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S. Paul Kapur
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CON T EN T S
1. Introduction 1
2 . The Logic of a Militant Proxy Strategy 13
3. Partition and an Emerging Strategy 32
4. Pakistan’s Militant Strategy Evolves 51
5. Kashmir and Afghanistan Reprise 81
6. Jihad as Grand Strategy: An Assessment 111
7. The Future: Can Pakistan Abandon Jihad? 127
Notes 143
Index 173
vi
1
CHAP T ER 1
Introduction
I n t r o d u c t i o n ( 3 )
adversaries and shape its strategic environment without the costs and
risks of direct combat, and to help promote internal cohesion to compen-
sate for Pakistan’s weak domestic political foundations.16
THE LITERATURE
I n t r o d u c t i o n ( 5 )
I n t r o d u c t i o n ( 7 )
effects that Pakistani state support has had on the interests and capabili-
ties of militant groups. This book, by contrast, is concerned mainly with
the impact that supporting militancy has had on the strategic interests of
the Pakistani state.
Work in the politico-military and organizational camp that focuses on
the bureaucratic interests and commitments of the Pakistan Army leaves
open the question of their source. From where do these interests and com-
mitments come? In fact, the army’s attachment to militancy is rooted in
a source even deeper than its own bureaucratic proclivities—namely, the
founding logic of the Pakistani state, which provides the ideological basis
for the military’s bureaucratic commitments.
Work in the politico-military and organizational camp stressing the
perverse impact of Pakistan’s strategic assets may overplay structure and
underplay the importance of preferences in driving Pakistani security
behavior. Why do other countries with resource endowments similar to
Pakistan’s not engage in similarly pathological security behaviors? The
difference in behavior results primarily from divergent leadership prefer-
ences, quite apart from structural similarities.
Finally, broad studies of Pakistani political history, which address
a diverse spectrum of issues in addition to the Pakistan–militant con-
nection, often provide overly simplified discussions of Pakistan’s use of
Islamist militancy. As a result, they can be misleading. For example, these
studies generally trace the roots of Pakistan’s militancy problem to the
Islamization of Pakistani society under General Zia. This Islamization
process, however, began earlier, under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto. Bhutto attempted to deflect public anger over the failure of his
economic programs through pious public gestures, such as declaring the
minority Ahmadi sect to be non-Muslim and banning the consumption
of alcohol.26 These were the first steps in the Islamization policy that Zia
later adopted. Moreover, a number of other factors underlay Pakistan’s
use of Islamist militants, such as the lack of a coherent national found-
ing narrative and material weakness relative to India. Finally, Pakistan
did not adopt its militant strategy during the Zia era; the Pakistanis had
been using Islamist militants as strategic tools since achieving indepen-
dence, long before Zia’s emergence.27 Other works in the historical camp
avoid these shortcomings but pay little specific attention to the subject of
militancy.
Despite its many strengths, then, the current literature on Pakistan’s
connection with Islamist militancy falls short in a number of areas.
Although I draw upon it, this book differs from existing scholarship in
important ways.
8
The Argument
Pakistan’s support for Islamist militancy has not been a mere accident or
a short-term military or political tactic. It is a deliberate, long-r unning
policy as old as the Pakistani state. Indeed, supporting jihad has con-
stituted nothing less than a central pillar of Pakistani grand strategy. 28
Grand strategy is a state’s theory of how to produce national security. It
identifies the goals that the state should seek in the world and also speci-
fies the military instruments that it should use to achieve them.29
Pakistan has three main grand strategic tools: nuclear weapons, con-
ventional forces, and militant proxies. Nuclear weapons have played a
defensive role for Pakistan, deterring large-scale Indian attacks against the
Pakistani homeland. During the 1999 Kargil war and a 2001–02 milita-
rized standoff, for example, nuclear danger led the Indians to rule out any
offensive that could have threatened Pakistan with catastrophic defeat.
Nuclear weapons have thus helped to guarantee Pakistan’s survival even
in the face of confrontation with a militarily stronger India. They have not
by themselves enabled Pakistan offensively to alter the territorial or politi-
cal status quo in South Asia, however. 30
Pakistani conventional forces have served a combination of pur-
poses. In some cases, such as the 1947 and 1965 wars, they have joined
conflicts against India that militants had already launched. In one
instance, the 1971 Bangladesh conflict, they began and fought a war
essentially on their own. In other cases, such as the Kashmir insurgency
and the Afghan conflicts, they have avoided direct involvement, leav-
ing the fighting up to the militants. Although conventional military
forces have occasionally engaged in offensive action against India, since
the Bangladesh war their main purpose has been to provide Pakistan
with a robust defense against any Indian conventional attack. Prior to
Bangladesh, Pakistani leaders believed that their forces were inherently
superior to the Indians and would inevitably defeat them on the battle-
field, much as the subcontinent’s Muslim invaders had done to its Hindu
inhabitants centuries earlier. At the very least, a small, Muslim Pakistan
would be able to fight a larger Hindu India to a draw, as it had in 1947
and 1965. The 1971 war, which saw India vivisect its adversary and cre-
ate Bangladesh out of East Pakistan, disabused the Pakistanis of this
notion. They realized that, in the future, a direct conventional military
confrontation with India could have catastrophic consequences. Since
then, the Pakistanis have avoided such fights and used their conven-
tional forces in a primarily defensive role. 31
Militant forces, by contrast, have served as Pakistan’s primary offen-
sive tool. They have started conflicts in which conventional forces have
9
I n t r o d u c t i o n ( 9 )
I n t r o d u c t i o n ( 11 )
CHAP T ER 2
This can help to explain more clearly the Pakistani case, as well as illumi-
nate the incentives that other states in a similar position may face in the
future. As I explain, a proxy strategy can offer a sponsor attractive cost,
military, and bargaining benefits. It can also give rise to control and devel-
opmental problems, however, which over the long term make it extremely
costly and dangerous.
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 15 )
On the denial side, weak-state use of militant proxies can make strong-
state defense considerably harder. A strong state could defeat an opera-
tion by the weak state’s proxy forces and achieve denial in three basic
ways. First, assuming that the weak state’s proxy forces were outside of
the strong state, the strong state could prevent the proxies from enter-
ing its territory. Second, if the weak state’s proxies were already inside
the strong state, the strong state could find the militants before they
launched their operation. Third, if the weak state’s proxies were already
in the strong state and the strong state was unable to find them before
they launched their operation, it could defeat the proxies’ attack once it
was already underway.
Unfortunately for strong states, each one of these denial options faces
formidable challenges when pitted against a militant proxy strategy. First,
preventing small groups of incognito militants from crossing interna-
tional boundaries and entering a strong state is an enormous task. The
only way for strong states wholly to stop them from entering their ter-
ritory is through flawless patrolling of extensive borders and coastlines,
and policing of multiple ports of entry. This is a virtually impossible chal-
lenge, even for the most capable of states. Indeed, large, powerful coun-
tries, which are likely to have relatively long borders and coastlines and
numerous ports of entry, may find this problem to be especially difficult.16
If militant forces do manage to evade detection at borders or ports and
infiltrate the strong state’s territory, preventing them from launching their
attack will be extremely difficult. Thwarting the militants will require the
strong state to locate and apprehend them before they can strike. The mili-
tants’ ability to operate in small groups that can blend into the local pop-
ulation, however, will make such detection and apprehension difficult,
particularly in the high-density urban centers in which they are likely to
launch their attacks.17 As a result, the strong state may be unable to find
and arrest the militants before they strike, even if it has some foreknowl-
edge of their plans and is actively searching for them. In this case, the
strong state’s last denial option would be to defeat the militants’ operation
by thwarting an attack once it was already underway.
Defeating an attack in progress is also likely to prove to be problem-
atic for the strong state. The strong state will probably have limited, if any,
warning of the attack, while the militants will have surprise and initia-
tive on their side. In addition, the attackers may not seek to escape, killing
themselves or fighting to the death instead. This can enable them to inflict
significant damage on their targets, thus making their operation costly to
the strong state even if they are quickly eliminated.18 The use of militant
proxy forces thus makes all three possible strong-state methods of denial
extremely difficult.
17
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 17 )
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 19 )
proxies. Specifically, the state can claim that reining in its proxies will
be difficult and costly, requiring an especially large compensatory
payment.
This control issue is rooted in what is known as a principal–agent prob-
lem. A principal–agent problem arises where one party employs another
to carry out an assigned task. The hiring party, or principal, employs the
agent because the agent is better able to do the work in question, for rea-
sons such as cost, legitimacy, deniability, or expertise. After having been
hired, however, the agent may prove unwilling or unable to do the princi-
pal’s bidding. This failure may occur because, from the outset, the princi-
pal and agent’s interests were misaligned, or because the agent lacked the
capacity to carry out the assigned task. Alternatively, this failure could
result from the principal’s inability to devise mechanisms to ensure that
the agent is behaving properly while under its employ.26 Regardless of the
failure’s precise source, principal–agent relationships can be extremely
costly for the sponsor. Misbehaving agents can consume the principal’s
resources without delivering promised results, or even drag the principal
into an unwanted war.
Although scholars typically focus on principal–agent problems’ costs
to sponsor states, a sponsor’s lack of control over its proxies can actually
help it to negotiate a favorable settlement to a conflict. Limited control
increases the difficulty of the sponsor’s task of reining in proxy forces.
The sponsor can therefore demand higher payment from its adversary in
return for calling off the proxies than it could if it had firm control over
them.27 Even if the sponsor is able to exercise relatively good control over
its proxies, it can still probably demand a higher settlement price than it
could if it were fighting alone, in which case the task of reining in a third
party would not exist.28 In addition to helping a weak state initiate and
prosecute a conflict with a stronger adversary, then, the use of militant
proxies can help a weak state to end a conflict with a powerful opponent
on relatively favorable terms.
The use of militant proxies thus can hold significant cost, military,
and bargaining benefits for a weak state seeking to challenge a stron-
ger adversary. Such a strategy does not, however, offer a sponsor state
unmitigated advantages; the use of militant proxies can also subject a
sponsor to important costs. These include principal–agent problems,
costly trade-offs between security and development, and antagonism of
stronger adversaries. Next, I discuss each of these costs in turn. All of
them are heightened by the characteristic that is most likely to make
a militant strategy attractive to a state sponsor—t he weakness of the
sponsor state.
20
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 21 )
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 23 )
Indian denial efforts also have had difficulty defeating militant opera-
tions once the operations have already begun. For example, during the
2008 assault on Mumbai, ten Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives fought Indian
police, paramilitary, and military hostage–rescue forces to a standstill
while killing over 160 people and wreaking havoc across the city. The
Indians did not succeed in defeating the militants until three days after
the attacks began.39
India’s inability to defeat the militant campaign has resulted not only
from operational difficulties but also from a political problem—the mili-
tant forces’ appearance of legitimacy. Militant proxies give the struggle
against Indian control of Kashmir the aura of a genuine independence
movement, which it would lack if the Pakistanis simply attempted to take
the territory with their own military forces. This has undermined Indian
defensive efforts, which have often appeared heavy-handed. This heavy-
handedness, in turn, has subjected the Indians to intense international
criticism and further stoked discontent in Kashmir.40
On the punishment side, over the course of four wars and decades of
hostility, India has never attempted to inflict significant harm on non-
combat-related Pakistani targets. Indian forbearance has had numerous
sources. Some of them are rooted in domestic politics. Partition and the
subsequent decades of Indo-Pakistani tension cannot change the fact that
India and Pakistan originally were a single country, which shared com-
mon geography, history, cultural, and colonial experiences. Moreover,
the two states continue to share important cultural ties. For example,
ethnic Punjabi culture, or “Punjabiyat,” spans the Indo-Pakistani divide
and creates links between populations on both sides of the border.41 As a
result, Indians and Pakistanis in this region may have more in common
with each other than they do with domestic populations in other parts
of their own countries. This shared past and present has domestic politi-
cal salience and, even in the face of ongoing antagonisms, may reduce the
willingness of either side to inflict large-scale harm on the other.42
From a more practical perspective, India, though sometimes character-
ized as a Hindu country, is home to approximately 180 million Muslims,
more than any other state except Pakistan and Indonesia.43 Indian leaders
are wary of taking actions that could inflame them. Muslim anger could
increase sympathy for and cooperation with Islamist terrorists plan-
ning to attack targets within India, or even lead to large-scale domestic
unrest.44 A punishment campaign against targets in Pakistan is precisely
the type of policy that could have this effect, and thus carries considerable
domestic political and security risks.
Military calculations also have played a role in India’s failure to
launch punishment campaigns against Pakistan in retaliation for past
24
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 25 )
the anti-Indian jihad? The lack of clear answers to questions such as these
has afforded the Pakistanis a measure of deniability that, in turn, has often
complicated India’s response to the militant campaign. 51
India probably came closest to launching punishment operations
against Pakistan in the wake of the December 2001 militant attack on
the Indian parliament. The Indian government quickly identified Jaish-e-
Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba as the organizations behind the opera-
tion. The Indians subsequently deployed approximately five hundred
thousand troops along the Indo-Pakistani border and threatened to attack
Pakistan unless Islamabad ceased its support for militancy and handed
over to India a list of fugitives implicated in anti-Indian terrorist activity.
Pakistan undertook a reciprocal deployment and soon the two countries
were locked in a standoff that threatened to escalate into large-scale war. 52
Before conflict could erupt, however, Pakistani leaders managed to
defuse the crisis by distancing themselves from the militant groups. They
claimed that although the attackers belonged to organizations operat-
ing within Pakistan, the Pakistani government did not actually support
their activities and would take concrete steps to prevent further attacks
in the future. These arguments convinced American officials attempting
to mediate the crisis that the Pakistan government and military were suf-
ficiently distinct from the militant organizations that they should not be
punished for the militants’ activities. The United States, therefore, encour-
aged India to exercise restraint and refrain from attacking Pakistan,
promising that the Pakistani government would rein in the militants and
prevent events such as the parliament attack from occurring in the future.
This combination of pressure and assurance from the Americans played
an important role in convincing Indian officials to stand down and refrain
from attacking Pakistan. 53 Thus, in the instance where India was perhaps
closest to punishing Pakistan for its involvement with militancy, opacity
regarding the Pakistani government’s actual level of complicity helped
to prevent the Indians from doing so. This uncertainty, in turn, resulted
directly from the nature of Pakistan’s militant proxy strategy. 54
Bargaining: Pakistan has used the challenges inherent in its third-
party relationship with the militants as a means of justifying high payoffs
for bringing them to heel. For example, when Indian leaders press them to
rein in Islamist groups, the Pakistanis state that they cannot control the
militants, who will not stand down until the Kashmir dispute has been
resolved in a just manner. 55 Implicit in this argument is the claim that
Pakistan’s lack of control over its proxies necessitates a high Indian pay-
off to settle the conflict—namely, Indian retreat from Kashmir. Similarly,
Pakistan extracted considerable financial and political support from the
United States in return for its participation in the war on terror following
27
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 27 )
the attacks of September 11, 2001. This high level of payment was in large
part predicated on the difficulty of reining in Pakistan’s erstwhile Taliban
allies, as well as other associated groups. 56
Downsides: Although Pakistan has benefited from the advantages dis-
cussed earlier, its use of militant proxies has also resulted in significant
costs. For example, the militants have adopted far more ambitious goals
than those of the Pakistani government. Lashkar-e-Taiba, for example,
hopes not just to free Kashmir or to claim it for Pakistan, but to conquer
India proper. Significantly, the group’s ambitions do not end on the sub-
continent; LeT views its South Asian struggle as only part of a larger,
global jihad. The group is unconcerned with the impact of such a maxi-
malist agenda on Pakistani interests and is undeterred by the prospect of
opposition from Islamabad. 57
In addition, militant groups have begun to challenge the central gov-
ernment for sovereignty over Pakistani territory. Groups such as the
Tehrik-e-Taliban, for instance, have seized control of large sections of
South Waziristan. There they have repudiated Islamabad’s writ, imposed
an extreme interpretation of sharia law, and supported attacks on govern-
ment and coalition targets in Afghanistan.58
Also, militant organizations have refused to subordinate their inter-
ests to Pakistan’s broader strategic imperatives. For example, following
events such as September 11 and a December 2001 terrorist attack on the
Indian parliament, Pakistan was forced to bow to international pressure
and scale back its support for militancy. The militants viewed this as an act
of betrayal and retaliated violently against Pakistan government targets,
including President Musharraf himself. 59
Pakistan’s militant strategy has also resulted in significant opportunity
costs. Continual support for jihad directly consumes resources and, more
broadly, creates a hostile security environment that forces prioritization
of the military over other sectors, thereby impeding Pakistani internal
development. Pakistan’s education sector offers one of the most urgent
examples of this problem, with only 62 percent of primary school–aged
children and 30 percent of secondary school–aged children actually
enrolled in school.60
Finally, Pakistan’s militant proxy strategy is leading the Indians to
develop new offensive military capabilities. For instance, the Indians
are increasing the speed with which their conventional forces can attack
Pakistan. They hope that this will enable them to retaliate for provoca-
tions before the Pakistanis can ready their defenses or the international
community can convince Indian leaders to stay their hand.61 Pakistan’s
asymmetric warfare strategy, by driving aggressive Indian military inno-
vation, thus threatens to trigger the very disaster that it was designed to
28
POTENTIAL COUNTERARGUMENTS
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 29 )
They require less training and equipment, and using them does not put
the sponsor state’s own soldiers at risk. Enhanced deniability and legiti-
macy, as well as cost savings, then, can give militant proxies advantages
that special operations forces lack. It is not surprising that the Pakistanis
have used militants more extensively than their own special operations
forces.
