As India launches missile strikes on what it says are camps related to militant teams inside Pakistan in retaliation for final month’s bloodbath in Kashmir, consideration has as soon as once more centered on India’s claimed relationship between Islamabad and armed teams concerned in assaults within the disputed Himalayan area of Kashmir, most prominently Lashkar-e-Taiba.
What’s Lashkar-e-Taiba?
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is a long-established Islamic salafist militant group based in 1986 in Pakistan and designated as a terrorist group by many international locations. Its 2008 assault on Mumbai killed 166 individuals, together with plenty of overseas nationals.
Based because the armed wing of the Markaz Dawat-ul Irshad, the centre for proselytisation and preaching, LeT emerged through the interval of the then Pakistani chief Zia-ul-Haq’s coverage of “Islamisation”, which aimed to show Pakistan into a worldwide centre for political Islam.
Ideologically, LeT expounds a imaginative and prescient of a worldwide Islamic caliphate together with the reclamation of “lost” Islamic lands by the dual efforts of preaching and armed wrestle.
The UN safety council says LeT has performed “numerous terrorist operations” in opposition to navy and civilian targets since 1993, together with assaults on Mumbai commuter trains in July 2006 and a December 2001 assault on India’s parliament.
Whereas the group has centered a lot of its militant exercise within the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir, largely due to its proximity to India, LeT has a broader hostility to India.
LeT’s emir, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who was arrested in 2019 and imprisoned in Pakistan for 31 years for financing terrorism, has lengthy insisted the group’s worldwide wrestle goes far past Kashmir and is aimed on the breakup of India, together with a robust aspect of violent antisemitism as proven in its assault on a Jewish centre through the Mumbai assault.
What’s Jaish e-Mohammed?
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) was based by Masood Azhar on his launch from jail in India in 1999. Pakistan banned the group in 2002 after it, together with LeT, was blamed for the 2001 assault on India’s parliament. The group had hyperlinks with al-Qaida, based by Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban, the UN safety council has mentioned.
Are Lashkar-e-Taiba and different teams supported by Pakistan?
The connection between LeT and different Islamist teams and Pakistani establishments, not least the military and Inter-Companies Intelligence company [ISI], is difficult and murky.
Whereas Islamabad has backed armed Islamic teams as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan prior to now, the current hyperlinks are extra opaque.
Traditionally, Pakistan noticed assist for armed teams within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties as a profitable technique, not least over the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In a 2012 essay for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Ashley Tellis, a world safety professional, wrote: “From the very beginning, LeT became a favoured ward of the Pakistani state because its local interests – fighting in Afghanistan and warring against India – dovetailed with the Pakistan army’s own ambitions: controlling Afghanistan in the west while keeping India off balance in the east.
“For over two decades … the ISI maintained strong institutional, albeit subterranean, links with LeT and has supported its operations through generous financing and, as required, combat training.”
Whereas LeT’s emir denied being behind the Mumbai assault, the jailed US-Pakistani citizen and LeT operative David Headley, who performed reconnaissance for the 2008 assault, has mentioned he coordinated with Pakistani intelligence officers over the Mumbai assault.
What’s much less clear is the extent of Pakistani official involvement: whether or not LeT has been given a protracted rope to function with out sharing exact particulars.
Whereas Pakistan strongly denies India’s claims, Pakistan’s tolerance for teams related to LeT, regardless of the jailing of Saeed, undermines its assurances together with LeT’s “rebranding” as a charity, Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), which the Australian authorities amongst others described as indistinguishable from LeT. “Lashkar-e-Taiba has also operated under the alias Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), which was ostensibly created as a charitable organisation by the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed immediately prior to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba being banned by the Pakistani government in 2002,” it wrote.
In 2018, on the tenth anniversary of the Mumbai assaults, Stephen Tankel of the Middle for a New American Safety, mentioned: “Pakistan makes a cosmetic distinction between Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, but the United States and the United Nations consider them to be the same organization and have designated it as a terrorist group.”
What about in the present day?
Specialists are much less clear in regards to the stage of formal Pakistani assist for teams similar to LeT and Jaish e-Mohammed. Some have instructed the current political turmoil in Pakistan might have led some members of the military and ISI right into a extra energetic function with militant teams, as has beforehand occurred throughout occasions of political instability when state safety establishments have felt beneath risk.
Tankel, nonetheless, famous a extra complicated, long-term dynamic. “Close observers of Pakistan have recognised for years now there is another reason: Lashkar-e-Taiba not only abjures launching attacks in Pakistan, but also helps combat groups that do.
“It has not only gathered intelligence about anti-state militants – jihadists, as well as separatists in Balochistan – but also helped to neutralise them at times. Lashkar-e-Taiba has also promoted an ideological and theological counter-narrative condemning militant groups that attack the Pakistani state.”
