Like we mentioned yesterday, today, there is also an emerging consensus among Indian authorities, that the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is behind the Mumbai attacks.

The complexity of the attack, the singling out of foreign-patronized sites and US, British and Jewish victims, by some experts, has also been seen as a hallmark of al Qaeda.

And while the siege is not yet over, the situation is remeiscent of the suicide attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, that led to a massive build-up of troops along their common border.

The main issue thus will be what the Indians decide to claim the facts are, and how the Pakistani government reacts.

It is not yet, clear what the Mumbai attackers wanted to achieve. It may well have been to put the Pakistani government in a position where its collaboration with the United States in Afghanistan is crippled, either politically or through shifts in military posture. If that was their intent, the early moves indicate that this might well become an issue.

In all likelihood as soon the standoff in Mumbai is over, a contingency plan will be selected. Such a plan would take days or even weeks to implement, giving the Indians some time to try and exhaust their diplomatic options. This spells out an interesting dynamic in which the intent of each player involved will not necessarily match up with the results of its actions. Washington’s intent right now is to restrain India, but India will not allow itself to be held back by the United States.

The Pakistanis are hoping that by admitting that they lack control over Pakistan’s intelligence-militant nexus, they can somehow manage to convince the Indians that any conflict will only lead to further attacks. It is a weak argument, but does represent the best that Pakistan can come up with (and could well be true).

It should be noted that even at the height of his power with the full support and fury of the United States immediately after 9/11, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf could not effect changes of such a magnitude. The weakness of the current civil-military setup and the nature and size of the country’s intelligence community and its complex relationships with Islamist militant actors of various stripes renders any such task extremely difficult.

In Pakistan in fact, prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and chief of army staff, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, currently are at loggerheads.

The general disputes the government line which leans toward cooperating with the Indian investigation of the terrorist attacks. He wants Islamabad to stand up to New Delhi, flatly deny allegations of ISI implication and confront India with a troop buildup on their border. India should realize, he contends, that any military action would meet with armed Pakistani resistance.

One of India’s military options involves ground troops backed by heavy fire support. These forces could attempt to push into Pakistani-controlled Kashmir to engage Pakistani militant groups directly.

Already shadowy organizations, these groups most likely have hunkered down in anticipation of military and intelligence collection efforts by India. Though amorphous and diffuse, they operate largely in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, a long-contested territory made up of extremely rough terrain. (They also have facilities in Punjab province.) Paramilitary forces patrol both sides of the border, an area for which both Islamabad and New Delhi keep war plans.

The Indian military is trained and equipped for this task. It has military and paramilitary units that train in mountain warfare and are acclimatized to the terrain. But the terrain is rugged and favors the defense. In the case of Kashmir, Pakistan’s defensive positions will have been chosen with care and are likely to be deeply entrenched and prepared for the defense. Soldiers and paramilitary forces along the border will be on high alert.

But there are other issues with Pakistan that might give the Mumbai attack weight also from a future geostrategic point of view. For example, al Qaeda and Taliban forces operate on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. While Afghanistan provides fertile ground for an insurgency, Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state with a strong radical Islamist current, presents an even more tantalizing opportunity for jihadists committed to reviving the Caliphate.

Pakistan’s military establishment is the dominant force and guarantor of stability in the country. As long as the military holds together, Pakistan will not devolve into a failed state that can be overrun by jihadists. The Pakistani military still has a fairly solid grip on Pakistan’s core, in the Punjabi heartland, but is losing control of its periphery in the northwestern tribal areas. And that is where things get exceedingly complicated for the United States.

The United States needs Pakistan, despite its complicity in the jihadist insurgency, in order to fight the war in Afghanistan. Geographically, Pakistan provides the shortest and least complex connection to the open ocean, from which all U.S. supplies not flown directly into Afghanistan are delivered. Those supplies include fuel, much of which is refined in Pakistan itself. As of late, however, Pakistan has become an increasingly unreliable supply route for the Americans and NATO. Not only has the Taliban targeted NATO convoys within Pakistani territory (perhaps with the aid of some elements of the Pakistani intelligence apparatus), but the United States is losing patience with the way Islamabad manages its insurgency.

The Pakistanis are dealing with the fact that segments of the military establishment itself are the fuel for the insurgent fire. In order to retain control, the military has adopted a complex strategy that distinguishes between “good Taliban” and “bad Taliban,” using the good guys to box in the bad guys and attempting to keep the insurgents’ focus across the border, in Afghanistan. After all, without an insurgency for the United States to contend with, Pakistan’s utility to the United States as a tactical ally diminishes. And with the United States set on developing a long-term, strategic partnership with India, the Pakistani regime must do whatever it takes to maintain its ties with Washington.

Islamabad’s method of managing the jihadist insurgency obviously does not align with U.S. interests. So rather than contending with the same Pakistani headache, Petraeus and his team are now trying to expand their options and essentially deprive Pakistan of much of its leverage in the jihadist quagmire.