A second potential objection to my argument is that it rests on an
overly mechanistic framework. Not all states, a skeptic might claim, will
enjoy the benefits, or bear the costs, that I identify in my discussion of
militant proxy logic. I agree that outcomes in these cases are not fixed and
will vary across time and place. My purpose in exploring militant proxy
logic is not to make ironclad predictions. Rather, I seek to lay bare some
of the core strategic advantages and disadvantages associated with a mili-
tant proxy strategy, to explain more clearly behavior and outcomes in the
Pakistani case, and to suggest possibilities regarding the future behavior
of the other states in a strategic position similar to that of Pakistan.
Actual outcomes in particular cases will depend to a significant degree
on factors such as political preferences, risk acceptance, history and cul-
ture, the conventional military environment, and the presence or absence
of nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, all things being equal, a militant proxy
strategy is likely to hold at least some appeal for weak, dissatisfied states
because of the potential benefits that I identified. And this type of strategy
is likely to be dangerous to such states because of the potential costs that
I discuss. To highlight these possibilities is not to predict that they will
necessarily come to pass.
A third potential objection to my argument is that it overstates the
importance of the role that militants have played in Indo-Pakistani con-
flicts. According to this objection, India’s and Pakistan’s conventional mili-
tary forces, in direct confrontation with one another, ultimately decided
the outcome of the wars of 1947, 1965, and 1971, as well as the 1999 con-
flict at Kargil. Thus, in this view, the significance of the contribution to
Pakistani military efforts by militant proxies has generally been limited.
It is true that in 1947 and 1965 the Pakistanis did not use militants
exclusively, and that both wars eventually evolved into conventional
conflicts between the Pakistani and Indian armies. Nonetheless, in both
cases, militant proxy forces were essential to Pakistani war plans. Indeed,
when they decided to launch these wars, Pakistani planners envisioned
either winning entirely with militants, without a significant combat role
for the regular Pakistan army, as in 1947, or prevailing primarily with
militants and using conventional forces largely in a holding and mop-up
capacity, as in 1965.
30
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I explored the question of why states might wish to pur-
sue their security interests through the use of nonstate proxies. I argued
that such a strategy can provide a weak sponsor state such as Pakistan
three main benefits. First, it can offer a sponsor a relatively inexpensive
means of fielding forces and engaging a stronger adversary. Second, it can
31
Lo gi c o f a M ili ta n t P r o x y S t r at e g y ( 31 )
CHAP T ER 3
Partition and an
Emerging Strategy
I n chapter 2, I stepped back from the Pakistani case to explore the gen-
eral logic of a proxy strategy. I argued that a state sponsor could realize
cost, operational, and bargaining benefits by employing militant proxy
forces against an adversary. These benefits can make the use of a militant
proxy strategy highly attractive to a sponsor, particularly if it is relatively
weak and unlikely to prevail in a direct military confrontation. I then
explained that a militant proxy strategy can subject sponsor states to sig-
nificant control problems, developmental opportunity costs, and external
security threats. The likelihood of suffering from these problems is espe-
cially high for weak states, which may lack the ability to protect them-
selves against them. As I showed briefly at the end of chapter 2, Pakistan
has profited from all three types of benefits throughout its history, and
also fallen prey to all three types of dangers.
In this chapter, I return my focus entirely to the Pakistani case and
begin to explore its historical evidence in detail. Pakistan used nonstate
proxies as strategic tools, and benefited from the advantages that I out-
lined in c hapter 2, from its earliest days of nationhood. To ameliorate
severe material and political weaknesses, Pakistani leaders decided to
emphasize the country’s Islamic identity, hoping that religion’s broad
appeal would help to hold the country together. Wresting control of the
Muslim-majority territory of Kashmir from India could contribute to this
effort. Given Pakistan’s acute lack of resources, however, doing so would be
difficult and dangerous. Pakistani leaders therefore devised a strategy of
fomenting unrest within Kashmir and then using local militants to attack
the territory. This, they hoped, would enable them to acquire Kashmir
without the cost and risk of direct military intervention. Although the
33
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 33 )
Pakistanis were not able to seize the territory entirely, they did succeed
in taking roughly one-third of it, fighting the Maharaja of Kashmir and
the Indian forces sent to support him to a standstill. This ensured that the
use of militant proxies became a central pillar of Pakistani security policy,
with the strategy’s importance and sophistication increasing with every
subsequent conflict.
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 35 )
Although Iqbal’s vision received some support from students and intel-
lectuals during the 1930s, it did not become a viable political project until
the Muslim League called in 1940 for the creation of two states out of
the old British India. Jinnah and the league then made the cause a cen-
tral plank of their electoral platform, arguing that Congress was a Hindu
institution that, by its very nature, would fail to protect Muslim interests
in a unified independent India. The manner in which many Hindu leaders
framed their arguments justifying the Indian National Congress Party’s
preeminent role in the independence movement, and in a post-British
India, lent Jinnah and the Muslim League’s position a significant measure
of credence. These leaders insisted that a wholly secular Congress should
be sole heir to the British Raj, as it was the only political organization that
could represent all Indians regardless of their communal differences or
preferences. Historically, India’s physical geography had only rarely coin-
cided with its political architecture. The British had attempted to per-
manently create such a situation, developing centralized political power
rooted in a single, unified sovereignty that extended its reach through-
out the entire country. The Indian National Congress internalized this
approach, adopting the British goal of creating what Ayesha Jalal calls
“a composite nationalism based on an indivisible central authority.”11
The rhetoric of leading Hindu figures emphasized both the exclusiv-
ity of Congress’s claim to govern independent India and its insistence on
the creation of a nonsectarian, all-India national identity. As Mahatma
Gandhi argued, “Congress alone claims to represent the whole of India,
all interests. It is no communal organization; it is a determined enemy of
communalism in any shape or form.” Nehru similarly maintained, “There
are only two forces in the country, the Congress and the [British] govern-
ment… . It is Congress alone that is capable of fighting the government.
The opponents of Congress are bound with each other by a community of
interests.”12
It was not unreasonable for an organization attempting to consolidate
power in a geographically, linguistically, and religiously diverse coun-
try after centuries of colonial domination to adopt such an approach.
Insisting that it was the exclusive heir to the Raj enabled Congress to
neutralize potential separatist movements and to bring India’s quasi-
independent princely states within its control. In addition, its claim to be
the sole legitimate representative institution in an India riven by religion,
ethnicity, and caste necessarily implied a secular orientation for the new
Indian state.13 Despite this internal logic, however, Congress’s approach
also seemed to suggest that groups whose members’ primary identity
was not anchored in the abstraction of a homogenous, secular nation-
state might be marginalized—particularly if they also were members of
37
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 37 )
You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or
any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion
39
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 39 )
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as military alli-
ances such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the
Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). They established close bilateral
security relationships with the United States and China. Pakistani leaders
also spoke directly to the people, encouraging them, cajoling them, and
attempting to define for them the purpose of their new national project.25
These measures played important roles in helping to ensure Pakistan’s
viability in the wake of partition. Despite their significance, however,
Pakistani leaders viewed still another strategy, which was purely mili-
tary in nature, as especially important and promising. It was a strategy
that could address the country’s material and ideological problems while
also speaking to a deep sense of injustice that many Pakistanis had felt at
their treatment by India during the partition process. This was the pos-
sibility of acquiring the territory of Kashmir. Kashmir, which was located
directly between the new Pakistani and Indian states, was significant for a
number of reasons. At the material level, Kashmir could provide Pakistan
with desperately needed strategic depth. Forces positioned there could
potentially threaten key areas of India in the event of conflict. In addition,
the region contained important water resources.26
Even more significantly, however, the acquisition of Kashmir could
strengthen Pakistan’s tenuous political foundations. Pakistani leaders had
decided that, if their new country were to survive, they would have to put
an end to the ambiguity surrounding its fundamental purpose. To do so,
they would need to ensure that Pakistan did not follow a wholly secular
path and become simply a pluralistic homeland for South Asian Muslims.
Rather, the new country would have to become a state based on a concept
meaningful to the majority of ordinary Pakistanis, regardless of their eth-
nic, economic, or geographical interests or backgrounds—it would have to
become a state based on Islam. As George Cunningham, governor general
of the North-West Frontier Province, put it to Pakistani Prime Minister
Liaquat Ali Khan, for the Pakistan project to succeed, Pakistan and Islam
must be “really synonymous.”27 The army, which quickly emerged as
Pakistan’s preeminent institution, in particular sought to use Islam as a
means of promoting national unity. Not coincidentally, the army’s use of
religion also justified its own leading position within Pakistan, since it
offered the country’s only means of defense against “Hindu” India.28
Ensuring that Pakistan became synonymous with Islam would have
important implications for Pakistani state building, helping to make it a
fundamentally revisionist project, opposed to the territorial status quo
in South Asia. Iqbal had held that Islam did not recognize the primacy
of Westphalian, sovereignty-based territorial arrangements such as the
modern nation-state, which it viewed as inferior to supranational religious
41
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 41 )
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 43 )
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 45 )
the first weeks of October 1947.43 Even more effective, however, was the
tribal militias’ external attack on Kashmir, which began on October 22.
Invading forces quickly captured Muzaffarabad and pushed toward the
Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Although the tribesmen plundered exten-
sively, they were not driven exclusively by the quest for booty; religion
also played an important role in motivating them. The militants consis-
tently referred to their attack on Kashmir as “jihad” and stated that they
were liberating the territory from Hindus for their Muslim brethren.44
The Pakistani government sought to promote this view, asking Muslim
clerics to issue fatwas declaring that the tribesmen’s invasion was in fact a
bona fide jihad. Colonel Khan himself adopted the nom de guerre General
Tariq, hearkening back to Tariq bin Ziyad, the Muslim conqueror of Spain
who gave his name to Gibraltar. According to Andrew Whitehead, the
militants’ religious motives played a central role in driving their efforts
and were “even more important [to them] than evicting Hari Singh from
his throne.”45
In the face of this tribal invasion, a frightened Hari Singh appealed
for Indian military assistance in repelling the intruders. Lord Louis
Mountbatten, the British viceroy, and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru agreed to the maharaja’s request for help. They stipulated, how-
ever, that in return for India’s intervention, Kashmir must accede to the
Indian Union. They also insisted that, upon the cessation of hostilities in
the region, the Kashmiri people would ratify the accession through a pleb-
iscite. Hari Singh agreed to these terms, signing an instrument of acces-
sion on October 26, 1947.46
Indian forces were airlifted into Kashmir immediately thereafter and
soon intercepted the intruders, thwarting their advance on Srinagar.
Pakistan supported the militants against the Indians but kept its assis-
tance unofficial until spring 1948, when the army formally took charge
of the war effort.47 The conflict proved to be indecisive. India succeeded
in defending critical areas such as Srinagar and the Valley of Kashmir.
But it was not able to expel intruding forces altogether or to compel
Pakistan to cease its operations within the territory, despite a large-
scale military commitment, threats to invade Pakistan proper, and an
extensive diplomatic campaign, which included energetic lobbying
against Pakistan in international fora such as the United Nations. After
approximately one year, the conflict ground to a stalemate, ending with
a UN-sponsored ceasefire on January 1, 1949. The ceasefire left one-
third of the territory in Pakistani hands and two-t hirds under Indian
control, essentially the same division of territory as had existed at the
beginning of hostilities.48
46
Did Pakistan’s use of militant proxies during the first Kashmir war
enable it to benefit from the strategy’s three advantages that I discussed
in c hapter 2? In this section, I argue that Pakistan probably did realize
all three types of advantages during the war, though to widely varying
degrees.
The first potential benefit of a militant proxy strategy is reduced cost.
The Pakistanis almost certainly realized significant cost benefits by using
rebels and militants, rather than their own conventional military forces,
to launch the first Kashmir war. The initial phase of the Pakistani plan,
which involved supporting an uprising in Poonch against the maha-
raja, did not require the Pakistanis to field forces of any kind. Instead,
the Pakistanis simply supplied the Kashmiris with a modest number of
rudimentary firearms to assist them in carrying out their rebellion. The
Pakistani plan’s second phase did require Pakistan to provide invading
tribesmen with more extensive organizational and logistical support
than they had previously given to the rebels in Poonch. It is impossible to
know exactly how the cost of this support compared to the likely cost of
using Pakistan Army forces to launch an attack on Kashmir. But given the
indirect nature of the assistance, which did not include Pakistani involve-
ment in combat operations, it is clear that even the second phase of the
Pakistani plan was relatively cheap. The low cost of the indirect approach
was extremely important, as it enabled the Pakistanis to husband their
scarce military and financial resources.
It is true that, although Pakistan exclusively used rebels and mili-
tants in the opening phases of the conflict, the Pakistani military did not
remain on the sidelines of the first Kashmir war indefinitely. They became
directly involved in the fighting after Indian forces intervened in Kashmir
and successfully blunted the tribesmen’s advance on Srinagar. During
this phase of the conflict, Pakistan did not benefit from a proxy strat-
egy and paid the full price of direct military confrontation with India.
Nonetheless, the Pakistanis’ initial use of proxies probably made the war
less costly overall than it otherwise would have been, as it avoided direct
Pakistani military involvement in the fighting for at least some period of
time. Had the Pakistanis not used proxies during the opening phase of
hostilities and instead fought directly with the Indians throughout the
conflict, the first Kashmir war would have been even more costly for the
Pakistanis than it actually was.
The second potential benefit of a militant proxy strategy is limitation of
the military options open to adversary states. Did Pakistan’s use of rebels
and militants limit the military responses that India was able to employ in
47
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 47 )
Given the global pressures that they faced, the British would probably
have argued against Indian expansion of the Kashmir war regardless of
who was responsible for starting it. The Indians, for their part, viewed
Pakistan as the aggressor in Kashmir despite the militants’ role in trig-
gering the conflict. Nonetheless, British arguments might well have been
less persuasive, particularly to an international audience, if the Pakistan
Army had unambiguously begun the war by attacking Kashmir and not
appeared simply to be joining a war that was already in progress. If this
had been the case, the British arguments for forbearance would have
seemed far weaker both to the Indians and to outside observers, and the
British would probably have had more difficulty than they did in pres-
suring the Indians to refrain from attacking Pakistan. This counterfac-
tual discussion is, of course, speculative. It does suggest, however, that
a degree of ambiguity regarding the outbreak of the first Kashmir war,
which resulted from the militants’ role in starting the conflict, may have
helped to insulate Pakistan from an Indian punishment campaign dur-
ing the conflict.
The third potential benefit of a militant proxy strategy is the sponsor
state’s ability to leverage principal–agent problems to improve its bargain-
ing position with the adversary. Did a lack of full control over the mili-
tants enable the Pakistanis to reach an especially favorable settlement to
the first Kashmir war? The suspension of hostilities between India and
Pakistan, which took place on January 1, 1949, simply stopped both sides
in place. The resulting ceasefire line was determined by the location of
Indian and Pakistani forces at the time, and the Pakistanis did not benefit
from any negotiations regarding their ability to influence their militant
allies. The Pakistanis did, however, use their lack of control over the mili-
tants to help them remain in Kashmir long after the ceasefire, indefinitely
retaining the territory that the militants had seized during their invasion.
The Pakistanis were able to do so despite the fact that the ceasefire line had
been understood by all parties to be temporary, and despite the promulga-
tion of a United Nations Security Council resolution stating that Pakistan
and the militants must withdraw entirely from Kashmir. 52
The Pakistanis justified their continued presence by maintaining
that they did not formally control the territory that they held after
the ceasefire, or the people who lived in it. They were simply keeping
custody of the territory until a permanent disposition of Kashmir was
reached. Such a disposition could occur only by direct appeal to the
Kashmiri people, through a plebiscite. Thus, the Pakistanis were pro-
tecting Kashmiri interests by remaining in the captured territory, but
they were not in charge of the militants and other Kashmiris located
49
Pa r t i t i o n a n d a n Em e r gi n g S t r at e g y ( 49 )
there and could not force them to withdraw or otherwise cooperate with
India if the Indians would not meet their demands. As Robert Wirsing
argues, this “calculated ambiguity” in Pakistan’s relationship with the
territory and the militants significantly advanced Pakistani interests. It
“strengthened Pakistan’s case for a plebiscite to settle the question of a
permanent boundary between India and Pakistan; and it meant that,
in the meantime, Pakistan would have at its disposal … an ostensibly
independent entity that could act as its political and even military sur-
rogate in Jammu and Kashmir.”53 This state of affairs quickly became
the status quo in the region and has endured to the present day. Thus,
the Pakistanis’ limited control over their proxies did not affect the
favorability of the ceasefire agreement that ended the first Kashmir war,
but it did help them to create an advantageous territorial and political
arrangement in Kashmir after the conflict had ended.
CONCLUSION
CHAP T ER 4
Pakistan’s Militant
Strategy Evolves
P akistan’s militant strategy during the first Kashmir war did not enable
it to capture the region entirely. The strategy was sufficiently success-
ful, however, that it became a significant component of Pakistani security
policy, growing in importance and sophistication with every subsequent
conflict. I turn to several of those subsequent conflicts in this chapter.
Specifically, I examine the evolution of Pakistan’s militant strategy
from the aftermath of the first Kashmir war through the 1965 Kashmir
war, the 1971 Bangladesh war, and the Afghan conflict of the 1980s. In
the 1965 Kashmir war, Pakistan moved from its previous use of informal
local militias to the employment of a well-trained and organized force of
religiously motivated guerrillas. The 1965 war did not succeed in achiev-
ing Pakistan’s broad strategic goal of capturing Kashmir. Operationally,
however, it was not a complete failure, and in fact it achieved a number
of successes. Moreover, the operation’s shortcomings could be attributed,
in large part, to poor planning and political misjudgments, rather than to
a flawed strategic concept. Thus, Pakistani planners remained sanguine
regarding their eventual ability to achieve strategic success through the
use of militant proxies.
