Geopolitical Risks of Emerging Technologies: A Study on AI, Cyber Warfare, and State Security in Pakistan
Abstract
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber warfare capabilities has emerged as a pivotal geopolitical risk, profoundly reshaping deterrence, escalation pathways, and strategic stability in an era of techno-geopolitical competition. This study focuses on Pakistan, a developing nuclear-armed state navigating intense rivalry with India, instability on its western border, and entrapment in U.S. and China technological contestation. Despite the launch of its National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2025, Pakistan exhibits only modest offensive cyber potential and significant defensive deficiencies, compounded by heavy dependence on Chinese technology transfers through the Digital Silk Road and restricted Western cooperation. In contrast, India’s accelerated militarization of AI encompassing advanced intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), autonomous systems, swarm technologies, and offensive cyber operations has dramatically widened the bilateral asymmetry, as vividly illustrated by the 2025 Indo-Pak crisis featuring over 1.5 million cyberattacks, AI-generated deepfakes, and disruptions to dual-use command-and-control infrastructure. Employing a synthesis of realism, offensive realism, and an adapted strategic stability framework enriched by entanglement theory, the analysis demonstrates how conventional cyber and AI operations now carry direct nuclear implications in South Asia’s compressed decision space. Attacks on shared C4ISR networks risk being misinterpreted as preemptive nuclear strikes, incentivizing dangerous pre-delegation and compressing crisis response timelines. The proposed Techno-Geopolitical Vulnerability Matrix locates Pakistan in a high-vulnerability quadrant defined by acute technological asymmetry and institutional fragmentation. Absent urgent reforms including a unified national AI and cyber authority, doctrinal clarification of digital red lines, indigenous talent development, and bilateral confidence-building measures with India, Pakistan faces progressive erosion of minimum credible deterrence. The findings extend broader lessons for developing nuclear powers: without deliberate institutional resilience and normative restraint mechanisms, emerging technologies shift risk from deliberate aggression to inadvertent escalation driven by misperception and systemic entanglement.
Keywords: Geopolitical Risk, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Warfare, Strategic Stability, Nuclear Entanglement, Pakistan Security