That involves developing alternative supply routes to support the war effort in Afghanistan. The alternatives at this point involve Russia in one way or another. The Caspian Sea cannot easily or quickly accommodate a meaningful expansion of sea transport. Therefore, any logistics traffic will have to be pushed north, into Russia’s sphere of influence, where the supply route will have to connect through Kazakhstan with roads in either Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. In Kyrgyzstan, the United States needs to ensure it can continue to rely on the government for permission to use an air base it already has at Manas. While the technical details are manageable, the “Russian” supply route is still in many ways a logistical nightmare for the United States.

There are more than logistics for the United States to worry about. Russia is on a resurgent path and is taking full advantage of the fact that the United States has been bogged down for years in a jihadist war. Russia needs to ensure its long-term survival. To do that, it must re-establish its influence in the former Soviet sphere, beginning with Georgia (with which Russia recently fought a brief war; it is now building more military bases in the disputed South Ossetia region) and then Ukraine (which is now at the center of a natural gas crisis, designed to reshape the government into a pro-Russian regime). Next, Russia likely will turn its attention to the Baltic states and Poland. Russia wants the United States to stay out of its way, and will use any leverage it has over the war in Afghanistan to clear its path.

So far, it appears that CENTCOM is willing to incur these risks. The Pentagon is working on the alternate logistics plan, with deliberate leaks that are making Pakistan more nervous by the day. Petraeus and his team are on a mission to fix a broken war in Afghanistan, even if that involves bringing Moscow into the loop. Whether this plan bears fruit, however, will depend on how far the White House intends to go with the Russians.

As we have discussed before, Pakistan is home to a wide array of different types of both indigenous and transnational jihadist actors. Because of the way the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate cultivated Islamist militants for use in India and Afghanistan, there are two main categories of groups. On one hand are the Taliban (the larger pool of militants) and on the other are the Kashmiri militants.

The Pakistani-based Taliban are subdivided into two broad categories, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban. It is unlikely that the former group, which is engaged in the insurgency in Afghanistan, will shift their focus to the Indian-Pakistani frontier. In fact, conflict between India and Pakistan will provide an opportunity for the Afghan insurgents to make gains in the Afghan theater.

The Pakistani Taliban (those challenging the writ of the Pakistani state) in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), by contrast, can be expected to participate in an India-Pakistan conflict significantly, even though at present these Pashtun militant forces are battling Pakistani troops. Reports have appeared in the Pakistani press quoting both Pakistani government and Taliban officials that in the event of a war with India, the Taliban groups will set aside their quarrels with Islamabad and instead will focus on dealing with the external challenge.

The term Pakistani Taliban refers to a broad array of groups operating in various parts of the FATA/NWFP region. While there has been an attempt to bring them under a single umbrella called the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan lead by Baitullah Mehsud, these groups operate more or less independently in their respective regions across Pakistan’s Pashtun-majority areas. And the price that the state would have to pay for these groups’ services in a war with India is government recognition of them as players within their respective regions.

Potentially limiting Pakistani-Taliban participation in an Indo-Pakistani war is the threat that U.S. and NATO forces could exploit the diversion of Pakistani forces to Pakistan’s border with India. The United States and its allies can in fact be expected to increase the tempo and geography of their operations in the event of a shift in Pakistani-Taliban forces to the Indian border. Therefore, these Taliban forces will have to divide their attention between eastern and western Pakistan.

This is not a problem for the Kashmiri militants, who are based in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, Punjab province, the non-Pashtun eastern districts of NWFP and Indian-administered Kashmir. Those on the Pakistani side of the border can be deployed in battles against Indian forces, while those within Indian-administered Kashmir can be activated to attempt to launch an insurgency.

Most notoriously, these groups include Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which shot to prominence after the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, and has been much in the news since the Nov. 26 Mumbai attack. Founded by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, it is one of several such groups created by Pakistani intelligence. Jasih-e-Mohammed (JeM), led by Maulana Masood Azhar, is another such group. Both have long had a relationship with the Pakistani state and al Qaeda.

Whereas LeT and JeM and other smaller groups focus on terrorist tactics, the Kashmiri Islamist rebel group posing the greatest military threat to India is Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), led by Syed Salahuddin. HuM has guerrillas on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC). HuM is also the lead group in the Kashmir Islamist alliance, the United Jihad Council (UJC). At a time when LeT and JeM have asserted their autonomy from Islamabad, HuM/UJC remains firmly under Pakistani control.

The Kashmiri militants and both branches of the Pakistani-based Taliban primarily operate in specific geographic areas. This is especially true of the Taliban, which are based in the country’s northwest. But by teaming up with the Pakistani army, they can use military facilities to expand their geographical reach.  
 

