by Bruce Riedel
THE IMMEDIATE GOAL: WAR IN SOUTH ASIA
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, which is formally banned in Pakistan but nonetheless operates relatively freely, has denied any role in the attack, and senior officials of the movement claim no knowledge of the attackers. Therefore the motives of LeT in attacking Mumbai must be gleaned from the circumstances surrounding the attack rather than from the masterminds directly. Exactly who in LeT beyond Lakhvi ordered the attack is unknown, but it is clear that whoever did so had powerful political leverage in Pakistan and powerful protectors. What is also clear is that the specific targets of this attack—India’s major financial capital, Westerners visiting Mumbai and its luxury hotels, Israelis, and Jews—are the targets of the global Islamic jihadist movement led, symbolically at least, by Osama bin Laden before his death. Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri have long urged the Islamic community to wage jihad against the so-called Crusader-Zionist-Hindu alliance, which, in their narrative, seeks to oppress the Muslim world.
The timing of the attack also was significant. In the fall of 2008 India and Pakistan were slowly and haltingly moving toward improving their long-tense bilateral relationship. As noted, since the partition of the subcontinent, the two have fought four wars and several smaller skirmishes. A peace process was begun in 1999—after the two had tested nuclear weapons a year earlier—by India’s prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif. Vajpayee came to Lahore in February 1999 to begin talks on the peace process, and he and Sharif agreed to look for ways to defuse tensions. They set up a back channel for quiet negotiations on the most difficult issues dividing the two, especially Kashmir. As Sharif has described it, the goal was to end the arms race between the two and resolve their underlying differences.15
The process began in Lahore and moved forward bit by bit, with some major setbacks along the way. The Kargil war in the summer of 1999, initiated by Pakistani army leader and future dictator Pervez Musharraf, halted it altogether for some time. Musharraf had opposed the Lahore process and actually snubbed the Indian prime minister by not showing up for some of the events scheduled for his unprecedented trip. Instead, the next spring he ordered the Pakistani army to take positions inside Indian-controlled territory across the line of control (LOC) in Kashmir, near the town of Kargil—a move that sparked a limited war between India and Pakistan in mid-1999. (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba was an enthusiastic supporter of the Kargil adventure and was highly critical of Sharif when he ordered the army to withdraw behind the LOC.) The peace process was further damaged by the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament on December 13, 2001, which led to the mobilization of more than 1 million soldiers along the border. The threat of war again loomed large. This attack, which is examined in more detail in chapter 6, came after Musharraf had taken power in a coup.
It is deeply ironic that in time Musharraf would become the principal agent of the peace process. After trying limited war, nuclear blackmail, and terrorism, Musharraf finally settled on the back channel, and by 2008 it had achieved significant progress under the new Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh. It even survived other major acts of terror, such as the attack on Mumbai’s subway and train system in 2006. The details of the back channel talks, discussed below, have been well reported,16 and Musharraf himself has confirmed the story.17
The back channel did not reach a final settlement of all the issues dividing the two, but it did produce an understanding that any deal would include two key points. First, the LOC would become an international border, with only minor adjustments mutually agreed to; second, the border would be a soft one—that is, it would permit maximum movement of Kashmiris between the two states. Local issues like tourism and the environment would be handled by the local governments of Pakistani Azad Kashmir and Indian Jammu and Kashmir. India could claim that it had achieved victory because the LOC was recognized as the official border; Pakistan could argue that because the border was porous, it was no longer relevant.