During the Bangladesh war, Pakistan primarily used conventional
military forces against India. Nonetheless, the conflict increased the
importance of Pakistan’s militant strategy, for the Pakistanis’ crushing
loss clearly demonstrated the danger of engaging India in a conventional
military confrontation. It also led Pakistan to buttress its state-building
efforts by further promoting the country’s Islamic identity. The resulting
Islamization of Pakistan increased the importance of its security compe-
tition with India, particularly in Kashmir. These military and political
52
The conclusion of the first Kashmir war in no way signaled the end of
Pakistan’s interest in Kashmir. The political and material incentives for
Pakistan to acquire the territory remained as strong as they had been in
the wake of partition. In addition, the Pakistanis’ efforts during the war
had been far from a complete failure. Pakistan had managed to seize one-
third of Kashmir and seemed likely to be able to keep its forces there
indefinitely. The results of the first Kashmir war had thus suggested that,
despite Pakistan’s relative weakness, the acquisition of Kashmir might be
within its reach—provided it employed an appropriate strategy that could
insulate it from the full cost and danger of direct military confrontation
with India.
Colonel Khan, who had masterminded Pakistan’s use of tribal mili-
tias in 1947, publicly championed the continuation of a militant-based
approach, arguing against efforts to seize Kashmir with Pakistani conven-
tional forces. Khan’s case for continuing to pursue a militant strategy in
Kashmir rested on two foundations. First, he believed that India, despite
Prime Minister Nehru’s promise and United Nations Security Council
Resolution 47, would not voluntarily hold a plebiscite to ratify its control
of Kashmir. India would agree to a plebiscite only if international pres-
sure became sufficiently severe that it had no other choice. This would
occur only if a crisis erupted in Kashmir, bringing the problem to the fore-
front of the world agenda. If such a crisis resulted in an Indian attack on
Pakistan, Khan believed, the likelihood of overwhelming international
pressure, including the possibility of direct involvement by outside par-
ties, would be even greater. Second, Khan was convinced that full-scale
53
Jawaharlal Nehru, who had led India since independence, had died in
1964, following several years of declining political authority. This cre-
ated a vacuum of leadership that the Pakistanis might be able to exploit.
Second, India had responded to an early 1965 Pakistani military probe
in a disputed border area known as the Rann of Kutch in a limited man-
ner, choosing not to escalate the conflict and achieving only a return to
the status quo ante. The Indians had preferred a reversion to the status
quo, rather than escalation, largely because they believed that little was at
stake in the desolate border region. Their restraint, however, convinced
Pakistani leaders that India lacked the will for a fight with Pakistan.
Third, Pakistan had grown close to China in recent years. The Pakistanis
believed that India, fearing Chinese intervention, would limit any retalia-
tion against Pakistan for provocations in Kashmir. Fourth, the Pakistanis
feared that an Indian military build-up, launched in the wake of its disas-
trous 1962 war with China, would soon make Pakistani action against
Kashmir impossible. Finally, by the mid-1960s, the Pakistanis had con-
siderable experience with militant proxy warfare. They had used militants
extensively in the first Kashmir war, had the benefit of Colonel Khan’s
years of plans and activities during the 1950s, and had formally studied
guerrilla warfare at US military schools. 5 Thus, the likelihood of a suc-
cessful militant campaign in Kashmir seemed higher than it had been
previously.
Given the apparently propitious political and strategic environment,
Pakistani President Ayub Khan directed the army to develop options
for offensive action against Indian Kashmir. Central to the army’s plan-
ning process was the Kashmir cell’s assumption, subsequently supported
by the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, that an attack would trigger
a Kashmiri revolt against Indian rule. There were sharp differences of
opinion over India’s likely reaction to such a move. A number of military
assessments, for example, had predicted that India would attack Pakistan
if the Pakistanis moved against Kashmir. This was the view that the direc-
tor of military operations conveyed through army general headquarters
to the government. Senior leaders in the foreign ministry, by contrast,
such as Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, were convinced that while
the Indians might launch a military response in Kashmir, they would not
retaliate against Pakistan proper in the event of an attack. This group advo-
cated swift and decisive action, unlike the more cautious military. Both
camps, however, believed that the predicted uprising within the Kashmiri
population would happen if the Pakistanis intervened in Kashmir.6
President Ayub, after some initial indecision, became convinced that
the benefits of offensive action outweighed the risks and decided to move
against Indian Kashmir. The army was instructed to devise an operation
55
In this sense, the 1965 war was more successful for Pakistan than was
the 1948 conflict. During the first Kashmir war, the attacking militants
were intercepted by Indian conventional military forces and were turned
back before they could reach their destination of Srinagar. In 1965, by
contrast, a sizeable militant force reached its destination within Indian
Kashmir before India reacted. Indeed, the Indians were surprised to
discover that such a large group of militants had entered their territory
without their knowledge. As the Indian Ministry of Defence’s history of
the war puts it, “The invasion of Gibraltar Force was one of the best kept
secrets of Pakistan.” Although Indian leaders had expected some militant
activity in Kashmir, “no one had visualized a well-coordinated operation
on such a massive scale. Even on 2 August 1965, when a high-level confer-
ence was being held at Srinagar to review the security arrangements along
the Cease-fi re Line, India had no inkling of the guerrilla invasion knock-
ing at her doors.”17
In addition, the infiltrators experienced some tactical successes once
they were inside Kashmir, destroying a number of military posts, as well
as tying down and inflicting casualties on Indian forces. Thus, in addi-
tion to failing to prevent infiltration, the Indians were unable to prevent
the infiltrators from launching operations once they were in Indian terri-
tory. It is worth noting that neither of these Pakistani successes required
Pakistan to pay the costs of a direct conventional fight against India;
they occurred while the conflict remained at the subconventional level.
Full-scale Indo-Pakistani conventional war erupted only after Pakistan
had launched Operation Grand Slam by attacking Chamb with regular
Pakistan Army forces. This conventional conflict also was less costly to
Pakistan than it would have been without the preceding militant cam-
paign, for the militants succeeded in absorbing the energies of four Indian
divisions in Kashmir during the month of September. This had a sig-
nificant impact on the outcome of the conventional fight. As the Indian
Ministry of Defence’s history of the war acknowledges, “Had these divi-
sions been available to fight the Pakistanis in Punjab, the result of the
Indo-Pak War of 1965 would have been different.18
Of course, despite their two initial denial failures, the Indians did suc-
ceed in defeating the Pakistani operation on Indian territory after the
operation had begun. As a result, Gibraltar did not achieve its broad strate-
gic objective of wresting Kashmir from India. To a large degree, however,
this failure resulted from political misjudgment and negligent planning,
rather than any problem inherent in the use of militants. For example, the
Pakistanis simply assumed that the Kashmiris would rise up against India
when they were given the opportunity to do so. Senior Pakistani military
and political decision makers do not appear seriously to have questioned
59
these beliefs. As a result, the Pakistanis did not bother to take basic pre-
paratory steps, such as making contact with local Kashmiri leaders prior
to launching Gibraltar. The Pakistanis were then surprised when the
Kashmiris not only refused to rebel but also turned the Gibraltar infiltra-
tors over to Indian authorities.19
In addition, the Pakistani officers leading the Gibraltar forces lacked
essential local skills and knowledge. For example, Pakistani officers did
not speak Kashmiri. This significantly impeded their effectiveness, given
that their mission was not simply to prevail on a conventional battlefield,
but rather to foment a rebellion inside Kashmir. 20 Such a mission would
require sophisticated communication skills—skills the Pakistani mili-
tary leadership had failed to ensure that they possessed.21
Finally, much of the Pakistani security establishment, including senior
Pakistan Army officers, was not informed of Operation Gibraltar until
after its launch. As a result, the military establishment did not take full
responsibility for the effort. They tended to view it, rather, as a hybrid
operation, born of an unsavory alliance between the foreign minister,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the leadership of the 12th Division. This impeded
planning for Gibraltar, as well as the provision of support for the opera-
tion once it was underway.22
I do not seek in any way to downplay Operation Gibraltar’s ultimate
failure. My point is simply that, although the project did not realize its
overall aims, it enabled the Pakistanis to tell themselves a hopeful story
about their militant proxy strategy. The strategy had achieved a number of
operational successes. In addition, Gibraltar’s shortcomings had resulted
largely from flawed planning and execution, which in turn stemmed from
political misjudgments; there was little evidence that these problems were
the result of a proxy strategy per se. Indeed, the outcome of Operation
Gibraltar suggested that, with a bit more foresight, the use of militant
proxies might enable Pakistan to achieve strategic success in the future.
This Pakistani hope was soon to be reinforced by a bitter lesson—when
the Pakistanis deviated from their militant strategy, as they did during the
Bangladesh war, the result was unmitigated disaster.
THE BANGLADESH WAR
The Bangladesh war occurred a mere six years after the 1965 conflict.
Although it was primarily a conventional military confrontation, 23 it had
profound implications for Pakistan’s militant strategy. The war’s cata-
strophic outcome exacerbated the material and political weakness that
had originally given rise to Pakistan’s militant policy and demonstrated
60
given the league’s electoral victory, it did not need to share power with the
PPP. When, in early March, the Pakistani government decided to post-
pone the opening session of the National Assembly in Dhaka, large-scale
rioting erupted in East Pakistan.27
Yahya Khan ordered the Pakistan Army to quell the uprising. It did so
in brutal fashion, massacring tens of thousands of East Pakistanis. The
military operation, called Searchlight, particularly targeted teachers,
journalists, medical doctors, other members of the intellectual and pro-
fessional classes, and students. In addition to regular military forces, the
Pakistanis also used nonstate groups such as the al Shams and al Badr
brigades to assist in these efforts.28
The US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, and the US ambas-
sador to India, Kenneth Keating, were so horrified by the violence that
they labeled it “selective genocide” in cables to Secretary of State William
Rodgers. Blood went on to describe the violence as a “reign of terror by
the Pak military” to which “we here in Dacca are mute and horrified wit-
nesses.”29 Soon, refugees seeking to escape the carnage began to flow into
India. By late spring, roughly ten million East Pakistanis had crossed the
border. This created a severe humanitarian challenge as India struggled
to provide appropriate care to the refugees, many of whom were sick,
wounded, and malnourished. The influx also created political difficul-
ties for India, for although most of the refugees were Hindus, whom the
Pakistani Army had deliberately targeted and ejected from East Pakistan,
large numbers of Muslims had fled the violence as well. Their presence
changed the demographic balance of Indian border states such as West
Bengal. It also triggered severe economic dislocations in these areas, lead-
ing to tensions between the refugees and local Indian populations. 30
Unable to absorb the refugee flow, Indian leaders decided to resolve
the situation by force, splitting East Pakistan off from the rest of the coun-
try. In addition to resolving the ongoing humanitarian crisis, severing
Pakistan’s eastern wing would provide India with strategic benefits. First,
it would end India’s two-f ront war problem. If East Pakistan became an
independent state, India would no longer automatically have to contend
with an enemy on both its eastern and western flanks every time it fought
with Pakistan. Second, vivisecting Pakistan would enhance India’s over-
all regional status, firmly establishing it as the premier power in South
Asia. 31
India pursued both subconventional and conventional military strat-
egies against the Pakistanis. At the subconventional level, the Indians
helped to organize and train East Pakistani refugees, creating a guerrilla
force known as the Mukti Bahini. The Mukti Bahini engaged in a range
of activities, such as conducting hit-and-r un attacks on Pakistani forces,
62
Pakistan Army’s chief of staff, General Abdul Hamid Khan, said to a State
Department official in August 1971, Pakistani forces were “far inferior to
India’s numerically and logistically.” Therefore “no senior Pak military
commander would want to take on war with India.”33
Senior Indian military officers had informed their government shortly
after the onset of the crisis that any conventional military attack on East
Pakistan would have to wait until the monsoon rains had ended in the fall
of 1971. In the meantime, they consolidated their forces, many of which
were dispersed on operations in other parts of the country, and finalized
their war plans. The Indians prepared to launch a blitzkrieg against East
Pakistan. The operation would rapidly drive armor, mechanized infantry,
and heliborne forces, backed by close air support, deep into East Pakistani
territory on three fronts, without pausing for set-piece battles along the
way. If successful, this deep penetration would cripple Pakistani command
and control, bringing Pakistani military operations to a halt and enabling
the Indians to achieve a quick victory. The operation would thus resemble
tank warfare in Europe or the Middle East far more than the militant-
centric conflict of recent decades in Kashmir. 34 While the military was
completing these preparatory tasks, Indian political leaders traveled the
world to make their case against Pakistan and garner international sup-
port for the upcoming attack. This included a three-week tour in October
and November 1971 by Prime Minister Gandhi, in which she visited the
United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and the United States. The trip
culminated in an acrimonious meeting in Washington with President
Nixon, during which the two leaders essentially talked past one another.
Nixon sternly warned the prime minister against launching a potentially
disastrous war against Pakistan, while Gandhi decried Pakistani atroci-
ties, emphasized the enormous costs of the refugee crisis, and stated that
East Pakistani independence was inevitable. 35
The Indians’ primary motive for undertaking this round of interna-
tional diplomacy was concern regarding the appearance of the upcom-
ing military campaign. They worried that attacking East Pakistan would
make them seem to be belligerent in the eyes of the international commu-
nity, and they sought to minimize this problem by consulting with world
leaders first. As it happened, however, the Indians had little to fear. On
December 3, 1971, Pakistan launched preemptive strikes against Indian
air bases in Rajasthan, Kashmir, and the Punjab, providing the Indians
with a clear justification for commencing large-scale offensive operations
against East Pakistan. The Pakistani strikes were largely ineffective and
managed only to incapacitate the airfield at Amritsar and destroy a radar
site. India responded quickly, striking air installations in West Pakistan
and attacking the port of Karachi. Indian air operations ultimately
64
EVALUATING THE BANGLADESH WAR
able to ensure that a calamity like Bangladesh would never occur again.
Nuclear weapons, with their vast destructive potential, would enable it to
do exactly that, preventing India from leveraging the full extent of its con-
ventional military advantage and potentially threatening Pakistan with
catastrophic defeat. Pakistan thus launched a full-fledged nuclear weap-
ons program in 1972, in response to the debacle of the Bangladesh war. 54
Significantly, nuclear weapons would not only provide Pakistan with
a robust defense but also enhance its offensive capability. Pakistan could
now vigorously challenge the South Asian status quo, insulated from the
dangers of conventional retaliation by the threat of a Pakistani nuclear
response. This would ensure that, despite the military vulnerability that
the Bangladesh war had laid bare, Pakistan could pursue its most cher-
ished national goals, even more aggressively than before, in relative
safety. 55
A symbiotic relationship thus developed between nuclear weapons
and militancy in Pakistani security policy. After Bangladesh, Pakistan
would exclusively employ militant proxies in its efforts to undermine
the regional status quo. Nuclear weapons insulated Pakistan against the
possibility of all-out Indian retaliation in response to its militant provo-
cations. This insulation, in turn, enabled Pakistan to employ militancy
and challenge the status quo even more aggressively than it otherwise
would have. Pakistan’s militant strategy, for its part, enhanced nuclear
weapons’ relevance, giving them a purpose beyond simply preserving the
status quo, and enabling them to play an important role in underwriting
Pakistan’s offensive efforts. As India found, such offensive efforts, when
backed by nuclear deterrence, were very difficult to combat.
Despite being a primarily conventional conflict, then, the Bangladesh
war played an extremely important role in the evolution of Pakistan’s mili-
tant proxy strategy. Bangladesh was the exception that proved the rule
regarding Pakistan’s use of militancy. By confronting India in a conven-
tional conflict, Pakistan fell prey to the danger that had long haunted it
in its confrontations with India—that India would leverage its conven-
tional military superiority to destroy or dismember Pakistan. Bangladesh
showed that this danger was real and not merely hypothetical. In doing
so, it reinforced the need to adhere to a militant proxy strategy and avoid
direct conventional military confrontations with India. By revealing the
weakness of the two-nation theory and undermining Pakistan’s politi-
cal foundations, Bangladesh also made the Indo-Pakistani dispute over
Kashmir even more important to Pakistan than it had been previously.
This, in turn, made the militant strategy that could enable Pakistan
to achieve success in Kashmir more significant as well. In addition,
Bangladesh spurred Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, which made
70
militant-based offensive action safer. Pakistan could thus pursue its revi-
sionist agenda through the use of militant proxies more energetically than
it could have in a nonnuclear environment. Nuclear weapons and mili-
tancy therefore became deeply intertwined. Together, they would make
up two of the three main legs of Pakistani grand strategy.
The Pakistanis would not repeat the mistake of Bangladesh; Pakistan
never again confronted India in a direct conventional military conflict.
Rather, the Pakistanis would apply the lessons that they learned during
the Bangladesh war in future conflicts. The next opportunity that pre-
sented itself would be the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
THE AFGHAN WAR
popular support network upon which the rebels relied. The Soviets
also employed airborne and special operations forces to disrupt muja-
hideen supply lines and engage the rebels in areas inaccessible to con-
ventional forces. 66
The mujahideen lacked the organization and firepower to combat these
tactics. The Soviets therefore managed to retain the upper hand in the
Afghan conflict through the mid-1980s. Despite their advantage, how-
ever, the Soviets were unable to win. The countryside remained beyond
their reach. There the rebels exploited their local knowledge and identity,
launching raids and ambushes and then blending back into the popula-
tion or disappearing into mountain redoubts. They particularly targeted
Soviet lines of communication, impeding the movement of crucial sup-
plies and forcing maneuver elements to provide security for logistics oper-
ations. In addition, the Afghan people were completely opposed to the
Soviets’ presence and supportive of the resistance. Finally, international
opinion was strongly against the Soviet Union’s position in Afghanistan.
