Video of Army General Saying India Paid Taliban To Attack Pak Is AI-Manipulated

The video has been altered using artificial intelligence and does not show a real statement by an army offficial.

An AI-manipulated video is being shared to falsely claim that an Indian Army official said that India was paying the Taliban to fight Pakistan.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)

A video, which purportedly shows a person identified as one Indian Army Lieutenant General named Vinod Sharma, is being shared on social media.

What does he say?: In the video, this Lt Gen Sharma can be heard saying that initially, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had thought of waging a war against Pakistan, but when he "failed, we got this idea: Why shouldn't we, instead of getting our own soldiers killed in this war, talk to the Afghan Taliban? Because they are hired killers and get sold for a few rupees."

• He goes on to talk about hiring all of Taliban's forces for "very little money," who were fighting against Pakistan but taking a beating. "But it doesn’t matter to us because our economy is strong," he can be heard saying.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: X/Screenshot)

Another post sharing this claim can be seen here. We also received a query to verify the truth behind this clip on our WhatsApp tipline.

Is it true?: No, the video has been altered using AI.

• The man in the video is Lt Gen Manoj Kumar Katiyar, not Vinod Sharma as claimed. He spoke about Operation Sindoor and the growth of the Indian Army, and did not mention the Taliban at all.

How did we find out the truth?: When we saw the video, we noticed garbled text in several places in the frame.

• This is typical of visuals which may have been created or altered using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

At several spots, text was garbled.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)

• We then ran a reverse image search on the video, which led us to a YouTube video streamed live by The Print on 14 October 2025.

• The video's title identified the person as Lieutenant General Manoj Kumar Katiyar, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Indian Army's Western Command.

• In this video, Lt Gen Katiyar spoke about Operation Sindoor, the Indian media's coverage of it, asking for more queries about the 1965 Indo-China war, veterans, and more during the Mega Ex-Servicemen Rally held at Jammu on 14 October 2025.

• He addressed Pakistan's use of drones during Operation Sindoor, India's air defence capacity, the terror attack in Pahalgam in April 2025, among other topics.

There was no mention of Afghanistan or Taliban during this interaction.

Is it AI?: We ran the video through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detector, which showed a 90.3 percent likelihood of the video containing AI-generated speech.

It flagged the audio in the claim.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)

Hiya's Deepfake Voice Detection tool, too, gave the audio a score of seven out of 100, noting that the sampled voice was likely a deepfake.

The tool said that the voice was likely a deepfake.

(Source: Hiya/Screenshot)

• The claim had first gone viral in October 2025, prompting the Press Information Bureau (PIB) to issue a clarification.

• Sharing the post on X, they called the video a "deepfake," stating that it was a digitally altered video.

Conclusion: An AI-manipulated video is being shared to falsely claim that it shows one Lt Gen Vinod Sharma saying that India paid the Taliban to fight against Pakistan.

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