The back channel stalled when Musharraf’s political position in Pakistan collapsed in late 2007 and early 2008. The Indian government became leery about whether Musharraf could deliver, rightly noting that he had done very little to prepare the Pakistani people and army for a deal. Musharraf’s successor, Benazir Bhutto’s widowed husband, Asif Ali Zardari, began to pick up the pieces of the peace process after he was elected and came to power. Most important, he publicly began to change Pakistan’s posture on terrorism, nuclear strategy, and India in a dramatic way. In a number of press interviews, Zardari said, in effect, that for years the Pakistani army and the ISI had been breeding terrorist groups like LeT—that they had been playing a double game, appearing to fight terror while actually sponsoring it—and that terrorism might destroy Pakistan.18
In the summer of 2008 Zardari declared that India was not Pakistan’s inevitable enemy, and, in a striking reversal of Islamabad’s strategy, he proposed in a video linkup to an Indian think tank that Pakistan should adopt a no-first-use policy regarding nuclear weapons.19 In addition, for the first time in decades, small but important steps were taken to open trade across the line of control in Kashmir and to expand transportation links between India and Pakistan. Many in Pakistan, including in the army and the jihadist camp, were appalled at Zardari’s statements and at the confidence-building steps that were being taken.
Zardari was threatening to fundamentally change South Asia. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that one of the key targets, if not the key target, of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba in Mumbai was the peace process itself, which they succeeded in stopping at least for a time. Singh was forced by the horror of Mumbai to suspend the dialogue. Almost certainly those dark forces in Pakistan who sent the LeT team to Mumbai had intended that outcome, if not even more: war with India.
An important book by a Pakistani expert on al Qaeda has argued that the ultimate objective of the Mumbai operation was in fact to provoke a full-scale war. Syed Saleem Shahzad based his conclusions on exclusive interviews with Kashmiri, who told him that al Qaeda manipulated the planning of the operation to make it bigger than the ISI expected or even the LeT senior leadership wanted.20 Headley’s interrogation and confession make clear that al Qaeda was involved in the planning of the plot, operating independently of the ISI and keeping its profile low. According to Kashmiri, al Qaeda wanted a nuclear war between India and Pakistan in order to disrupt the global counterterrorism efforts against al Qaeda, to complicate NATO’s war in Afghanistan, and to polarize the world between Islam and the “Crusader-Zionist-Hindu conspiracy.” For al Qaeda, a war between India and Pakistan would be a global game changer, disrupting the U.S. campaign to defeat al Qaeda, weakening global unity in the battle against terrorism, and creating a whole new environment for al Qaeda to operate in.
There is no doubt that Kashmiri was very important to al Qaeda. After the SEAL raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carefully studied the material found in his hideout. One forty-eight-page document showed that bin Laden had ordered Kashmiri to develop a plan to assassinate President Obama. According to the message, killing Obama “will lead the U.S. into a crisis as Vice President Biden is totally unprepared for the post.” He urged “brother Ilyas” to find a way to attack the president’s jet, Air Force One, the next time that the president came to South Asia.21
It is hard to prove or disprove Shahzad’s claim. Shahzad was murdered shortly after his book came out. According to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the ISI was responsible for Shahzad’s death. Kashmiri himself was killed by a drone a few weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed. While there is no way to check Shahzad’s interview and story, a careful study of LeT itself tends to confirm the outline of his analysis.
HOW LASHKAR-E-TAYYIBA FITS IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, or the Army of the Pure, was created in 1987 by three Islamic scholars, Hafiz Saeed and Zafar Iqbal, who were the
n teaching at the Engineering University in Lahore, and Abdullah Azzam, then at the International Islamic University in Islamabad.22 Saeed, who took the lead role, is rightly considered the founder and leader of LeT; however, he has publicly distanced himself from the organization in recent years after taking on the leadership of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a humanitarian organization that is also a cover for LeT’s activities. Saeed is a Punjabi whose family lost many of its members in the bitter communal fighting in the Punjab that followed the partition of British India in 1947. In the 1980s Saeed traveled to Saudi Arabia to further his Islamic education, where he was heavily influenced by its extreme Wahhabi brand of Islam. He became a charismatic speaker known for his fiery rhetoric.
Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian born in the West Bank, was educated in Islamic law and philosophy in Syria and Jordan and at Egypt’s prestigious Al Azhar University. He is rightly regarded by many experts as the father of the modern Islamic global jihadist ideology. Azzam also taught in Saudi Arabia, where he proposed that jihad should focus first on the “far enemy”—the United States and the Soviet Union, which sought to control the Islamic world—and defeat them before turning to the “near enemy,” Israel. Azzam had tremendous influence on the young Osama bin Laden during his formative years fighting alongside the mujahedin in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Azzam and bin Laden created an office to assist Muslims from around the world who sought to fight in Afghanistan, known as the Services Bureau, which had close connections to Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. Bin Laden, who then had access to his family’s massive wealth, was an early source of funding for Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. Azzam was assassinated in 1989. The ISI believes that the Israeli secret intelligence service Mossad was responsible; others believe that the Russians killed him.23 Al Qaeda, on the other hand, accused the Jordanian intelligence service of killing Azzam; it says a Jordanian intelligence officer told an al Qaeda triple agent of the Jordanians’ responsibility in 2009.
The Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence also played a key role in the creation and development of LeT. In the late 1980s the ISI was eager to take control of the Kashmiri Muslim separatist movement in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan had demanded the annexation of Kashmir since 1947, and the issue is at the core of the tension between Pakistan and India. However, a home-grown Kashmiri movement—the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF)—emerged during the 1980s that sought independence for Kashmir, not unity with Pakistan.24 The army and ISI wanted to encourage anti-Indian resistance and violence but not independence, so alternatives to the home-grown movement were encouraged. LeT was one of several such groups.
LeT’s ideology as laid out by its founder Saeed goes far beyond Kashmir, however; it seeks the creation of a Muslim caliphate over the entire subcontinent. The role model is the old Mughal Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under which a Muslim minority ruled the Hindu majority and dominated most of the subcontinent. The vision of Saeed and his fellow LeT leaders requires the destruction of India as a state. Saeed declared that goal in a speech in 1999 after the Kargil war with India: “Today I announce the breakup of India, Inshallah [God willing]. We will not rest until the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan.”25 One LeT newspaper captured the spirit of LeT’s ideology with this passage: “Kashmir can be liberated in six months. Within a couple of years, the rest of the territories of India could be conquered as well, and we can regain our lost glory. We can bring back the era of Mughal rule. We can once again subjugate the Hindus, like our forefathers.”26
In seeking to revive a lost Islamic empire, LeT’s ideology is by definition violently anti-Western, since the British Raj is blamed for the downfall of the Mughals. LeT therefore opposes any manifestation of British or Western influence in Pakistan and South Asia. For example, it routinely denounces cricket, the country’s national sport, as a colonial implant; Pakistanis should instead wage jihad. Or, as another LeT paper has written: “The British gave the Muslims the bat and snatched the sword and said to them: ‘You take this bat and play cricket.’ We should throw the bat and seize the sword and instead of hitting ‘six’ or ‘four,’ cut the throats of the Hindus and Jews.”27
Since its founding, LeT has trained thousands of volunteers from around the world in its camps in Pakistan, which are scattered from Kashmir to the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan and particularly around Lahore, in the Punjab. According to one Pakistani estimate, more than 200,000 jihadis have been trained in LeT’s camps over the last twenty years.28 In 2009, according to a Pakistani intelligence source quoted in the New York Times, LeT had an active membership of 150,000 in Pakistan.29 Its main headquarters in Muridke, near Lahore, has a campus of several hundred acres with schools and dormitories for thousands of students, a garment factory, an iron foundry, and a huge mosque.30
The organization has wide popularity in Pakistan, especially in the Punjab. Its strong roots in the Punjab set it apart from many other jihadist groups in Pakistan, which have their strength in the tribal areas or Kashmir. LeT recruits from the same areas where the Pakistani army recruits, indeed from the same families. Because of LeT’s Punjab connection, it is far less vulnerable than any other Pakistan-based network to a crackdown by the army and the government. It even attracts major speakers to its events. The self-described father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, the famous nuclear technology proliferator A. Q. Khan, was the keynote speaker at LeT’s annual public conference in 2001 and is reported to be a member of the organization.31
LeT has taken credit for dozens of attacks on Indian targets in Kashmir since the late 1980s. By its own account, it has killed thousands of Indian soldiers. At the same time, it has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Kashmiris, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in the Kashmiri insurgency. It was probably behind the slaughter of a Sikh village in 2000 on the eve of President Clinton’s visit to the subcontinent. It has also taken the conflict into India proper on numerous occasions. LeT was a co-conspirator in the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and was principally responsible for the multiple attacks on the Mumbai metro system in 2006 and the bombing at the famous Gateway Arch in Mumbai in 2003.