As a result, after years of inconclusive conflict, the Soviets were becoming
war-weary; the morale of their forces, as well as the political will of their
government and home population, was eroding. The mujahideen, for their
part, did not need to defeat the Soviet Union on the battlefield to prevail
in the overall conflict. They needed only to remain in the fight and avoid
being eradicated.67
This basic dynamic continued until, in 1986, the mujahideen acquired
the tool that turned the tide of the war—the shoulder-fi red US Stinger
antiaircraft missile. There had been considerable debate in the United
States and in Pakistan regarding the prudence of supplying the mujahi-
deen with the Stinger, given its potential for use against civilian aircraft.
The devastating effects of Soviet airpower on Afghan resistance forces
ultimately led US and Pakistani officials to make the Stinger available to
them. Even after doing so, however, Pakistani trainers imposed tight con-
trol over the missiles’ distribution and use.68
The Stinger finally gave the resistance a viable defense against Soviet air
capabilities. It quickly proved its utility, destroying nearly three hundred
Soviet aircraft in 1987 alone. This badly undermined the effectiveness of
Soviet air operations. For example, helicopter gunships could no longer
conduct close-range bombardment at will, while bombers were forced to
release their loads at higher altitudes, thereby reducing accuracy. Given
the centrality of airpower to Soviet counterinsurgency efforts, this sig-
nificantly reduced the Soviets’ ability to combat the mujahideen. In addi-
tion, by eroding the aura of invincibility that the Soviets’ air capabilities
had previously given them, these developments damaged Soviet morale
even further. The mujahideen, for their part, grew more confident in their
75
EVALUATING THE AFGHAN WAR
At first blush, Pakistani support for the mujahideen during the Afghan
war appears to have been a new strategy, devised in reaction to the Soviet
Union’s unexpected and highly threatening invasion of Afghanistan. It is
better understood, however, as a reprise of Pakistan’s traditional approach
to dealing with its security challenges. Most broadly, Pakistan’s Afghan
policy was a return to the strategic use of militancy after the catastrophe
of pursuing a conventional military strategy against a stronger oppo-
nent during the Bangladesh war. More specifically, within Afghanistan,
Pakistan’s conduct bore many similarities to its policy in years past, which
had included training and arming Islamist fighters to combat the Afghan
government. Pakistan’s new policy did differ from its past approach in
scale, far exceeding the levels of earlier efforts. Nonetheless, the new pol-
icy was an augmentation of, rather than a qualitative departure from, its
earlier approach. Finally, Pakistan’s strategy during the Afghanistan war
enabled it to return to its oldest strategic theme, the use of militants to
undermine Indian rule in Kashmir. Indeed, thanks to its Afghan expe-
rience, Pakistan would now be able to support the Kashmir jihad with
significantly increased resources. Pakistan’s policy during the war in
Afghanistan thus ensured that the sophistication and efficacy of its mili-
tant proxy strategy would continue to grow.
Operationally, the strategy enjoyed many of the advantages that
I discussed in c hapter 2. First, it was inexpensive. The strategy did not
require the Pakistanis to use their own personnel. Nor did the Pakistanis
have to raise the resistance forces themselves, as the Afghan mujahideen
already existed. Pakistan had only to train and equip an extant force.
In addition, Pakistan did not bear the costs even of these efforts, since
foreign donors like the United States and Saudi Arabia footed the bill
for training and equipment and then paid the Pakistanis a premium in
return for their services. It is of course true that the millions of Afghan
refugees who fled into Pakistan were costly to maintain. The presence
of the refugees did not, however, result from Pakistan’s support for the
mujahideen. It resulted, rather, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
and the ensuing violence that wracked the country. Also, international
organizations covered much of the monetary cost of the refugees. From
a financial perspective, then, Pakistan’s use of militants in Afghanistan
was especially cheap.
Second, Pakistan’s Afghan strategy made denial operations difficult
for the Soviets. The Pakistanis were able to infiltrate mujahideen in and
out of Afghanistan with relative ease. They could not have accomplished
this with their own military, which the Soviets would have detected and
78
CONCLUSION
CHAP T ER 5
Pakistan had launched the 1965 war in the belief that Kashmiris were vio-
lently opposed to Indian rule and would rise up to support invading mili-
tant forces. The Pakistanis were right that Kashmiris were not happy with
India, but they were wrong in their belief that the Kashmiris were ready
to fight to free themselves from it. The Pakistanis had deployed their strat-
egy at the wrong time, when the structural conditions necessary for suc-
cess did not yet exist.
The right time came decades later, during the late 1980s. By this
point, sufficient resentment had built up among the Kashmiri popula-
tion to lead them to violent rebellion. This resentment resulted from
the simultaneous political mobilization of Kashmiris and the decay
of regional governmental institutions. Kashmiris became more aware
of the world around them through improved access to education and
media, but also lost autonomy as India tightened its grip on the terri-
tory. This left them without legitimate avenues for political participation
even as they became more politically interested and aware. Blame for
the situation lay primarily with the Indian government, which had over
the decades steadily encroached on Kashmir’s traditional autonomy
within the federal union through a combination of legislative fiat and
electoral malfeasance.1
The tipping point in this process was the Jammu and Kashmir state
assembly elections of April 1987. In November 1986, Kashmiri National
Conference leader Farooq Abdullah signed an accord with Rajiv Gandhi,
which enabled Farooq to return to the chief ministry of Jammu and
Kashmir. Gandhi’s government had unceremoniously dismissed Farooq
just two years earlier, in 1984. The accord damaged Farooq’s legitimacy,
giving him the appearance of an opportunist. More broadly, it sug-
gested the existence of an unprincipled alliance between the National
Conference and the Congress(I) party in New Delhi. This hurt both par-
ties, though in different ways. The National Conference could no longer
be seen as a truly nationalist organization, protecting Kashmiri interests
against Indian encroachment. The Congress(I), for its part, could no lon-
ger be seen as a buffer against ethnic Kashmiri domination in Jammu and
Kashmir, particularly in the Jammu region of the state.2
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K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 83 )
horizon for Kashmir. As Praveen Swami writes, “for the first time since
1947 … Jammu and Kashmir did have a genuine mass constituency for
the Islamists, hostile both to the National Conference and to New Delhi.
Where earlier phases of the jihad had failed precisely because of the
absence of such a constituency … the conditions now seemed right to
make another attempt.”5
Conditions also were right to resume support for the Kashmiri jihad
for reasons external to Kashmir, such as the conclusion of the Afghan war.
General Zia had viewed participation in the war not simply as a means of
protecting Pakistan from the dangers of the Soviet Union’s presence in
Afghanistan. He also viewed it as an integral part of the Kashmir struggle
and ensured that the Pakistanis used the war effort to amass financial and
military resources that would improve their ability to fight in Kashmir.
Now, after years of supporting the Afghan mujahideen and helping to
drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, the Pakistanis were ready to
put those resources to use. The Afghan war had also given the Pakistanis
valuable experience in the tasks necessary to manage an insurgency, which
could be applied to similar projects elsewhere. This augmented opera-
tional experience and influx of material resources significantly improved
Pakistani asymmetric warfare capabilities.6
The combination of political change within Kashmir and improved
Pakistani capabilities meant that, when the Pakistanis began working
closely with the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in the
mid-1980s to lay the groundwork for revolt, structural conditions were
finally favorable for a successful outcome. The results of Pakistan’s efforts
were therefore far more effective than they had been in 1965.
These efforts were critical to the outbreak of the insurgency. Scholars
often point out that Pakistan did not cause the discontent underlying the
Kashmiri uprising. This, of course, is true. Popular discontent in Kashmir
resulted largely from chronic mismanagement and malfeasance on the
part of the Indian central government, as well as the Kashmiri National
Conference. It was not a Pakistani creation. The Pakistanis actively capi-
talized on Kashmiri discontent, however, and played a crucial role in
transforming spontaneous, decentralized opposition to Indian rule into a
full-fledged insurgency, dedicated to promoting an Islamist sociopolitical
agenda and violently joining Kashmir to Pakistan.
For example, the insurgency’s initial round of violence occurred only
after the Pakistanis coerced the JKLF into launching a series of attacks in
Kashmir. The front had been delaying the start of its campaign to carry out
more extensive preparations. It wanted to train additional personnel and
establish more cells inside of Indian Kashmir. The Pakistanis, however,
sensed that the moment was ripe to launch the insurgency and believed
85
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 85 )
that the JKLF had sufficient resources at its disposal to do so. About ten
thousand fighters reportedly had already been trained and were ready for
use. The Pakistanis wanted to ensure that they did not miss a long-awaited
opportunity and were impatient to realize a return on their investment of
time, money, and military resources. Thus, during 1988, the Inter-Services
Intelligence agency repeatedly pushed the JKLF to launch attacks in
Kashmir, at one point threatening to betray JKLF leaders to the Indian
security services if it did not act soon. Under Pakistani pressure, the JKLF
finally gave in and orchestrated two successful bombings in Srinagar in
July 1988.7 This was the insurgency’s opening salvo.
The initial phases of the insurgency were not primarily designed to
achieve military effects. Their aim, rather, was symbolic, seeking to dem-
onstrate in dramatic fashion India’s loss of political authority in Kashmir.
Thus, the rebels staged relatively few attacks on Indian security forces.
Instead, they assassinated judges, intelligence officers, and National
Conference leaders; prevented voters from participating in elections;
and staged high-profile kidnappings, such as the abduction of an Indian
Congress party leader’s daughter, who was freed only after the Kashmiri
government released several JKLF fighters being held on terrorism
charges. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis increased the intensity of their opera-
tions. By 1990, several hundred Kashmiris per month were crossing into
Pakistani territory for military training and then returning to Kashmir to
fight the Indian occupation. Violent clashes between militants and secu-
rity forces soon became a daily occurrence.8
The insurgency quickly became far more than a mere uprising, or even
a campaign of symbolic violence—it became a genuine war for control of
Jammu and Kashmir. Unlike in the past, this war was not limited to short
periods of state-to-state conflict between India and Pakistan. Rather,
thanks to General Zia’s careful preparations, the struggle was now an
ongoing jihad, which continued even in peacetime and had no end in sight.
Realizing this, Indian leaders devoted significant resources to combatting
the rebellion. The Indian government dissolved the Kashmiri state assem-
bly, placed Jammu and Kashmir under governor’s rule, and, in January
1990, appointed the well-k nown civil servant Jagmohan Malhotra as
governor.
Jagmohan’s appointment is indicative of the seriousness with which the
Indians took the Kashmir problem. He had served successfully as lieuten-
ant governor of a number of states and territories, including Delhi and
Goa, and as governor of Jammu and Kashmir during the 1980s. In addi-
tion, Jagmohan was a firm believer in the utility of brute force. His mandate
was clear: to crush the rebellion decisively and restore New Delhi’s writ
in Kashmir. As he explains, “Our first and foremost objective was to …
86
assert the authority of the state … no matter what the costs, no matter what
the sacrifices. Our resolve, our will, had to be made clear… . It had …
to be conveyed to all concerned, in no uncertain terms, that … no soft
underbelly of the state would be offered to punch or fool with.”9
Despite the seriousness with which the Indians took the Kashmir prob-
lem, they had great difficulty stopping the Pakistanis’ militant campaign.
They could not prevent the movement of fighters across the porous border
separating Indian from Pakistani Kashmir. And once the militants had
entered Indian Kashmir, it was difficult to apprehend them in advance of
their attacks. During 1990, approximately 1,000 civilians and 130 mem-
bers of the security forces died in roughly 4,000 instances of militant
violence.10
The Indians responded with draconian measures. They deployed hun-
dreds of thousands of security forces to Kashmir. The government used
the 1987 Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) to
hold terrorism suspects for up to one year without filing formal charges
against them; to try them in camera, utilizing secret witnesses; to treat
them as guilty until proven innocent in certain cases, such as those involv-
ing explosives or firearms; and to allow them to make appeals only to the
Supreme Court of India, within thirty days of a judgment.11 Numerous
Indian government officials, including the members of the Supreme
Court, publicly recognized TADA’s propensity for abuse.12 Indian secu-
rity forces also employed heavy-handed tactics such as cordon-and-search
operations, which resulted in the widespread destruction of property and
harm to civilians; routinely engaged in extrajudicial killings; and regu-
larly employed torture to extract confessions and intelligence from sus-
pected militants.13 Whatever their tactical utility may have been, these
measures deepened India’s strategic problem by further alienating the
Kashmiri population. They also badly tarnished India’s international rep-
utation as a democratic, law-abiding state dedicated to the promotion of
human rights.14
Finally, after multiple attempts, the Pakistanis had managed to devise
a winning militant strategy in Kashmir, which extracted significant mili-
tary, economic, and human costs from India while avoiding the dangers of
direct conventional conflict. The Pakistanis quickly discovered, however,
that the militant campaign would not run itself. It required close super-
vision if it was to remain successful over the long term. They therefore
spent the subsequent decades carefully managing the insurgency, using
their military, financial, and political resources to determine its charac-
ter and trajectory. The biggest challenge that Pakistan faced was ensuring
proper alignment between Pakistani national interests and the interests
and capabilities of its militant proxies. In this vein, the Pakistanis’ first
87
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 87 )
major step after triggering the outbreak of the Kashmir rebellion was to
undermine the position of their primary allies, the JKLF.
Pakistan’s problem with the JKLF was threefold. First, the front’s
ideology was at least notionally secular, emphasizing the importance of
democratic rights such as sovereignty and self-determination, rather than
the pursuit of religious goals. It is not clear how deep the group’s secular-
ism actually ran. As Praveen Swami has noted, despite its rhetoric, the
front never sought to curb religion-based violence in Kashmir, such as
attacks on liquor stores and cinemas or assaults against unveiled women.
In fact, the JKLF was implicated in a series of assassinations of members
of Kashmir’s Hindu Pandit community that triggered the Pandits’ exodus
from the Kashmir Valley. In addition, some of the most oppressive poli-
cies ever imposed in Kashmir, particularly with regard to women’s rights,
were instituted while the front was ascendant.15
These are important points that illustrate the complex relationship
between the JKLF’s stated ideology and the reality of its political prac-
tice. Even if the front tolerated or engaged in religiously motivated vio-
lent behavior, the fact remains that its stated organizational goals were
secular. This put the JKLF fundamentally at odds with its Pakistani
patrons.
Pakistan’s second problem with the JKLF was that it was a genuinely
nationalist organization, dedicated to achieving Kashmiri independence
rather than joining Kashmir to Pakistan. According to its official litera-
ture, the “Kashmir issue is not a territorial dispute between India and
Pakistan but concerns the unfettered right of self-determination of the
people of Jammu Kashmir State. Jammu Kashmir State or any part of it is
not a constitutional or integral part of India, Pakistan, or any other coun-
try.” Their objective is the “re-unification and complete independence of
Jammu Kashmir State.”16 These views ran counter to Pakistan’s policy of
joining Kashmir to Pakistan.
Pakistan’s third problem with the front was its lack of operational capa-
bilities. The JKLF’s cadre, despite their nationalist zeal, did not consist of
hardened fighters. Although the front was certainly willing to engage in
extensive violence, it therefore did not prove to be as militarily effective as
the Pakistanis had hoped.17
The Pakistanis tried to push the JKLF in directions more compatible
with their interests. For example, they asked the front to stop calling for
Kashmiri sovereignty in its public statements. They also requested that an
ISI representative be allowed to observe the workings of the JKLF Central
Committee. The front, however, refused to entertain these suggestions.
The JKLF’s failure to cooperate with their patrons led the Pakistanis to
conclude that their differences with the front were irreconcilable.18
88
The Pakistanis therefore decided to replace the JKLF with more use-
ful partners. They cut off funding for the front and, during the early
1990s, supported a variety of other militant groups. Eventually, they
settled primarily on the Hizb-u l-Mujahideen (HM). HM based its
agenda on that of its political patron, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), which
promoted Islamist sociopolitical goals and advocated the accession of
Kashmir to Pakistan. Pakistan had engineered the alliance between the
JI and HM during the 1989–9 0 timeframe, to ensure ideological com-
patibility with its new proxy. The relationship between the two groups
became extremely close—so close that HM allowed the Jamaat to
nominate one of its members to become leader of HM. In Arif Jamal’s
words, these developments “virtually turned [HM] into a subsidiary of
Jamat-i-Islami.19
HM used the newfound resources that it acquired through its relation-
ship with Pakistan to wage a full-blown war against the JKLF. It publicly
accused the front of atheism and of indifference to religious goals and
concerns. In addition, HM fighters assassinated, kidnapped, and tortured
front personnel. This campaign, combined with vigorous targeting by
Indian security forces, devastated the front and enabled HM to emerge
as the dominant militant group in Kashmir, a status that it maintained
through the rest of the 1990s.20 During this period, violence in Kashmir
increased significantly. For example, the number of militant attacks
climbed from about 3,700 in 1991 to more than 5,800 in 1995. Civilian
fatalities rose from approximately 900 to 1,200, and security-force deaths
jumped from roughly 170 to nearly 240 during this period.21
Although the insurgency at times appeared to be wholly beyond Indian
control, the Indians did manage to stem its tide by the late 1990s. They
used a number of techniques in their efforts to defeat the militants. For
example, they sowed discord within militant groups and turned fighters
against their own comrades, cooperated with relatively moderate militant
factions and individuals, and attrited militant forces through detention
and outright killing.22 One of India’s biggest advantages was a recurring
Pakistani problem that had nothing to do with Indian policy: Pakistan’s
selection of its militant allies. Although the Pakistanis had finally found
the right political environment in which to pursue Kashmiri jihad, they
had not yet identified the optimal militant groups to carry it out. The
Pakistanis’ decision to abandon the secular nationalist JKLF and sup-
port the Islamist, pro-Pakistan HM had paid handsome dividends.
Nonetheless, the overlap of interests and goals between Pakistan and
HM was far from perfect. Like the JKLF before it, HM diverged from
Pakistan’s agenda in important ways and ultimately proved to be less than
an ideal partner for Pakistan.