State and Nonstate Cooperation Before Mumbai

An early instance of this occurred in 1948, when Pashtun tribesmen from FATA/NWFP fought alongside the army against India. Pakistan seized much of the territory that later became the Federally Administered Northern Areas (FANA) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir during this conflict. The 1965 Indo-Pakistani war resulted from Operation Gibraltar, a covert Pakistani army operation to infiltrate troops and irregulars across the LoC to stir up an uprising against Indian rule in Indian-administered Kashmir.

In the subsequent Indo-Pakistani war in 1971, in which East Pakistan seceded to become Bangladesh, the Pakistani army worked with two groups of irregulars to prevent Bangladesh’s secession. These were al-Shams and al-Badr, paramilitary organizations formed by Pakistan’s best organized Islamist political party, Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). These two groups fought alongside the Pakistani army against Mukti Bahini, the separatist vanguard of the Bengali ethnic community in East Pakistan, which was backed by Indian forces.  
 

Pakistan Historical Overview

Decades later, during the reign of former Pakistani leader Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, the Pakistani army worked to develop plans to use Pashtun irregulars in Kashmir after their preferred Afghan Islamist rebel group Hizb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was firmly in power in Kabul after the pullout of Soviet forces. Hekmatyar’s group was Pakistan’s main proxy among the seven Afghan resistance groups that formed the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistani-backed mujahideen alliance. Hizb-i-Islami received the most support from the ISI, which served as the main conduit for U.S. weapons, Saudi money and Pakistani logistic assistance.

But by the time Hekmatyar eventually become prime minister in the interim Afghan government formed after the 1992 overthrow of the Marxist regime, the Afghan mujahideen alliance had begun to fall apart. The subsequent intra-Islamist Afghan civil war derailed Pakistan’s plans, forcing it to search for a new proxy to consolidate its influence in Afghanistan. The Taliban would become that new proxy, but by that time al Qaeda had also entered the mix, complicating Pakistani plans.

Despite this setback, the Pakistani army kept working on its plans to use irregulars in Indian-administered Kashmir. When he was a two-star general and the Pakistani army’s director-general of military operations, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf played a lead role in refining this plan. The strategy was put into effect during the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan.

This struggle, which occurred between May and July 1999, broke out after thousands of Kashmiri Islamist guerrillas backed by Pakistani troops crossed the LoC in the Kargil area and occupied high-altitude positions. It did not spread beyond Kashmir, and ended after Pakistan withdrew its forces after Indian successes against Pakistani and irregular forces and U.S. pressure.

Until 9/11, the ISI continued to support Kashmiri Islamist militant groups, especially groups like LeT. After the Sept. 11 and the Pakistani crisis with India that began in December 2001, the ISI pursued a policy of indirect support for Kashmiri militants. (The ISI could not bring itself completely to mothball the Islamist militant proxy project.)

The transition to an indirect relationship, however, became a key factor behind the ISI’s loss of control over the Kashmiri Islamist groups, which became increasingly autonomous. By this time, al Qaeda’s relocation from Afghanistan to Pakistan had been completed, giving groups like LeT a new ally after the Pakistani state was forced to freeze operations in Kashmir. This not only signaled the beginning of the break between Islamabad and many of its Islamist proxies, it also saw the internal discord within the Pakistani military-intelligence take root.

Musharraf and his closest generals decided to cut their losses and adjust to a world where they had to part ways with the Taliban regime and scale back the Kashmiris. They acted out of fears of a U.S.-Indian alignment and a U.S. designation of Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism. Many others within the Pakistani military, and especially the ISI, saw this as an unacceptable cost.

The removal of then ISI Director-General Lt. Gen Mahmud Ahmed on Oct. 8, 2001, within hours of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, underscored the tensions within the Pakistani state very early on. One way in which Musharraf tried to deal with these internal tensions was to push the idea that Islamabad would cooperate against al Qaeda, but resume support for the Taliban and the Kashmiri militants once the external pressure was off.

But the Pakistanis underestimated the degree to which al Qaeda’s influence in their country had grown, and that the United States was not about to calm down so soon given the nature of 9/11. Meanwhile, as the U.S. war to topple the Taliban was still in progress, Kashmiri Islamist militants staged two major attacks in India. The first occurred in October against the state legislature in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir; the second struck the Indian parliament in New Delhi in December 2001.

Still reeling under U.S. pressure, Pakistan now also faced the wrath of India. The Musharraf government was forced to ban LeT and JeM. The freezing of Islamist militant operations in Kashmir only further alienated many former state assets that were already being attacked for betraying the Taliban.

More troubling, al Qaeda’s relocation to Pakistan after the destruction of its facilities in Afghanistan facilitated the gravitation of many instruments of Pakistani state policy toward the global jihadist organization. Thus, many from within the ISI found themselves orbiting between Islamabad and al Qaeda.

 

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