Dealing with Let and Escaping Pakistan’s Nuclear Coercion

Given Pakistan's strategic commitments and the risk aversion of policy-makers in the United States and India, what options exist for these states to deal with LeT specifically, or more generally, the problem of Pakistan's reliance upon terrorism as a key foreign policy tool? Admittedly, the options are few and not without risk. In this chapter, I lay out three broad sets of options: maintain the status quo; manage the narrow problem of LeT through enhanced counter-terrorism efforts and leadership decapitation; and develop a new complement of compellent policies to undermine Pakistan's heretofore successful nuclear coercion strategy. India cannot compel Pakistan to cease and desist from using terrorism as a tool of policy on its own; rather, the United States will have to assume the heaviest burden in this effort. However, there is important--if limited--space for Indian action even if the United States, per its historical record, declines to pursue this course of action

What is the Let?

This chapter provides an historical account of LeT's ideological roots as well as its organizational and operational development, including its most recent foray into Pakistani politics despite decades of forswearing direct political participation. Even though Pakistan did not create LeT/JuD or its parent organization MDI, it quickly co-opted it and rendered it the most lethal and loyal proxy in Pakistan's arsenal for managing external threats but also for assisting its military and intelligence agencies domestically.

The Domestic Politics of Let

Most scholars of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba/Jamaat ud Dawah (LeT/JuD) tend to view the tanzeem as a proxy militia for the Pakistani army. While the organization certainly performs this role, this narrow understanding undervalues the full scope of activities it performs, alongside the full range of political and social perquisites that the organization affords the Pakistani state, and thus, the importance that the state attaches to it. Presumably, the formation of the Milli Muslim League (MML) will further entrench this alliance between the state and the LeT/JuD. This chapter demonstrates that LeT/JuD performs a critical role in assisting the deep state to secure its domestic objectives as well as its foreign policies in India and Afghanistan.

Who are the Soldiers in the Army of the Pure?

Generally, writers on terrorism, particularly Islamist groups, frequently adduce that terrorists are poor, uneducated, and/or come from criminal backgrounds. Speaking of Islamist militants, writers have long argued that madaris are responsible for producing scores of Muslims ready to kill and die for their faith. Various governmental efforts to counter violent extremism (aka "CVE") tend to focus upon men of military age and often subsume many of the aforenoted assumptions about the deprived backgrounds of persons who join militant groups. Many of these ostensible insights are gleaned from anecdotal accounts of captured or killed militants. Fortunately, for understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, we have a very rich source of data that allows us to glean considerable detail about the persons who fight, and ultimately die, for LeT, namely: the hundreds of biographies of slain LeT militants that are widely available in several LeT publications. This chapter provides quantitative and qualitative insights from 918 posthumous biographies of LeT militants, whom LeT calls shaheed (martyrs), assembled and analyzed by a team I oversaw at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. These data reveal that families are incredibly important in encouraging their sons to join the organization and ultimately to fight and die in its service.

Pakistan’s Creeping Jihad and Expanding Nuclear Umbrella

To complement and enable its advances at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, Pakistan also strategically acquired nuclear weapons. We now know that Pakistan had a crude device around 1983-4, if not earlier. As Pakistan became increasingly confident of its nuclear capabilities, it was more emboldened to use its proxies in India, secure in the belief that India would be unable to punish Pakistan militarily. Consequently, Pakistan's adventurism in India became bolder through the use of state-sponsored proxies, but also through Pakistani security forces masquerading as militants in the 1999 Kargil War. Until the reciprocal nuclear tests by India and then by Pakistan in May 1998, scholars used a term introduced by McGeorge Bundy, "existential deterrence," to describe the deterrence that seemed to exist between India and Pakistan. Given the opacity and uncertainty surrounding the two countries' programs, the mutual deterrence calculation of India and Pakistan did not rest on "relative capabilities and strategic doctrines, but on the shared realization that each side is nuclear-capable, and thus any outbreak of conflict might lead to a nuclear war." This chapter outlines the dual trajectories of Pakistan's development and deployment of Islamist proxies and nuclear weapons.

Introduction

"In Their Own Words" informs contemporary discussions and analysis of this organization by mobilizing the vast corpus of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba's (LeT) own writing. In this work, I analyze a sample of LeT's own publications and present new information about the organization, its recruits, the families that produce them and the external and domestic political imperatives that motivate LeT's operations within and beyond Pakistan. I draw from these materials to advance two key claims about the organization. First, LeT's ability to conduct complex terror attacks in India and Afghanistan--coupled with its loyalty to the Pakistani security establishment--render it incredibly useful as a reliable and obedient proxy. Second, because LeT argues against violence against other Muslims and Pakistan's religious minorities, it is a critical partner of the deep state's efforts to quell violence within Pakistan.

The Genesis of Indo-Pakistan Security Competition1

Understanding the tortured history of Pakistan's revisionist agenda with respect to India is critical to appreciating the utility of LeT and other militants to Pakistan's deep state. For this reason, this chapter provides a brief history of the independence movement, the inherent communal ideologies that Pakistan's proponents mobilized to achieve an independent state, and a precis of the disastrous Partition process that gave rise to India and Pakistan. Three particular issues remain significant in contemporary Pakistan. First, many Pakistanis continue to pass onto their descendants these tales of communally motivated murder, rape, and mayhem that accompanied the countries' births. Second, Pakistanis continue to assert that the way in which the British parsed the districts of the Punjab was inherently unfair and prejudicial to Pakistan's interests. Third, Pakistanis believe that the princely state of Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan and that the way in which the British carved up the Punjab enabled India to mobilize troops against Pakistani invaders, thus thwarting Pakistani efforts to secure the state by force.