LeT’s public name has changed frequently over the years as it has evolved and come under pressure for its acts of terrorism. When it was created in 1987 as an allegedly humanitarian agency, Saeed and Azzam called it the Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad, or the Center for Preaching and Guidance. The leadership officially named the militant wing Lashkar-e-Tayyiba in the early 1990s in a meeting in Afghanistan. After the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament by another Pakistan-based terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammad (in which LeT probably played a supporting role), LeT was officially banned in Pakistan. The group then reappeared under the title Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which claimed to be a purely humanitarian organization that provides aid to those in need in Pakistan, such as the victims of the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005.32
In fact, JuD is an elaborate cover for Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. It has an extensive humanitarian infrastructure that provides both real assistance to the needy and a useful cover for terrorism. After the Mumbai attacks in 2008 and subsequent international pressure, JuD renamed itself again; it currently operates under several cover names. Saeed now leads a group of Pakistani jihadist organizations calling themselves the Defense of Pakistan movement. In April 2012 President Obama offered $10 million for information leading to Saeed’s arrest for his role in Mumbai, making him one of the most wanted men in the world. Despite the reward, he is not in hiding. Indeed, he regularly appears on Pakistani television and at large rallies organized with the help of the ISI, whose protection makes him immune to arrest.
In addition to its infrastructure of terror camps and humanitarian agencies inside Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba also operates an extensive network outside the country, often among Pakistani diaspora communities around the world. LeT cells have been identified in the United Kingdom and other European countries, in the Persian Gulf states, and
in the United States. LeT also operates in Nepal and Bangladesh, where it uses cells in those countries to support its operations inside India. The links to cells outside Pakistan are also important for fundraising, in the Gulf states in particular. Saudi Arabia is an especially attractive place for LeT fundraising, both among Pakistanis living in the kingdom and Saudis who are attracted to LeT’s jihadist ideology and actions.33
LASHKAR-E-TAYYIBA AND AL QAEDA
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba has extensive links to al Qaeda that go beyond sharing a similar list of enemies and a common link through the connection to Azzam. Bin Laden was an early funder of LeT. After the U.S.-led NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) attack on Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks drove al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, LeT provided refuge for many al Qaeda operatives seeking to hide out in Pakistan. LeT camps and safe houses became critical to the survival of al Qaeda.
The first major terrorist figure linked to 9/11—a Palestinian named Zayn Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah—was captured in an LeT safehouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan. According to the account of the CIA officer who captured him, it was clear that LeT was serving as a knowing host for Zubaydah.34 In fact, LeT was providing its network of safe houses and friendly mosques to help hide al Qaeda fugitives all over Pakistan. As al Qaeda recovered from the shock of its defeat in Afghanistan, it also used LeT training camps to train its operatives.35 LeT itself has sent fighters to Afghanistan and Iraq to participate in the jihad against Western armies in both countries. LeT has a long-standing interest in supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and has been especially active in Konar Province. The dispatch of fighters to Iraq was a response to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation, which LeT publicly characterized as a threat to the Islamic community.