Lashkar-e-Taiba beyond Bin Laden: Enduring Challenges for the Region and the International Community

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is the most lethal terrorist group operating in and from South Asia. LeT was founded in 1989 in Afghanistan with help from Pakistan‘s external intelligence agency, the Inter services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). Since 1990 it began operations in India. Until Thanksgiving weekend in November 2008, U.S. policy makers tended to dismiss LeT as India‘s problem—hardly that of the United States. However, on that weekend, LeT made its debut as an international terrorist organization when it launched a multi-site siege of India‘s port city of Mumbai that lasted some four days. The attack, which claimed 166 lives—including several Americans and Israelis—was reported without halt on global media. It was the first time LeT had targeted non-Indian civilians. However, the group had been attacking U.S. troops and its international and Afghan allies in Afghanistan since 2004. Revelations that David Headley Coleman (née Daood Gilani), an American citizen of Pakistani origin, facilitated the attack has galvanized renewed fears about American homegrown terrorism and the ability of LeT to attack the American homeland.2 Headley‘s ties to an al Qaeda leader, Ilyas Kashmiri, have furthered speculation about LeT‘s ties to al Qaeda.3 Rightly or wrongly, some American officials believe it is only a matter of when LeT will strike a devastating attack on U.S. soil, rather than if.4 Scholars of South Asian security and media analysts explain Pakistan‘s reliance upon LeT—and a raft of other groups—as a response to its enduring rivalry with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir specifically and deep neuralgic fears about Indian intentions towards Pakistan more generally. Lacking military, diplomatic or political options to resolve its security competition with India, Pakistan has developed a series of proxies that operate in India and Afghanistan, with presumably plausible deniability. Pakistan‘s activities and use of militants in Afghanistan stems directly from Pakistan‘s fears about India and a desire to prevent it from developing influence and deepening its capabilities of fomenting insurgency along the border I Pakistan (e.g. in Balochistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Khyber Pakhtunkha). This widely-held explanation for Pakistan‘s reliance upon LeT among other Islamist militants results in policy recommendations that stress resolution of the enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan as a necessary if insufficient condition for Pakistan to strategically abandon its Islamist proxies. Inevitably, calls are made for international intervention to encourage both sides to reach some accommodation.6 Moreover, this has led to specific arguments that Afghanistan will be stabilized only when the status of Kashmir is resolved as this alone will 3 permit Pakistan to relax its aggressive efforts to manage efforts there with Islamist proxies, including the Afghan Taliban, the Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar networks, LeT among others.7 I argue in this testimony that this conventional understanding of Pakistan‘s reliance upon militancy, framed within the logic Pakistan‘s external security preoccupations, is dangerously incomplete as it excludes the domestic politics of militant groups and the support they enjoy from the state.