On Tuesday, Indian aircraft carried out strikes on a series of targets in Pakistan’s Punjab Province and the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. Pakistan responded by shelling areas of Indian administered Kashmir. New Delhi has dubbed its campaign “Operation Sindoor.” Pakistan reported that 26 civilians were killed in the attacks. India, meanwhile, said that at least seven people died as a result of the Pakistani bombardment.
With Indian and Pakistani forces now engaged in exchanges of fire, it is worth taking a closer look at the events that led to India’s action this week.
The renewed tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad, which have now resulted in open confrontation, are the result of a brutal terror attack that took place in the Baisaran valley near Pahalgam in India’s Jammu and Kashmir province on April 22.
The details and circumstances of the attack led to widespread anger in India and a determination to strike back against Pakistan, given a long history of Pakistani support for Islamist insurgent groups in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir.
The Pahalgam attack was the worst terror incident in Kashmir since 2019, and the biggest attack targeting civilians in two decades. The details of the incident, in which 26 Indian citizens and one Nepali were slaughtered, have particularly incensed public opinion in India.
Pakistani terrorists gunned down Hindu tourists
The terrorists, according to eyewitness reports, sought to ascertain the religion of the captured travelers before killing them. The travelers were asked to recite the Kalima prayers, (lines from Islamic Hadiths that are taught in South Asian madrassas), and some were even subjected to physical examinations, before the killers decided that their captives were Hindus. They were executed in front of their families; among those murdered were newlyweds.
The Pakistani authorities denied any involvement in the attack. The long history of Pakistani state support for Islamist proxy militias in Kashmir, as well as an early claim of responsibility (since withdrawn) by an organization with known ties to Islamabad-supported militants, led Indian officials to conclude that the denials were without merit. Pakistan’s use of proxy Islamist groups as a tool of state policy against India and more broadly is of long standing.
The role played by such groups in this context differs from the familiar Middle Eastern picture in a significant way. States such as Iran and Turkey make use of Islamist proxies as part of a unified state strategy. In Pakistan, support for Islamist groups in Kashmir and elsewhere is the preserve of particular state agencies. In turn, these agencies may activate the proxy groups as part of their internal struggles within Pakistan.
REGARDING THE Pahalgam attack, responsibility was claimed (and then denied) by a group calling itself the Resistance Front (TRF). This organization, which emerged in 2019, is regarded by the Indian authorities as a proxy of the better known Lashkar a-Taibe (LeT) organization, a Salafi jihadi group that has been waging war against India in Kashmir since 1986. LeT, incidentally, was the organization that trained the terrorists who carried out the Mumbai attacks in 2008, in which 175 people died, including nine of the attackers.
The Resistance Front, which avoids Islamic language and symbolism, appears to have been established to lend a secular and indigenous tint to LeT activities. Both TRF and LeT are designated as terrorist organizations by the Indian state. The nakedly sectarian nature of the Pahalgam attacks would obviously belie TRF’s effort to brand itself as a secular militant group.
But there is substantial evidence tracing the foundation of the organization back to the activities of LeT militants. TRF appears to have been established by cadres of LeT and a related group, Hizbul Mujahideen, under Pakistani guidance, as part of an effort to increase militancy in the wake of India’s abrogation in 2019 of Jammu and Kashmir province’s “special status.”
In addition to the desire to project a more secular image, Pakistan was evidently concerned about avoiding the attention of the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF). This G7-supported agency placed Pakistan on its “gray list” of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, because of evidence of Pakistani support and financing of terror groups.
LeT, a UN-designated terror group, was under its scrutiny, making the emergence of ostensibly new organizations a necessity. FATF removed Pakistan from the list, however, in 2022.
The body of evidence linking LeT to agencies of the Pakistani state is considerable. Specifically, Pakistan’s powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has a long history of sponsorship and direction of LeT activities, as confirmed by testimony of jihadis detained in Guantanamo Bay and later published by Wikileaks, but also in statements by former Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf.
In a 2021 interview, Musharraf said: “In the 1990s, the freedom struggle began in Kashmir. At that time, Lashkar a-Taibe and 11 or 12 other organizations were formed. We supported them and trained them as they were fighting in Kashmir at the cost of their lives.”
To explain why the Pakistani military and ISI might be seeking an escalation in Kashmir at the present time, a number of Indian researchers have pointed to the currently unstable internal situation, the growing unpopularity of the army, and the hard-line stance by General Asim Munir, current commander of the Pakistani army.
The arrest of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, the persecution of his supporters, growing discontent among Pakistan’s Baluch and Pashtun minorities, along with economic paralysis, are fueling instability.
Dr. Chietigi Bajpaee, writing for the London-based Chatham House, noted in an April 25 article that “there is precedent for attacks on India taking place during periods when the Pakistani military feels it is being marginalized.”Munir, in a speech in Islamabad on April 16, described Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein,” saying that Islamabad would “not forget it. We will not leave our Kashmiri brothers in their heroic struggle.”
Put all this together – the known links of TRF to Lashkar a-Taibe, and of the latter to ISI and the Pakistani Army, Pakistan’s internal travails, the growing unpopularity of the army and the latter’s track record in igniting external struggles as a way to build its own internal legitimacy – and it becomes possible, even likely, that the slaughter at Pahalgam was the work of elements within the Pakistani security structures.
INDIA’S MILITARY response has now come. Despite the exchanges of fire, a full deterioration to war between the two nuclear-armed powers remains unlikely. A controlled series of exchanges of fire is more probable.
The international community will now set about trying to mediate de-escalation. Such a response will not, however, address the broader problem: Pakistan’s flouting of internationally accepted norms, in its support, sponsorship, and activation of proxy Islamist military groups as a tool of policy.
The Middle East of recent years is testimony to the parlous results of allowing such practices to continue unchecked. The situations are comparable: in both areas, what is taking place is the harnessing of the energies of political Islam for the advancement of state interests (or, in the Pakistani case, the interest of particular state agencies).
The result, in both contexts, is similarly harmful to all those living in the affected area.