89
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 89 )
The main problem with HM was that the group was composed primar-
ily of Kashmiris, who had brethren in Indian Jammu and Kashmir and
who cared deeply about the territory’s welfare. HM members thus worried
about the consequences of their militant activities and were less inclined
to engage in extremely violent actions against the Indian authorities than
the Pakistanis wished. In addition, in important instances, HM leaders
were willing to strike compromises directly with the Indian government.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this propensity for compromise
was legendary HM commander Abdul Majid Dar. Dar was, according to
a senior Indian counterinsurgency force commander, a hardened mili-
tant and “a real fighter,” unlike many of the native Kashmiri militants.
Nonetheless, Dar ultimately decided to renounce violence, proclaiming
an HM ceasefire in 2000 and encouraging Kashmiri separatist groups to
resolve their differences with India in an amicable fashion. Given Dar’s
highly influential status, numerous HM field commanders followed his
example. Although the HM ceasefire eventually fell through, the damage
had been done; Dar’s behavior seriously undermined Pakistani leaders’
faith in the group. Dar was among the most aggressive and highly moti-
vated members of HM. If he could not be trusted to wage an all-out battle
with the Indians, the Pakistanis reasoned, neither could any other mem-
bers of the group. As a result, the Pakistanis became far less supportive of
the HM than they had been previously. This confluence of developments
led to infighting with the HM, which damaged its effectiveness.23
Given the combination of increasingly sophisticated Indian counterin-
surgency tactics and rifts between Pakistan and its militant allies, insur-
gency was on the wane in Kashmir by the late 1990s. Incidents of militant
violence declined to fewer than three thousand, and civilian deaths
dipped below one thousand in 1998.24 The Pakistanis, however, were
not simply going to abandon their militant campaign and accept defeat
in response to these setbacks. Their problems resulted in large measure
from improper selection of their militant proxies. The Pakistanis needed
a militant force that not only was dedicated to Pakistan’s Islamist agenda
and its goal of joining Kashmir to Pakistan but also was willing to employ
extreme violence in the pursuit of these ends, able to pose a significant
tactical challenge to Indian security forces, and utterly unwilling to com-
promise with its adversaries. Organizations without this combination of
characteristics would be unable to wage jihad effectively. Groups that pos-
sessed these characteristics, however, could be highly effective, giving the
insurgency the boost it needed and ensuring that it continued well into
the future.
The Pakistanis therefore began to recruit a new class of militant groups
as their partners in the Kashmir jihad. Like HM, these organizations
90
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 91 )
turn against them in the future. LeT’s doctrine held that it was wrong to
wage jihad against Muslim rulers, even if those rulers were misguided.
LeT’s leaders also believed that fighting against the Pakistan government
would distract them from their main task of freeing Kashmir from Indian
oppression. The Pakistanis were thus confident that LeT’s ideology and
practical concerns would ensure that the group would not bite the hand
that fed it.28
The Pakistanis therefore worked with LeT more closely, and sup-
ported them more extensively, than other militant organizations. Indeed,
LeT’s military capabilities were largely a product of Pakistan Army and
ISI efforts to construct a force for use against India from the ground up.
Specific forms of aid included organizational, strategic, and financial sup-
port; military training; the supply of weapons, communications gear,
and other materiel; assistance infiltrating and exfiltrating Kashmir and
India proper; and protection on Pakistani soil. Numerous army and ISI
personnel also contributed their expertise by joining LeT following their
retirement.29
In addition to material support from Pakistan, LeT benefited from
tactical innovations that significantly increased the effectiveness of their
operations. One such innovation was the fedayeen attack. 30 In fedayeen
operations, heavily armed assailants launched high-r isk assaults against
prominent military and civilian objectives. During these operations, the
militants did not seek immediate death, but rather sought to fight for as
long as possible, to maximize damage to their targets. When and if the
militants died, they fell at the hands of the enemy. These tactics enabled
the militants to push violence in Kashmir to a new level. This heightened
violence, they hoped, would intimidate Indian security forces and rein-
vigorate the flagging insurgency. In addition, fedayeen tactics avoided the
Muslim injunction against suicide, which some religious commentators
had raised as an objection to martyrdom operations. 31
The results of Pakistan’s shift to LeT and the mehmaan mujahideen were
impressive. Fatalities among Indian forces rose to their highest-ever level
in the Kashmir insurgency. In 2000, over 480 security personnel died in
militant violence. By 2001, that figure had increased to 613. Significantly,
civilian deaths during this period were lower than they had been during
the mid-1990s. Approximately 1,400 civilians had died in militant vio-
lence during 1996, as compared to about 940 in 2000 and 1,100 in 2001. 32
These figures highlight an interesting paradox. The new, “foreign” militant
groups like LeT were less concerned with the welfare of Kashmiris, and
more willing to deploy extreme violence, than indigenous organizations
such as HM. Nonetheless, the mehmaan fighters apparently inflicted less
harm than indigenous militants on Kashmir’s civilian population, even as
92
they did greater damage to Indian security forces. This may have resulted
in part from the new groups’ tactical skill, which enabled them to better
discriminate between targets than the Kashmiri organizations. This, in
turn, had possible implications for how the insurgency was viewed among
the Kashmiri population and could at least help mitigate legitimacy prob-
lems arising from the new groups’ outsider status.
In addition to their Kashmiri operations, the new militant groups took
jihad into the Indian homeland. In December 2000, two LeT militants
entered Delhi’s Mughal-era Red Fort, which was being used to house
army personnel. They killed two Indian soldiers and a civilian sentry prior
to escaping. 33 In December 2001, five militants attacked India’s national
legislature in New Delhi while it was in session. Although the attackers
managed to enter the parliament compound, security forces were able to
repulse them before they could gain access to the parliament house itself.
Had the militants succeeded in doing so, the result could have been a mas-
sacre of India’s legislators. 34
Such attacks made an important statement, demonstrating that the
militants’ capabilities did not end at the borders of Kashmir, but could
reach the very heart of Indian power. The Red Fort operation was particu-
larly rich with symbolism, since this had been the seat of Mughal rule in
India before the arrival of the British Raj. The attack on the old fortress
suggested that history might repeat itself, and that the Muslims could rule
India once again. The new organizations capable of such audacious opera-
tions quickly assumed the role of Pakistan’s primary proxy forces. 35
LeT was the Pakistanis’ favorite of the emerging mehmaan mujahideen
groups during the mid-1990s. By the end of the decade, it had solidified
its leading position, and LeT’s dominance continued in the months and
years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. 36 This was the case for a
number of reasons. First, LeT continued to be the most trusted of the mil-
itant organizations. The Pakistanis were confident that, for all of its feroc-
ity, it would not attack them, even if it disagreed with their policies. The
Pakistanis could not say the same thing of the other groups. For example,
Jaish-e-Mohammed had turned on Pakistan in a number of instances,
including plots to assassinate President Musharraf. Second, LeT’s tacti-
cal abilities were unmatched by the other groups. By the late 1990s, they
were widely viewed as the most capable of the militant organizations at
large in Kashmir, even by members of the Indian security forces. Third,
despite some personality-driven internal conflict, LeT was generally not
riven by ideological or policy disputes. Thus, they resisted splintering in
the manner of other militant organizations such as Jaish-e-Mohammed,
Harakat-u l-Mujahideen, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Finally, LeT’s opera-
tions were audacious, drawing attention to their cause, embarrassing
93
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 93 )
Pakistan, forswear its support for terrorism, close militant training camps
in Pakistani territory, and prevent militant infiltration from Pakistan
into Jammu and Kashmir. In the event of Pakistani noncompliance, the
Indians planned to strike militant camps and seize territory in Pakistani
Kashmir. Pakistan reacted with similar force deployments, resulting in
a standoff between approximately one million troops along the Line of
Control and the international border, where they remained in place for
the following months.40 The crisis escalated further when LeT militants
killed thirty-t wo people at an Indian army camp at Kaluchak in Jammu in
May 2002. Indian leaders responded by expanding their planned retalia-
tion. They now envisioned attacking Pakistan with three strike corps and
capturing territory in the Thar Desert. Despite their costly ten-month
military deployment and extensive retaliatory plans, the Indians ulti-
mately decided not to attack Pakistan, and they withdrew their forces in
October 2002.41
The Indians did, however, apply significant diplomatic pressure on
Pakistan to rein in groups like LeT. The Pakistanis at times seemed as if
they were prepared to cooperate. For example, in January 2002, President
Musharraf outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and pub-
licly promised to prevent Pakistani territory from being used to foment
terrorism in Kashmir. The Pakistanis also convinced US officials that
they were seriously considering the handover to India of non-Pakistanis
on India’s twenty-person extradition list.42
In the end, however, the Pakistanis took few, if any, concrete steps to
honor these pledges. Indeed, they often behaved in ways that were directly
opposed to their publicly stated goals. For example, the ISI helped LeT
to insulate itself from Pakistan’s official crackdown, through a range of
measures including name changes, the relocation of financial assets, and
the calibration of its activities to an intensity level that was not overly
provocative but nonetheless demonstrated the insurgency’s continued
viability, as well as Pakistan’s ongoing commitment to sustaining it. As
a result, Lashkar was able to remain active despite Musharraf ’s putative
ban in January 2002, and just a few months later it was implicated in the
massacre at the Indian Army camp at Kaluchak.43 To defuse the military
standoff and to prevent potential Indian punitive action in the wake of the
Kaluchak attack, President Musharraf promised US Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage to end permanently all militant infiltration into
Indian Kashmir. Armitage’s communication of Musharraf ’s pledge to
Indian leaders helped to convince them that the Pakistanis had changed
their minds and were now serious about reining in their proxy forces. This
belief played an important role in the Indians’ eventual decision not to
attack Pakistan in 2002.44
95
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 95 )
In the following months and years, however, it became clear that the
Pakistanis were not going to end militant infiltration into Indian Kashmir.
Infiltration rates did slow, but they nonetheless remained significant. For
example, the Home Ministry estimated that over twenty-four hundred
militants entered Jammu and Kashmir in 2001, with over fifteen hundred
entering in 2002 and over thirteen hundred entering in 2003.45 In addi-
tion, the Indian government directly implicated Lashkar in numerous
attacks within India. Pakistan either ignored or denied the charges.46 The
ISI did close or move militant training camps in Kashmir and restrict the
activities of a number of groups. Lashkar-e-Taiba, however, was allowed
to continue operating openly. Within Pakistan, it regularly held large ral-
lies at its headquarters at Muridke on the outskirts of Lahore. Officially,
Muridke is home to Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charitable organization
dedicated to such projects as preaching, promoting religious education,
assisting widows and orphans, and engaging in disaster assistance. The
sprawling Muridke complex houses schools, farming tracts, a mosque,
shops, and medical facilities. As Stephen Tankel puts it, “Muridke’s pal-
pable sense of ambition in terms of scale is unrivalled in the world of
Pakistani jihadi organizations.”47 Although JuD leaders have vehemently
denied any connection between their organization and Lashkar-e-Taiba,
the United Nations identified Jamaat-ud-Dawa as an LeT front and out-
lawed the JuD in 2008. This hampered some of JuD’s later relief opera-
tions, forcing it to assume different names, such as Falah-e-Insaniyat.48
Muridke, however, continued to remain open, even after officially hav-
ing been taken over by the Punjab government in the wake of the 2008
attacks on Mumbai.49
Although overwhelming evidence tied LeT to the 2008 Mumbai
attacks, Pakistani authorities continued to decline to move decisively
against the group. 50 The Pakistanis initially denied that any connection
existed between Pakistan and the Mumbai assault. Indian authorities sub-
sequently offered them incontrovertible proof of such a link, from sources
that included the contact lists and call logs of the attackers’ cell phones,
recorded telephone conversations between Pakistan-based handlers and
the militants during the attacks, and the confession of the one surviving
member of the Mumbai assault team.
Faced with this evidence, the Pakistanis finally acknowledged the
Pakistan–Mumbai connection and placed Hafiz Mohammad Saeed,
founder of LeT and leader of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, under house arrest. He
was released for want of evidence, however. Soon thereafter, a Lahore
court dismissed terrorism charges against Saeed. 51 At present Saeed
lives openly in Lahore, in a compound that includes a house, office, and
mosque. He is protected by personal security forces and by the Pakistani
96
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 97 )
The Pakistanis were not friendly with all of the Afghan warlords,
however. One significant exception was the Tajik military commander
Ahmed Shah Massoud. Massoud had received intermittent support from
Pakistan during the anti-Soviet conflict. The Pakistanis had come to
believe that he was not truly dedicated to fighting the Soviets. For exam-
ple, Massoud had never cut off the Soviets’ main supply line in his native
Panjshir Valley. Even more egregiously, in 1983, Massoud had struck a
truce with Soviet forces, agreeing to allow them to operate unmolested
in the South Panjshir in return for a promise not to attack his forces else-
where in the valley. Finally, Massoud had long been a fierce opponent of
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was a Pakistani favorite. Years after the anti-
Soviet war had ended, the Pakistanis still harbored suspicions regarding
Massoud’s motives and loyalties. Consequently, Massoud’s relations with
Pakistan remained fraught. This, in turn, narrowed the range of possible
allies for Pakistan in Afghanistan. 56
The spectrum of potential Afghan allies was important to the Pakistanis
because, despite their current preoccupation with Kashmir, their interests
in Afghanistan were too strong for them to remain agnostic regarding the
outcome of the Afghan power struggle. Pakistani leaders wanted to estab-
lish a reliable route through Afghanistan to the markets and resources of
Central Asia. They also needed to repatriate large numbers of Afghan ref-
ugees still in Pakistan after the end of the anti-Soviet war. In addition, the
Pakistanis hoped that a friendly Afghanistan would provide them with
increased strategic depth. An Afghan government well disposed toward
Pakistan could limit India’s presence in the country, reducing the likeli-
hood of Pakistan’s encirclement by Indian forces on both its western and
its eastern frontiers. In addition, a cooperative Afghanistan could make
its territory available to the Pakistanis in case they needed to fall back in
the West during a war with India. Finally, an Afghan government sympa-
thetic to Pakistan could permit the training of militants in Afghanistan
to wage the Kashmir jihad. Given the strength of these interests, it was
only a matter of time before the Pakistanis turned their attention back to
Afghanistan and attempted to affect political outcomes there. In doing so,
they hoped to help install a regime that would ensure the country’s stabil-
ity and that would be as congenial as possible to Pakistan. 57 Therefore,
the question of available Afghan allies was an essential one for Pakistani
leaders.
Despite efforts to maintain good relations with a number of Afghan
warlords, the Pakistanis preferred Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This had been
the case since the 1980s when, impressed with Hekmatyar’s discipline,
ruthlessness, and battlefield successes, the Pakistanis had considered
him their most reliable ally in the anti-Soviet jihad. Now, years after the
98
Soviet withdrawal, they continued to hold that view. The Pakistanis also
believed that, as an ethnic Pashtun and the product of Pakistani military
training during the early 1970s, he would serve as a pliant proxy in the
future. Subsequent events demonstrated to the Pakistanis that their faith
was misplaced, however. Despite his past successes, Hekmatyar proved to
be a less-than-effective leader during the post-Soviet era. He was widely
unpopular with his fellow Pashtuns, suffered a number of important mili-
tary failures, and was unable to deliver the Pakistanis their long-standing
goal in Afghanistan—a stable country with a government friendly to
Pakistan and its interests. By 1994, it became clear that the Pakistanis
would have to look elsewhere for an Afghan proxy. 58 They eventually
decided on the Taliban.
The Pakistanis found the Taliban appealing for a number of reasons.
First, the Taliban were ethnic Pashtuns. Pashtuns make up only about
15 percent of Pakistan’s population, but they are heavily concentrated
in the country’s Northwest, along the Pakistan–A fghanistan border.
This had long been a problem for Pakistan, as Pashtun nationalists liv-
ing in Pakistani territory had sought either to establish an independent
region or to join the area to Afghanistan. Governments of Afghanistan,
where Pashtuns account for 40 percent of the population, had tradition-
ally refused to recognize the Durand Line that demarcated the Afghan–
Pakistan border. Instead, they argued that Pashtuns in the area should
be able to choose either independence or union with Afghanistan. The
Pakistanis expected that a friendly Pashtun government in Kabul would
be sensitive to their interests in these matters, recognizing the Durand
Line as the legitimate Afghan–Pakistan border and curbing potentially
destabilizing Pashtun separatism. In addition, the Pakistanis simply
trusted the Pashtuns more than other Afghan ethnic groups. Pashtuns
made up approximately 20 percent of the Pakistan Army and had a strong
lobby in the military and ISI. The Pakistanis thus became convinced that
only the Pashtuns would promote their interests in Afghanistan. 59
The Taliban’s second major advantage was that Benazir Bhutto’s gov-
ernment already had a relationship with them. In 1993, the political
party Jamaat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) had aligned with Bhutto’s Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP). The JUI then developed a close association with
General Naseerullah Babar, Bhutto’s minister of the interior. Also, one of
the group’s principal leaders, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, became chair of
the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Pakistani parliament.
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the JUI had set up a net-
work of madrassas, or religious schools, in Pashtun areas of the North-
West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan. The Taliban, which
literally means “students,” emerged largely from these madrassas in 1994.
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K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 99 )
Thus, from their inception, the Taliban enjoyed close ties to the Pakistan
government.60
Finally, the Pakistanis were impressed by the Taliban’s success on the
battlefield. Other characteristics aside, they needed an ally that could
defeat competing forces and impose its will on the country. Indeed, mili-
tary ineffectiveness is what led the Pakistanis to abandon Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, despite his numerous attractions. In October 1994, the
Taliban seized the border town of Spin Boldak, defeating Hekmatyar’s
forces. Then in November they captured Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-
largest city. Pakistani leaders were surprised at the speed and extent of
their victory. General Babar now referred to them as “our boys.”61 The
Pakistanis were further impressed when the Taliban captured Herat in
late 1995, giving them control of western Afghanistan and demonstrating
that they could operate effectively beyond the Pashtun South. It was now
clear that the Taliban would be both a potent military force at the national
level and a potential long-term ally for Pakistan.
