloses revision. A claim stated with explicit confidence levels remains alive under questioning. A claim stated as certainty dies with its first unexplained inconsistency. The stage returns strategic communication to the doctrine it departed from, veracity and transparency “in words and deeds”. It also returns it to Nye’s dialogue-based standard. Under that standard, communication that audiences recognize as a persuasion attempt is discounted before it is heard. Presenting limitations is not weakness. In the contest of competitive credibility, the actor who acknowledges uncertainty is the only one an uncertain audience can believe.
4. Accountability. The final question is how errors are corrected and assessments updated. Claims are reviewed and corrections published. Assessments are revised when new evidence emerges. This stage acknowledges an uncomfortable asymmetry of the digital age. Open-source archives make official error effectively permanent. The same visibility makes correction demonstrable. Demonstrated correction is one of the few trust-building events available to a government mid-crisis. The Iraqi precedent shows the alternative. The exaggerations were disclosed later, and the disclosure “dealt a costly blow to American credibility”. The loss was aggravated because the correction was extracted rather than volunteered. Accountability also distinguishes the framework from public-relations repair. A corrections mechanism that runs only when claims are disproven is damage control. A standing review mechanism that updates assessments on new evidence is an epistemic practice. That practice accumulates the third pillar, trust.
The intended outcome of the four stages is strategic credibility. This essay understands it throughout as a developed property, built through consistency and verifiable communication, and never as an automatic guarantee. The caveat carries weight. Szostek’s finding that credibility is a receiver perception, assessed against prior frames shaped by years of linkage and experience, has a consequence. Even a scrupulously evidence-driven communicator inherits the discount attached to its past behavior and to its audience’s priors. The framework raises the ceiling on what a state’s communication can achieve. It cannot exempt a state from the reputation it has already earned. That limitation is the framework’s strongest recommendation. A government that knows its claims will be audited by its own future accountability stage has a structural incentive to align its deeds with its words before the crisis arrives.
Conclusion
The 2025 India–Pakistan crisis distills the argument. Strategic communication operated at full intensity on both sides. Briefings were synchronized and visual registers forensic. Digital amplification and intertextual chains of precedent added to the effort. Yet the component that determines whether such communication persuades beyond the already persuaded was absent from the initiating move. India attributed the Pahalgam attack to Pakistan without placing verifiable evidence before audiences equipped, now more than ever, to demand it. The consequences ran in the direction the literature predicts but practitioners resist. The unverified claim hardened into a psychological barrier. Future evidence from the accuser became suspect by definition. The epistemic frame of uncertainty became the international default. The narrative initiative passed to the state whose account demanded less credence. Credibility, as Shea’s Balkan reflection and Nye’s Iraq warnings both insist, is not manufactured at the moment of projection. It is the standing result of an evidence-base that survives scrutiny and of attributions calibrated to what can actually be shown. A say-do record then gives words their weight.
The four-stage framework gives that finding operational form. For states, it translates the essay’s lesson into process. Evidence comes before attribution, and attribution before communication. Accountability runs throughout. A claim that is slower and smaller but true then outperforms one that is faster and larger but unprovable, in front of the audiences that matter. For alliances and multilateral institutions, the lesson is different. Crisis mediation now requires evidentiary infrastructure. This means independent fact-finding mechanisms whose findings both parties can contest but neither can dismiss. Without them, attribution becomes pure narrative warfare. For scholars, the case confirms that the three-moment framework introduced earlier earns its keep only if reception is studied as an evidentiary judgment rather than a rhetorical one. The war of narratives is real, but it is not won by narratives. It is won by the states whose stories remain standing when audiences ask the only question that finally matters. How do you know?
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or stance of the Institute of Peace and Diplomatic Studies (IPDS).
Muhammad Moez
Muhammad Moez is a final-year Strategic Studies student at NDU Islamabad specializing in South Asian security, soft power, and nuclear affairs, with published work in The Diplomatic Insight and internship experience at Defence Complex Islamabad, as well as membership in the Pakistan Youth Parliament.