As with Kashmiri militant groups, the Pakistanis gave the Taliban
extensive assistance. For example, General Babar created the Afghan
Trade and Development Cell in the interior ministry to provide the
Taliban with logistical support, Pakistan’s Public Works Department
and Water Development Authority repaired roads and supplied elec-
tricity in Kandahar, Frontier Corps paramilitary forces helped to con-
struct communications networks for Taliban commanders, and Pakistan
International Airlines and the Civil Aviation Authority assisted with the
repair of Kandahar airport and Taliban military aircraft. Other Pakistani
assistance included the recruitment and training of Taliban personnel,
intelligence and combat advisory support, and direct military action
such as cross-border artillery fire in conjunction with Taliban operations.
Pakistan also provided the Taliban with crucial diplomatic support and
in 1997 was the first state to recognize it as the legitimate government of
Afghanistan. This wide-ranging assistance was essential to the Taliban’s
success. Their ascendance to power, which was complete by 2000, could
not have occurred without Pakistani backing.62
Despite their debt to Pakistan, the Taliban exhibited considerable inde-
pendence upon taking power, diverging from Islamabad’s preferences in
important areas. For example, as noted earlier, the Pakistanis had hoped
that the Taliban would honor their wishes regarding the Afghan–Pakistan
border dispute. The Taliban was intransigent on this issue, however,
refusing to formalize the border in accordance with Pakistani desires.
Nonetheless, the Taliban cooperated with the Pakistanis on a number of
other important matters, including the establishment of militant training
camps in Afghanistan.
100
During the early 1990s, the United States had nearly classified Pakistan
as a state sponsor of terrorism. The Pakistanis had therefore come under
intense pressure to demonstrate that they were taking steps to reduce
anti-Indian militancy. To create the appearance of compliance, they
moved militant training camps out of Pakistani territory and into eastern
Afghanistan, where the Taliban allowed them to operate. In Pakistan’s
view, the Taliban’s support for the Kashmir struggle outweighed its non-
compliance on other Afghan-related matters such as the Durand Line,
and in fact made it an indispensable ally. Despite Afghanistan’s strate-
gic import, it was second for the Pakistanis in significance to Kashmir.
Indeed, the Pakistanis saw the creation of a favorable strategic environ-
ment in Afghanistan as a means of achieving its goals in Kashmir, much as
General Zia had done during the anti-Soviet war. As Ahmed Rashid puts
it, Kashmir “became the prime mover behind Pakistan’s Afghan policy
and its support to the Taliban.” Pakistan would “deny [the Taliban] noth-
ing, as long as they provided bases for Kashmiri and Pakistani militants.”63
The Taliban thus served as what Larry Goodson calls a “proxy army in
Afghanistan,” helping Pakistan to install a friendly government in Kabul
that increased the country’s stability and promoted Pakistan’s central stra-
tegic interests.64 Whatever the Taliban’s other problems, the Pakistanis
therefore considered them allies who were deserving of extensive ongo-
ing assistance. As a senior Pakistani diplomat characterized his country’s
position regarding the Taliban, “we will support whoever can bring stabil-
ity to Afghanistan. If they are angels, nothing like it. And if they are devils,
we don’t mind.”65
Pakistan joined the US-led coalition to combat global terrorism follow-
ing the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Pakistani
president Pervez Musharraf realized that participation in this effort would
likely require the Pakistanis to help the United States fight against their
Taliban allies. In the wake of 9/11, the United States had offered the
Pakistanis a stark choice: stand with the United States and obtain the ben-
efits of its support, or stand against it and suffer the consequences of its anger.
Upon reflection, Musharraf decided that Pakistan’s only option was to coop-
erate with the United States. The Taliban was an important Pakistani ally,
but it was not worth incurring the wrath of the United States to protect it. As
Musharraf writes, “The ultimate question that confronted me was whether it
was in our national interest to destroy ourselves for the Taliban. Were they
worth committing suicide over? The answer was a resounding no.”66
Although Pakistan appeared to face an “either-or” choice in Afghanistan
after September 11, 2001, its options proved not to be as binary as they
initially seemed. The Pakistanis ultimately managed to have it both ways
in Afghanistan; they joined the US-led antiterror coalition but avoided
101
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K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 103 )
K a s h mi r a n d A f g h a n is ta n R e p r is e ( 105 )
As in Kashmir, this strategy made all three basic denial tasks extremely
challenging for defenders in Afghanistan. It was difficult to prevent mili-
tants from penetrating Afghan territory, as they could transit from sanc-
tuaries inside Pakistan across the porous Afghan–Pakistan border in
small groups with relative ease. This enabled them not only to launch
attacks but also to escape back into Pakistan to regroup, recover, and pre-
pare for further operations. This greatly increased the difficulty of defeat-
ing the militants and posed a major challenge to the coalition mission.
As a December 2012 Defense Department report stated, “the availability
of sanctuary inside of Pakistan enables key elements of the insurgency
to remain potent and threatening, including the Afghan Taliban and the
Haqqani Taliban Network.” This constitutes “the most critical opera-
tional threat to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) cam-
paign in Afghanistan.”77
Once they were in Afghanistan, militants were difficult to detect and
apprehend, as they blended into the local population, along with Taliban
elements that remained in the country. This gave them the opportunity
to prepare and launch attacks, which they did at the rate of hundreds and
often thousands of incidents per month. For example, the number of insur-
gent attacks during 2010 ranged from approximately 1,250 in January to
nearly 4,500 in August. 78
The militants exploited the element of surprise, knowledge of terrain,
and local support and intelligence networks to ensure that their attacks,
once launched, were difficult to defeat before they inflicted damage
on their targets. Over 1,800 military personnel from the United States
alone died in combat with the militants, and over 19,500 were wounded
between the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in late 2001
and early 2014. Coalition partners lost over 1,000 personnel from OEF’s
launch through 2012. The Afghan National Army and Directorate of
Security lost over 2,300 personnel between 2007 and mid-2012. Senior
commanders viewed this militant violence, and its associated losses, as a
major threat to the success of the ISAF mission. The difficulty of achiev-
ing denial against Pakistan’s militant strategy thus had severe strategic
ramifications for Afghanistan.79
The Pakistanis suffered almost no direct losses or damage as a result of
their militant campaigns in either India or Afghanistan. The Pakistanis did
not use their own forces to launch attacks. Therefore, neither Indian nor
coalition denial efforts directly engaged the Pakistan military. This, in turn,
meant that any attacker losses were restricted primarily to the militants.
In addition, neither Indian nor coalition forces in Afghanistan launched
punitive attacks against the Pakistanis to punish them for their behavior.
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Why did they not do so? Indian forbearance had multiple sources. As
noted in c hapter 2, to some extent it resulted from India’s and Pakistan’s
shared history and culture, domestic political dangers to India inherent
in attacking a Muslim country, India’s lack of good conventional military
options against Pakistan, and concerns regarding the dangers of nuclear
escalation in the event of an Indo-Pakistani conflict. Despite these imped-
iments, however, India did at times seriously contemplate undertaking
punishment operations against Pakistan. Its decision not to do so turned,
to a significant degree, on the deniability inherent in Pakistan’s militant
proxy strategy.
For example, during the crisis following the 2001 parliament attack,
India planned to launch punitive strikes on Pakistani Kashmir and large-
scale incursions into Pakistan proper. India ultimately refrained from doing
so because Pakistani leaders made a convincing case that they opposed
militant violence and would take steps to limit or end it. Implicit in the
Pakistanis’ case was the claim that the militants were an entity separate
from the Pakistan government, whose interests and actions were distinct
from Islamabad’s. As President Musharraf put it during a televised address
in January 2002, the government viewed the militants as “religious extrem-
ists” who were subverting “Pakistan and Islam.” They were not instru-
ments of Pakistani policy. “We condemn the terrorist acts of September
11, October 1 and December 13,” Musharraf announced. “Anyone found
involved in any terrorist act would be dealt with sternly. Pakistan rejects
and condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. Pakistan will
not allow its territory to be used for any terrorist activity anywhere in the
world. No individual, organization or party will be allowed to break the law
of the land.”80
If, as Musharraf claimed, the militants were in fact separate from and
at odds with the Pakistani state, it implied that the Pakistan government
was not truly responsible for the militants’ attack on the Indian parlia-
ment. This, in turn, suggested that Pakistan should not be punished for
the militants’ behavior, since the government, whatever its past, was not
behind current militant violence such as the parliament attack and would
work to prevent such violence in the future.
The Indians were not naïve regarding Pakistan’s use of militancy; they
fully understood the Pakistanis’ militant proxy strategy and its role in
creating an environment in which events like the parliament attack were
likely to occur. Still, Pakistan’s ability to distance itself from the militants
and their actions in the parliament case mattered. Had Pakistan been
unable to do so, it is unlikely that the United States would have believed
its promises to rein in the militants and urged the Indians to exercise
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created serious problems for Pakistan with India and the broader interna-
tional community. Finally, the group worked with militant organizations
whose interests diverged sharply from those of Pakistan. At times, this
amounted to de facto efforts to undermine Pakistani policies. All of these
issues would give rise to serious principal–agent problems, and badly
damage Pakistani interests, in the future.
The Pakistanis also faced adverse-selection issues with their allies in
Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami, for example, had
been the Pakistanis’ favorite Afghan militant organization during the
anti-Soviet war. In the post-Soviet period, however, Hekmatyar proved to
be politically and militarily ineffective. Such problems would continue for
the Pakistanis in Afghanistan. For example, the Taliban was uncoopera-
tive in areas where its interests did not align with Pakistan’s, including the
harboring of allies repugnant to the international community. This forced
the Pakistanis to assist the United States in its ouster of the Taliban. As
a result, much of the Pakistanis’ effort in facilitating the Taliban’s rise
to power was wasted. In addition, many militants in Afghanistan and
Pakistan began to view the Pakistani government as an enemy and turned
violently against it. This problem has become one of Pakistan’s most sig-
nificant security challenges, potentially threatening the survival of the
Pakistani state.
CONCLUSION
CHAP T ER 6
S ince the end of the British Raj and the founding of the Pakistani state
in 1947, Pakistan has sought to promote its security interests through
the use of Islamist militants. Today, militant proxies are one of the pri-
mary tools, along with conventional and nuclear forces, that Pakistan uses
to produce security for itself. Jihad has become a central component of
Pakistani grand strategy.
How successful has Pakistan’s use of militant proxies actually been?
Has the strategy made Pakistan more secure? Or has it in fact undermined
Pakistani security interests? In this chapter I assess the benefits and the
costs of Pakistan’s militant proxy strategy. In the first section, I argue that,
contrary to many analyses, Pakistan’s use of Islamist militants has not
been an unmitigated disaster. In truth, the strategy has yielded a num-
ber of benefits over the decades. These include the promotion of domestic
political cohesion within Pakistan, partial compensation for Pakistan’s
material imbalance with India, the ability to continue challenging Indian
control of Kashmir, and the protection of Pakistani interests in the larger
South Asia region, particularly in Afghanistan. To recognize these advan-
tages is in no way to endorse Pakistan’s strategy, or to argue that it has
been an optimal means of addressing Pakistan’s myriad geo-strategic
challenges. It is simply to recognize that the truth regarding Pakistan’s
use of militancy is more complicated than it sometimes appears.
In the chapter’s second section, I explore the costs of Pakistan’s mili-
tant strategy. I argue that it has given rise to a number of serious problems
and pathologies, including loss of control of its militant proxies, damaging
developmental trade-offs, and increased tension with India. Some of these
112
problems are so severe that they have begun to endanger the continued
survival of the Pakistani state. Thus, despite its past successes, Pakistan’s
militant strategy has outlived its utility, and Pakistani leaders must move
decisively to abandon it.
From its inception, one of Pakistan’s most serious problems was its lack
of a coherent founding narrative. The creation of Pakistan was initially
an elite project; it originated not at the grassroots level, but rather out of
discussion and debate within a community of poets, scholars, and politi-
cal entrepreneurs. As a result, the Pakistan project was reflective mainly
of their interests and aspirations. Those ordinary Muslims who were to
live in the new Pakistani state had much to lose economically, politically,
and socially by leaving India and were often highly ambivalent about the
prospect of doing so. This gave rise to fundamental questions regard-
ing the Pakistan project that remained salient even after partition and
the founding of the Pakistani state: What was the purpose of Pakistan
and why did it need to exist? Without clear answers to these questions,
it would be difficult for the new Pakistani state to generate the domestic
political cohesion necessary for survival. Pakistan’s militant strategy has
helped to ensure that, despite its weak domestic political foundations, the
country has in fact had a plausible reason to exist. This, in turn, has helped
Pakistan to promote internal political unity.
The strategy has done so by offering a practical means of operational-
izing Pakistan’s Muslim identity. Given Pakistan’s lack of firm political
foundations, its early leaders decided to adopt an approach to state build-
ing that emphasized Islam. Although a more inclusive, secular Pakistani
nationalism could have been preferable to religion as an organizing
principle, it was not viewed as a realistic option. As Olivier Roy argues,
secularism created the danger that once Pakistan had been founded and
“the Muslims were all together on the same territory,” they would be left
without an adversary. As a result, disparate groups would revert back to
“an ethnic or linguistic category,” thereby fragmenting the country. Thus,
Roy maintains, “the promotion of a secular Pakistani nationalism proved
impossible.”1 Pakistan would need to become a Muslim state; it could
not simply serve as a secular state for Muslims. This religious foundation
would help to generate critical domestic political cohesion by ensuring
that all Pakistanis, regardless of interest, history, or background, had a
common normative point around which they could rally.2
113
The first major problem with Pakistan’s militant proxy strategy is that the
militant organizations that Pakistan once controlled have increasingly
slipped its grasp. After decades of financial and military support, these
groups are sufficiently strong that they can pursue their own agendas
117
regardless of Pakistani wishes. The results of this change have badly dam-
aged Pakistani security interests.
Militant groups have begun to contest the central government’s author-
ity, in some cases even competing with it for sovereignty over Pakistani
territory. For example, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani
Taliban, has undertaken jihad against the Pakistani state. To this end, it
has launched bombings and suicide attacks against government targets
such as army, police, and intelligence personnel; military bases; and other
security infrastructure. The TTP also has seized control of large sections
of Waziristan, where it has repudiated Islamabad’s writ. There, in accor-
dance with the three goals that it announced at its founding in 2007, the
TTP has imposed an extreme interpretation of sharia law, battled the
Pakistan Army, and participated in attacks on government and coalition
targets in Afghanistan.17 This has led the Pakistani government to station
approximately one hundred and fifty thousand troops in the tribal areas
and to undertake extensive and costly military efforts to rout the insur-
gents. The army, which has borne the brunt of anti-Taliban operations,
has been particularly hard hit, with its soldiers frequently kidnapped and
killed by TTP militants. Pakistani efforts to combat the TTP have also
resulted in widespread civilian deaths and dislocations. This has alien-
ated local populations, thereby compounding the difficulty of Pakistan’s
counterinsurgency campaign.18
The Pakistani government’s efforts to combat the TTP in the tribal
areas have subjected the rest of Pakistan to a bloody cycle of reprisals
between the government and the Tehrik-e-Taliban. For example, the
TTP, in perhaps its most high-profile operation, attacked the Karachi
airport in June 2014, killing twenty-eight people. According to a spokes-
man for the Pakistani Taliban, the attack was launched in retaliation for
the November 2013 killing of TTP chief Hakimullah Meshud in North
Waziristan.19 In response to the Karachi attack, Pakistani Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif, who had previously favored negotiations with the Tehrik-e-
Taliban, reversed his position and approved extensive military operations
against the group. In response, the TTP promised a campaign of coun-
trywide violence, undertaken by TTP fighters who in recent years have
spread throughout Pakistan, posing as refugees from the tribal regions.
As TTP spokesman Shahidullah Shahid said, “By God, we will soon shake
your palaces in Islamabad and Lahore and burn those to ashes.”20 Thus,
the stakes in the continuing cycle of government–TTP violence increas-
ingly are not limited to military outcomes in the contested tribal areas.
They threaten the broader destabilization of Pakistan proper. As one
prominent Pakistani analyst put it, “establishing control in Waziristan
118
won’t be the biggest issue” in the government’s battle with the TTP. “The
problem will lie in the militants’ pockets of support across the country.”21
Pakistan played an important role in facilitating the rise of the Taliban
in Afghanistan. By contrast, it did not directly create or promote the
establishment of the TTP, which is distinct from the Afghan Taliban.
Nonetheless, Pakistan’s TTP problem has resulted largely from its pursuit
of a militant proxy strategy in Afghanistan. When the Afghan Taliban fell
to coalition forces in 2001, large numbers of its fighters fled the country,
taking refuge in Pakistan’s border regions. Pakistan’s subsequent efforts
to eject these militants from its territory led them to organize into a range
of extremist groups collectively known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,
dedicated not only to battling coalition forces in Afghanistan but also to
fighting a “defensive jihad” against the Pakistani state, which they held
responsible for their plight. This series of events would not have occurred
if the Afghan Taliban had not controlled Afghanistan. And it is unlikely
that the Afghan Taliban would have taken control of Afghanistan had it not
been for extensive Pakistani political, financial, and military support.22 If
Pakistan had not pursed its militant proxy strategy in Afghanistan by pro-
moting the Taliban, then the Pakistani Taliban probably would not exist.
It is also worth noting that while the TTP and the Afghan Taliban
remain distinct organizations, the TTP’s leaders have sworn allegiance
to the Afghan Taliban’s leadership. According to TTP spokesman
Shahidullah Shahid, “we consider [Afghan Taliban leader] Mullah Omar
as the Amir-u l-Momineen.” He “can establish the caliphate” in Pakistan
and Afghanistan.23 The two groups also enjoy close operational coop-
eration. For example, the TTP supplies the Afghan Taliban with trained
fighters recruited from Pakistan’s tribal areas. They may also have coop-
erated on operations such as the 2009 attack on the Central Intelligence
Agency base at Camp Chapman in Khost Province, for which both
groups claimed responsibility.24 Coordination between the Afghan and
Pakistani Taliban has become so extensive that one analyst has called
the organizations “Siamese twins—t wo heads of the same body.”25 Some
observers predict that the groups may more explicitly join forces in the
future, perhaps forming some type of “Afghan-Pakistani Taliban syndi-
cate” to redouble Afghan Taliban efforts to defeat government and coali-
tion forces in Afghanistan, or possibly to intensify the TTP’s jihad against
the Pakistani state.26 Whether or not this particular danger materializes,
it is clear that by facilitating Taliban rule in Afghanistan, Pakistan has
sown the seeds of its difficulties with the TTP.
The Pakistani military has often tried to differentiate between the TTP
and the Afghan Taliban, labeling the former “good” and the latter “bad.”27
As the previous discussion makes clear, however, this is a false dichotomy.
119
The two groups share goals, tactics, and ideologies. They cooperate closely
at an operational level. Moreover, the “bad” Taliban would never have
emerged were it not for the Pakistanis’ role in creating the “good” Taliban.
Far from being wholly distinct entities, then, the Afghan Taliban and the
Pakistani Taliban are two sides of the same coin.
Even Pakistan’s closest militant allies have refused to subordinate their
interests and agendas to Pakistan’s broader strategic imperatives. Lashkar-
e-Taiba (LeT), for example, has adopted far more ambitious goals than
those of the Pakistani government, hoping not just to free Kashmir or to
claim it for Pakistan, but also to conquer India proper. LeT militants have
waged jihad on behalf of Muslim causes in multiple locations, includ-
ing Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the Philippines. Since becoming close
to the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) in the early to mid-1990s,
however, the group has restricted its focus mainly to Kashmir. This was
only partially the result of Pakistan’s influence; it was also driven by the
group’s own internal considerations. Ideologically, Kashmir is the most
significant of LeT’s concerns. Indian Kashmir is the Muslim territory
occupied by nonbelievers that is nearest to Pakistan. This creates a duty
for LeT’s members to prioritize fighting in Kashmir over waging jihad in
other locations. In addition, the Indian presence in Kashmir is one of the
largest occupations of Muslim territory by non-Muslims in the world.
This obligates members of LeT to pursue jihad in Kashmir before turning
their attention to struggles on behalf of beleaguered Muslims elsewhere.
Finally, LeT views polytheistic India as an especially objectionable foe and
maintains that the Prophet Muhammed offered special rewards to those
Muslims who fought against it.28 This antagonism toward India leads LeT
to prioritize the liberation of Kashmir over other struggles, since freeing
Kashmir necessarily involves struggle against India.
Even as LeT’s ideology leads it to prioritize Kashmir, however, it also
expands the group’s concerns much further afield. India’s presence does
not end at Kashmir’s borders, but rather extends throughout the subcon-
tinent. Therefore, LeT is obligated to fight India across the entire region.
The group thus sees Kashmir as the first in a string of future conquests
that will result in the establishment of Muslim control of all of South Asia.
As LeT official Nasr Javed declared in a 2008 speech, “Jihad will spread
from Kashmir to other parts of India. The Muslims will be ruling India
again.”29
Not only do LeT’s ambitions extend beyond Kashmir throughout
the Indian subcontinent, but also they extend well beyond South Asia.
Indeed, the group views its South Asian struggle as part of a larger effort
to oppose infidel regimes and establish Islamic rule throughout the world,
including in far-off regions such as Europe and North America. In the
120
LeT should reconsider its position, given that the Pakistani government
has at times restricted the group’s activities. Even Pakistan’s closest and
most supportive militant allies, then, may pose serious control problems
for it in the years ahead. 33
The second major problem with Pakistan’s militant strategy is the
opportunity cost it entails. Continual support for jihad diverts scarce
national resources from other critical projects, impeding Pakistani inter-
nal development. Pakistan’s education sector offers one of the most urgent
examples of this problem. Only 62 percent of Pakistani primary-school-
aged children and 30 percent of secondary-school-aged children are actu-
ally enrolled in school. Nine percent of primary schools lack a blackboard,
24 percent do not have textbooks, and 46 percent have no desks. A mere
36 percent of public primary schools have access to electricity. And 9 per-
cent of teaching posts at the secondary level remain unfilled. 34 Pakistan
must rectify this situation if it hopes to achieve the long-term economic
growth necessary to afford its citizens a reasonable quality of life. 35
The lack of viable public educational opportunities creates a demand
for private schooling. Part of this demand is met by madrassas, as well as
by less formal mosque schools, which offer poor students free or low-cost
educations based on religious curricula. 36 With their focus on religious
teaching at the expense of such subjects as mathematics, science, and his-
tory, madrassas and other religious schools produce graduates lacking
the skills necessary to run a modern country. They also contribute to the
increasingly Islamist and sectarian tenor of Pakistani society. Survey data
suggest that students and teachers in madrassas are less socially tolerant
and more supportive of religiously motivated violence than their coun-
terparts in public and nonreligious private educational institutions. For
example, they are not as likely to support equal rights for women and
religious minorities, and are more favorably disposed toward militancy
in Kashmir, as well as outright war with India, than their peers in public
and private schools. Finally, madrassas provide manpower for militant
groups. Although madrassas appear to have only weak connections with
militants operating in Kashmir or overseas, suicide attackers in Pakistan
and Afghanistan, as well as sectarian fighters in Pakistan, often come
from madrassa backgrounds.37
A better public education system, offering a broad-based, modern
curriculum, would help to ameliorate these problems. Yet Pakistan has
not chosen to invest in the development of such a system. It has pre-
ferred instead to devote scarce resources to the maintenance of a large
military establishment. The social costs of this military prioritization
are significant. In the late 1980s, Pakistan was spending approximately
7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. This spending
122
As one senior Indian strategist put it: “Call it what you like, Cold Start,
something else, a doctrine, not a doctrine. This is a new way of thinking
about bringing force to bear against the Pakistanis.”46
Significantly, these conventional military changes not only will affect
Indian strategic planning but also will have a major impact on Pakistan.
Because the Indians will be able to launch a major offensive far more
quickly than before, Pakistan will have to prepare to respond rapidly.
Acquiring the capability to do so will be difficult, however, for India’s
economic and military resources far outstrip Pakistan’s. Despite recent
downturns, India’s economy remains far larger than Pakistan’s, with a
GDP of $1.87 trillion, compared to Pakistan’s $236.6 billion. It is grow-
ing at a rate of 5.5 percent, compared to Pakistan’s 3.7 percent, and was
recently forecast to become the world’s third-largest economy, behind
only China and the United States, by 2030.47 The Indian defense budget,
at over $37 billion, is also far larger than Pakistan’s $7 billion budget and
is growing at a rate of approximately 10 percent per year.48
Pakistan will thus be hard pressed to defend itself against the growing
Indian threat through conventional military means. Instead, Pakistan is
likely to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons.49 Doing so will require
the Pakistanis to threaten to use nuclear weapons first, however, in
response to Indian conventional attacks. Such threats may lack credibil-
ity, for the result of Pakistani nuclear first use would likely be devastating
for Pakistan, which could be irreparably crippled by even modest Indian
nuclear retaliation following a Pakistani first strike. Pakistan therefore
faces a conundrum: To protect itself from the danger of an Indian conven-
tional attack, Pakistan must threaten to trigger a nuclear catastrophe—an
outcome far worse than the conventional war that Pakistan is trying to
deter. Indian leaders may simply not believe that Pakistan would be will-
ing to carry out such a threat.
The Pakistanis are addressing this problem by pursuing a tactical
nuclear weapons capability, for use on the battlefield against Indian mili-
tary forces, rather than against civilian targets in India. To this end, it
has developed and tested the Nasr missile, with a range of 60 kilome-
ters, which Pakistani strategists have dubbed an antidote to Cold Start.
It is also expanding its production of plutonium, which is better suited
than uranium for use in small warheads. 50 A tactical nuclear weapons
capability can help the Pakistanis to increase the credibility of their
nuclear deterrent threat in two ways. First, tactical nuclear weapons are
relatively small and are employed against military targets. The threat to
use them is therefore less momentous, and likely to be more believable,
than a threat to launch large-scale strikes against Indian civilian targets.
125
CONCLUSION
CHAP T ER 7
The Future
Can Pakistan Abandon Jihad?
allowing their personnel to disappear from the tribal areas into Pakistan
proper, as well as into Afghanistan. 3 Elsewhere, the Pakistanis have failed
to take such basic steps as closing training camps for Kashmiri militants,
shuttering Lashkar-e-Taiba’s stronghold at Muridke, significantly restrict-
ing the activities of Jaamat-ud-Daawa’s Mufti Mohammed Saeed, or cut-
ting ties with the Afghan Taliban.
This Pakistani behavior is puzzling. When a national security strat-
egy fails to achieve its objectives, rational leaders should change course,
adopting new strategic approaches to minimize dangers and increase the
likelihood of attaining their goals. Given their militant strategy’s signifi-
cant shortcomings, Pakistani leaders thus should be expected to look for
new ways to produce national security that do not rely on the use of non-
state proxies. Even if the Pakistanis do not abandon their militant proxy
strategy immediately and in full, they should at least be taking concrete
steps away from the policy. This has not yet happened, however. Why is
this the case? Pakistani failure to abandon jihad despite the strategy’s
many dangerous problems is one of the biggest mysteries of Pakistani
security behavior.4 Explaining this past failure is important if we are to
suggest ways in which Pakistan might devise means of altering its behav-
ior in the future.
In this chapter, I argue that several reasons exist for Pakistan’s failure
to abandon its militant proxy strategy. First, the magnitude of the prob-
lems associated with Pakistani strategy has become apparent only rela-
tively recently. For example, truly worrisome Pakistani developmental
indicators, as well as the most dangerous security-related trends in South
Asia, have occurred mainly within the past decade. Until then, Pakistan
appeared to be faring reasonably well, generally avoiding major military
debacles, and actually outperforming India in a number of economic and
developmental areas. Even today, Pakistan does not lag far behind India
on several important indicators of national well-being. Thus, the urgency
of the need to abandon militancy and develop alternative security strate-
gies has not always been apparent.
Second, Pakistani leaders believe that, with nuclear weapons, they
hold a national-security trump card. Whatever else happens in Pakistan’s
security competition with India or other states, nuclear weapons ensure
that the Pakistanis will not suffer catastrophic defeat. This significantly
reduces the Pakistanis’ incentives to abandon their militant strategy and
develop less dangerous means of generating national security.
Third and most important is the character of Pakistan’s state-building
project. Since Pakistan’s founding, it has continually had to compete with
India to meet the demands of its oppositional national narrative. Given
its material imbalance with India, an ongoing jihad employing nonstate
129
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 129 )
proxies has offered Pakistan one of the few practical means of doing so.
The costs and risks of its other main option, direct military confrontation
with India, would have been prohibitive. Probably more than any other
factors, these oppositional demands of Pakistani state building prevent
Pakistan from fundamentally changing course and abandoning militancy,
for if it does so, Pakistan will have to cease its ongoing anti-Indian strug-
gle and reach some form of basic accommodation with India. If it makes
such a change, however, the Pakistani state, as defined since its founding,
will cease to exist. Although it will be extremely difficult, this is precisely
what will need to occur if Pakistan is to have any real hope of abandoning
militancy. Only if Pakistan can alter its state-building narrative will it also
be able to change its strategy and avoid looming catastrophe.
Pakistan’s failure to alter its militant proxy strategy, despite mounting evi-
dence of the strategy’s shortcomings, is a vexing puzzle. What accounts
for Pakistani intransigence on this issue? One possibility is that Pakistani
leaders are simply irrational, unable to devise coherent strategies con-
necting the means that they employ with the ends that they seek. 5 As a
result, the Pakistanis continually make poor policy choices that not only
fail to achieve their goals but also actually undermine them.
The main problem with this explanation is that Pakistani security man-
agers have shown little evidence of irrationality in the past. Indeed, the
military means that they have employed have, in general, been fairly well
tailored to the pursuit of their ends. This is not to argue that the Pakistanis
have never made mistakes, or that their policies have never resulted in
dangerous failures. Mistakes and failures have obviously occurred on a
number of occasions, ranging from the Pakistanis’ long-standing inabil-
ity to dislodge India from Kashmir to Pakistan’s vivisection during the
Bangladesh war. Nonetheless, the main facets of the Pakistanis’ security
behavior, from the use of militant proxies to challenge stronger adver-
saries while avoiding direct military confrontation with them, to the
development of nuclear weapons to insulate Pakistan against large-scale
retaliation by such adversaries, to the recruitment of powerful allies to
provide Pakistan with critical economic and military resources, have both
required a significant degree of finesse to execute and been largely rea-
sonable given the revisionist nature of Pakistan’s goals and its status as a
relatively weak state. It seems unlikely that, given this record, Pakistani
leaders have suddenly become so unable to connect ends and means that
they should be considered irrational.
130
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 131 )
shared the military’s revisionist goals and was well known to support mil-
itant groups operating in Kashmir and elsewhere in the region. Indeed,
Sharif favored negotiating with the Tehrik-e-Taliban even after the army
had decided to undertake large-scale military action against it in 2014. It
is also worth noting that challenging the status quo in Kashmir is popular
throughout Pakistani society. According to recent polling data, 68 percent
of Pakistanis view the current situation in Kashmir as a “very big prob-
lem,” with an additional 18 percent seeing it as a “moderately big prob-
lem”; 79 percent of Pakistanis believe that it is “very important” that the
Kashmir dispute be resolved.13 These views are constantly reinforced in
an array of fora, such as public school curricula, which teach students the
history of jihad, describe Hindus as enemies of Pakistan, and portray the
defense of Pakistan as being synonymous with the defense of Islam, and
in popular political discourse, where civilian leaders describe Kashmir as
Pakistan’s “jugular vein.”14
A strategy of jihad offers one of the few practical means by which
Pakistan can operationalize this foundational revisionism; jihad enables
Pakistan continually to challenge the status quo while avoiding the dan-
gers of direct Indo-Pakistani conflict. Thus, Pakistan’s state-building
narrative and its use of militant proxies are inexorably linked. Pakistan’s
oppositional approach to state building requires it to adopt jihad as an
integral part of its grand strategy—and to continue to employ it regard-
less of whether Pakistan actually achieves its revisionist aims.
Although the logic of Pakistan’s state-building narrative is the major
reason for its ongoing adherence to its militant strategy, a number of other
causes deserve mention. One is the fact that the full extent of the strate-
gy’s dangers became apparent only relatively recently. For example, severe
principal–agent problems between Pakistan and its militant proxies have
arisen in roughly the past decade. Principal–agent issues did, of course,
dog Pakistan’s militant strategy much earlier than this. The Pakistanis
long had difficulty finding allies with the optimal mix of interests and
capabilities that would lead them to do Pakistan’s bidding as effectively
as possible. The task of identifying and recruiting such proxies con-
sumed a great deal of effort, particularly as the Pakistanis managed the
Kashmir insurgency following its outbreak in 1989. Despite these difficul-
ties, however, Pakistani concern focused primarily on the effectiveness
of their allies. The Pakistanis did not fear that the militants would work
directly against them, attacking government infrastructure and person-
nel, attempting to assassinate national leaders, or challenging Islamabad
for control over Pakistani territory. Such problems emerged mainly in the
post-9/11 environment, after Pakistan joined the United States in its war
on terror.
133
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 133 )
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 135 )
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 137 )
its policy priorities. T. V. Paul, for example, maintains that Pakistani lead-
ers must de-emphasize “hyper-realpolitik” projects such as competition
with India and instead pursue developmental goals, such as improved
education, healthcare, and infrastructure, and fuller integration into the
global economy.27 The work of still other scholars suggests that Pakistan is
unlikely to give up its militant strategy unless the army undergoes a thor-
ough ideological transformation. Christine Fair, for example, argues that,
for Pakistan to cease its efforts to challenge India and overturn regional
territorial arrangements, army leaders would have to renounce their deep
commitment to revisionism in South Asia.28
All of these scholars make excellent points. One of the United States’
few levers of influence with Pakistani leaders is its ability to control the pro-
vision of large amounts of military and developmental aid to their coun-
try. Although placing conditions on this aid cannot force the Pakistanis
to behave according to US wishes, doing so may at least encourage them
to reconsider the wisdom of particularly dangerous policies. In addition,
citizens of a more prosperous, healthier, better-educated Pakistan are less
likely to view continued conflict with India as attractive and are more
likely to see the opportunity costs of such policy as prohibitive. Finally, a
Pakistani army that is ideologically dedicated to revising the status quo in
South Asia is unlikely to abandon the use of militant proxies, which are its
most effective tool for achieving this goal.
Even if all of these conditions were met, however, it is doubtful that
Pakistan would fully disassociate itself from militancy. The reason is that,
at root, Pakistani strategy is not necessitated by lax donor control over for-
eign aid, misdirected Pakistani spending priorities, or even a revisionist
culture within the Pakistan military. Pakistan’s militant strategy is neces-
sitated, rather, by Pakistan’s state-building logic. Pakistan is by definition
an oppositional state, created in contradistinction to India. As long as it
remains so, it will need to challenge existing territorial arrangements on
the subcontinent. And, given its weak status relative to India, this will
require Pakistan to continue to employ some version of its militant strat-
egy. If it does not do so, Pakistani policy will be at odds with the country’s
core national purpose. Thus, in principle, even ideological transformation
within the army would be insufficient to fully divert Pakistan from its cur-
rent course. The army’s dedication to revisionism comes from a source
deeper than its own bureaucratic culture—it comes from the country’s
oppositional state-building narrative, which informs the full range of
Pakistani policies and institutions, the military included. Reconsidering
jihad would thus require an intellectual reformulation of the Pakistani
state. As Jean-Luc Racine puts it, continued oppositional relations with
India “weigh so heavily on the experience of ‘being Pakistan’ that no one
138
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 139 )
If this does not occur, it is doubtful that other policy fixes, such as condi-
tioning foreign aid or even implementing military reform, will be effective
in diverting Pakistan from its current course. The purpose and meaning
of Pakistan as an oppositional state dedicated to competing with India
will remain unchanged. Continued adherence to a strategy of jihad will be
the only logical result, just as it has been for the past six decades.
C a n Pa k is ta n A b a n d o n J i h a d ? ( 141 )
strategy, nonstate proxies can serve as offensive forces that defeat the tar-
get state’s denial efforts, while nuclear weapons provide the sponsor with
protection against target-state punishment. Sponsors that possess both of
these capabilities will be particularly formidable adversaries. Target and
other states will likely have considerable difficulty coercing them into
abandoning their militant strategies.
Fourth, control challenges inherent in principal–agent relationships
can cut in opposite directions for sponsor states. They can be problem-
atic, preventing sponsors from extracting optimal performance from their
proxies, potentially rendering sponsors unable credibly to commit to end-
ing their proxy campaign, and even allowing proxies violently to oppose
sponsor states. Control challenges also can be useful to sponsors, how-
ever, enabling them to demand a particularly high price for the difficult
task of reining in their militant allies. Sponsors therefore must manage
the principal–agent balance carefully. They need to maintain enough con-
trol over their allies to ensure that they receive acceptable service and can
credibly commit to ending their proxy campaign. Simultaneously, spon-
sors must avoid appearing to have so much control that they can call off
the militants with ease. This is likely to be a difficult balance to strike.
Fifth, a nonstate proxy strategy is likely to be especially attractive to
weak states, which lack the wherewithal to challenge stronger adversar-
ies in conventional military confrontations. This would seem to suggest
that sponsors might be convinced to abandon their proxy campaigns if
their adversaries or other states assuaged their security concerns, making
them feel less threatened and obviating their need for aggressive behav-
ior. 35 Although this approach may work in some cases, in others it may
not be effective. The reason is that although the appeal of a militant strat-
egy could be rooted in state weakness, the deep cause of the goals that
the state seeks to accomplish through the strategy might not be security
related. Rather, the state’s goals might result from ideological commit-
ments and normative concerns, rather than from security. If this is the
case, then no amount of reassurance will lead the sponsor to abandon its
proxy campaign. It will do so only if the adversary capitulates or if the
sponsor state undergoes significant ideational change.
Finally, the relationship between state weakness and adherence to a
militant strategy is paradoxical. The strategy is especially attractive to
weak states that are dissatisfied with the status quo but unable to face
stronger adversaries in a conventional conflict. That weakness, however,
can make sponsor states vulnerable to a range of serious problems associ-
ated with the use of militant proxies. These problems can be so serious as
to threaten the survival of the sponsor states. The leaders of weak states
tempted to adopt a militant proxy strategy thus need to consider their
142
policy options carefully. The weaker they are, the more likely a nonstate
proxy strategy is to appear attractive—and the more likely such a strat-
egy is to harm them severely. States that decide to follow Pakistan’s stra-
tegic logic, then, should remember that doing so may well land them in
Pakistan’s predicament.
143
NOT E S
CHAPTER 1
1. During the Cold War, US security policy sought to achieve the twin goals of deter-
rence and containment of the Soviet Union. The United States did not wish to force
the Soviets out of their existing positions in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, but
rather sought to prevent them from expanding their holdings to new territories. The
September 11, 2001, terror attacks convinced US leaders that this type of approach,
with its focus on maintaining the status quo, was no longer a feasible basis for US secu-
rity policy. The 9/11 attacks showed that nonstate actors such as terrorists could inflict
major damage on the United States. If, in the future, those actors were armed with
nuclear weapons, their impact on the United States could be truly catastrophic. Since it
was not clear that terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives could be deterred, US leaders
decided that they had to adopt a different tack, actively rolling back terrorists and the
regimes that supported them. In some cases, this required launching large-scale wars
such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. See National Security Strategy of the United States
(September 2002), http://w ww.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf.
2. See, for example, James A. Piazza, “Rooted in Poverty? Terrorism, Poor Economic
Development, and Social Cleavages,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 18
(2006), pp. 159–77; Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, “Education, Poverty and
Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 17,
No. 4, (Fall 2003), pp. 119–4 4; “The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique
of Psychological Approaches,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 49, No. 1 (February
2005), pp. 3–42; Rex A. Hudson, “The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who
Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” Library of Congress Report (September 1999); Robert
Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random
House, 2006); and Max Abrahms, “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives
and Counterterrorism Strategy,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Spring 2008),
pp. 78–105.
3. By “Islamist militants” I mean nonstate actors violently pursuing a sociopolitical agenda
based at least partially on their interpretation of Islamic religious principles. I do not
label these actors “terrorists” because, although they often attack noncombatants, they
do not do so exclusively; they also strike military, police, and other government tar-
gets. Moreover, they often seek not only to influence particular audiences but also to
achieve battlefield victory. Although definitions vary, terrorism is usually understood
more narrowly, as violence by nonstate actors that is (1) directed against noncom-
batants, (2) intended to coerce or garner support among particular audiences rather
than to win on the battlefield, or (3) both. See, for example, Annual Country Reports on
Terrorism, U.S. Code, Title 22, sec. 2656(f); Pape, Dying to Win, p. 9; and Daniel Byman,
144
( 144 ) Notes
Notes ( 145 )
15. By Pakistan I mean the group of decision makers who determine the Pakistani state’s
national security policy. Despite periods of nominally civilian rule, in practice this group
has almost always been the leadership of the Pakistan Army. See Stephen P. Cohen, The
Idea of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 97–130; and Mazhar
Aziz, Military Control in Pakistan: The Parallel State (London: Routledge, 2008).
16. The importance of religion as a motivator has varied across cases. In some instances,
such as the 1947 Kashmir war, the desire for pillage and plunder probably drove the
militants as much as the pursuit of religious goals. In other instances, such as the cur-
rent Kashmir insurgency, one of the militant groups’ primary aims has been the pro-
motion of an Islamist sociopolitical agenda. In all cases, however, Islam has played a
significant role in motivating the militants.
17. See, for example, Ralph Peters, “America Plays the Fool in Pakistan’s Double
Game,” New York Post, July 27, 2010; James P. Farwell, “U.S. Must Turn Up the
Heat on Pakistan. Here’s How to Make That Happen,” Christian Science Monitor,
October 27, 2011; and “Pakistan’s Next Batch of Intrigues,” Economist, November
17, 2011. Reports of Pakistani duplicity are so widespread that the topic has
become the subject of popular satire. See “Pakistani Intelligence Announces Its
Full Cooperation with U.S. Forces During Upcoming Top-S ecret Drone Strike on
Al-Q aeda at 5:23 a.m. Near Small Town of Razmani in North Waziristan,” Onion,
June 9, 2011.
18. See, for example, Nicholas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden: What Happened That
Night in Abbottabad,” New Yorker, August 8, 2011; Lawrence Wright, “The Double
Game: The Unintended Consequences of American Funding in Pakistan,” New Yorker,
May 16, 2011; and Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder, “The Ally from Hell,” Atlantic
(December 2011). Even this more careful category of journalistic work at times borders
on demonization. For example, a recent discussion characterized Pakistani security
policy as “terrible, horrible, no-good [and] very bad,” a “race to annihilation” fueled
by “fear, paranoia, and a deep sense of insecurity.” See Tom Hundley, “Pakistan’s
Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Idea to Develop Battlefield Nukes,” Foreign
Policy, September 5, 2012.
19. See, for example, Arif Jamal, Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir
(New York: Melville House, 2009); and Bruce Reidel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan,
America, and the Future of the Global Jihad (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution, 2011).
20. See, for example, Stephen Tankel, Storming the World Stage: The Story of the Lashkar-
e- Taiba (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and Carlotta Gall, The Wrong
Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2014 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).
21. See Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2005); Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle
with Militant Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Hassan
Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America’s War on Terror
(New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004).
22. See Byman, Deadly Connections; C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan
Army’s Way of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and T. V. Paul, The
Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
23. Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military and Politics in Pakistan (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Husain Haqqani, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan,
the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding (New York: Public Affairs,
2013); Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan; and Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). See also Ahmed Rashid, Descent into
Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and
Central Asia (New York: Public Affairs, 2008); and Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of
Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). I do not suggest that litera-
ture in this camp wholly ignores Pakistan’s use of Islamist militants as strategic tools.
My point is simply that its main purpose is to not to explain and assess Pakistan’s
146
( 146 ) Notes
militant strategy. Partial exceptions include Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the
Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004 (London: Routledge, 2006), which
focuses on Pakistan’s use of militancy in the Kashmir conflict; and C. Christine Fair,
Keith Crane, Christopher S. Chivvis, Samir Puri, and Michael Spirtas, Pakistan: Can
the United States Secure an Insecure State? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2010), which
assesses Pakistani security strategies, including support for militancy, in light of US
strategic interests.
24. See “LeT Are Freedom Fighters, Musharraf Says,” United Press International, October
11, 2010; “Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ’s Address to the Nation, July 12,
1999,” http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/document/papers/paki-
stani/_ pm_nawaz.htm; and Barbara Crossette, “India’s Growing Peril: Kashmir and
Punjab Separatism,” New York Times, April 17, 1990.
25. The title of Hassan Abbas’s book, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army,
and America’s War on Terror, captures this tendency to downplay the agency of the
Pakistani government in forging and exploiting links with Islamist militancy. It
characterizes the connection between Allah and the army as having resulted from
drift, rather than from the deliberate actions of Pakistani political and military
leaders.
26. On the persecution of the Ahmadis, see Antonio R. Gualtieri, Conscience and
Coercion: Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodoxy in Pakistan (Toronto: Guernica Press, 1989).
27. This shortcoming is not limited to broad overviews of Pakistani political history.
As noted earlier, other studies focusing specifically on Pakistan’s relationship with
Islamist militancy also trace the emergence of the Pakistan–m ilitant nexus to the
Zia era.
28. By “jihad” I mean violence intended at least partially to advance the actor’s view of
Islamic sociopolitical or strategic principles. Jihad, which literally means the struggle
to follow God’s will, in principle need not be violent. Waging war against nonbe-
lievers is, however, a prominent form of jihad. See Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to
Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981), pp. 102–3; and John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 113–15. The militants whom I discuss
in this book commonly use the term “jihad” to refer to their own violent activities.
I use the term in that spirit here. It is important to note that Pakistani leaders have
also used Islamist militants domestically. In doing so they have sought to curb Shiite
influence in the country, extend the government’s reach more fully across Pakistani
territory, and strike electoral bargains to gain favor with and manipulate particular
constituencies. See Zahab and Roy, Islamist Networks, p. 27; Fair et al., Pakistan, pp.
90–91; and Paul Staniland, “Beyond the Monopoly of Violence: Militancy and the
State in Pakistan,” Working Paper (September 2012). Although these domestic uses
of militancy are important, they are not my focus in this book; I am interested primar-
ily in the Pakistani state’s use of militancy against external adversaries. This external
policy has, of course, often had internal ramifications. For example, as I argue later,
the policy has helped to promote domestic political cohesion in the absence of a coher-
ent narrative justifying the existence of the Pakistani state. Such internal benefits,
however, have resulted from an externally directed strategy, rather than from a policy
that was primarily directed inward. It also is important to recognize that not all of
Pakistan’s militant allies have been Islamist in nature. For example, the Pakistanis pro-
vided extensive support to Sikh militants seeking to establish an independent state of
Khalistan in the Indian Punjab, and to rebels in India’s northeastern state of Nagaland.
See Haqqani, Between Mosque and Military, pp. 270–72; D. B. Shekatkar, “India’s
Counterinsurgency Campaign in Nagaland,” in Sumit Ganguly and David P. Fidler,
eds., India and Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned (Abingdon, United Kingdom:
Routledge, 2009), pp. 9–27; and Subir Bhaumik, Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s
North East (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), pp. 153–81. Such campaigns inflicted consider-
able costs on India, and many of the arguments that I make in this book would apply
147
Notes ( 147 )
to them as well. Nonetheless, they are not my primary concern in this project, which
focuses on Pakistan’s use of Islamist militancy and the central role that it has played in
Pakistani grand strategy.
29. See Barry Posen, “The Case for Restraint,” American Interest (November/December
2007); and Robert Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004), pp. 1–2 .
30. Nuclear weapons have helped Pakistan to aggressively challenge the status quo, but
only when employed in combination with other types of capabilities. Specifically,
nuclear weapons have insulated Pakistan against Indian retaliation in response to
provocations by Pakistani conventional forces and by Pakistan-supported militants.
This has enabled the Pakistanis to use these forces more aggressively than they other-
wise would have. Pakistani nuclear weapons themselves, however, played a defensive
role, deterring any potential Indian retaliatory attack against Pakistan. See generally
Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 32–63.
31. The Pakistan Army’s doctrine, known as offensive defense, focused on repelling an
Indian offensive by launching attacks into Indian territory. Although blunting an
Indian conventional military attack of course remains a major goal, the Pakistan
Army appears recently to have shifted its focus to defeating insurgents operating
on Pakistani territory. See R. S. N. Singh, “Pakistan’s Offensive Defense Strategy,”
Indian Defence Review, February 18, 2011; Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, p. 51; Stephen
P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 145;
“New Doctrine: Army Identifies ‘Homegrown Militancy’ as Biggest Threat,” Express
Tribune, January 3, 2013; and Mohammad Jamil, “Military Doctrine Reviewed,”
Nation, January 9, 2013.
32. On these cases see Byman, Deadly Connections, pp. 79–115; Central Intelligence
Agency, “Soviet Support for International Terrorism and Revolutionary Violence,”
Special National Intelligence Estimate, May 27, 1981; and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The
Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September
10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004).
33. General scholarship on states’ strategic use of nonstate actors has sought primar-
ily to determine the policy’s impact on the actors, rather than on the states that
deploy them. Daniel Byman, for example, asks what effect state support has had on
the interests, capabilities, and behavior of leading terrorist groups. Although he also
seeks to determine why states support terrorists, he does not address specifically
the effects of state sponsorship on the strategic interests of the sponsors themselves.
Byman, Deadly Connections, pp. 1–2 0, esp. p. 16; and Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk,
Bruce Hoffman, William Rosenau, and David Brannan, Trends in Outside Support for
Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001). Pakistan-specific work also
largely ignores the question of how the strategic use of Islamist militancy has affected
Pakistan’s own domestic and international interests. As noted earlier, scholarship
focusing directly on the Pakistan–m ilitant connection has provided detailed empiri-
cal accounts of Pakistan’s use of militancy, tried to explain the broad social and politi-
cal trends underlying it, and discussed the tactical use of militancy in Kashmir. But
this literature has not carefully evaluated Islamist militancy’s utility as a decades-old
component of Pakistani grand strategy.
34. Timothy Hoyt, “Pakistani Nuclear Doctrine and the Dangers of Strategic
Myopia,” Asian Survey, Vol. 41, No. 6 (November–D ecember 2001), pp. 956–7 7.
See also Ahmad Faruqui, Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan: The Price
of Strategic Myopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Altaf Gauhar, “Four Wars, One
Assumption,” Nation, September 5, 1999; and Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan,
pp. 207– 8 .
35. Fair, Crane, Chivvis, Puri, and Spirtas, Pakistan, p. 112. For partial exceptions, see
Byman, Deadly Connections, pp. 177–78; Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy,
Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004), p. 53; and Fair, Fighting to the End, p. 6.
148
( 148 ) Notes
CHAPTER 2
1. In principle, proxy forces need not be limited to nonstate actors; one state could also
use another state’s conventional military forces to promote its own strategic interests.
During the Cold War, for example, the United States and Soviet Union often used
other states, such as North and South Korea and Vietnam, to fight wars promoting US
and Soviet interests while avoiding the dangers of direct superpower confrontation.
Although a strategy of using nonstate proxies shares some similarities with the use of
state-level proxies, the two approaches differ in important ways. For example, nonstate
forces are likely to be smaller and less technologically sophisticated than conventional
militaries. Using such forces as proxies will probably be considerably less expensive
and more easily deniable than backing another state’s conventional military. Nonstate
proxies can also offer their sponsors more operational flexibility than state-level forces.
For example, militants can be deployed to attack targets in distant, powerful coun-
tries that state-level proxies would be unable or unwilling to strike. Differences and
similarities aside, Pakistan’s policy has been to use nonstate proxies, rather than state-
level proxy forces, to promote its strategic interests. Since I wish to explain and assess
Pakistani behavior, my specific focus in this book is states’ use of nonstate actors such
as militants or terrorists as proxy forces.
2. Answering this question also can improve our understanding of cases beyond Pakistan
and South Asia. Pakistan, after all, is not the only state that might wish to use militant
proxies to further its strategic interests. Indeed, the frequency of interstate war has
declined significantly since World War II; it is today a rare event. Increasingly, states
have substituted alternative strategies for outright conflict with their adversaries. The
use of nonstate proxies is one such alternative. An understanding of the general logic
of a proxy strategy can help us to anticipate the circumstances under which such a
strategy might be attractive and how it might be employed. See Idean Salehyan, “The
Delegation of War to Rebel Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 54, No.
3 (2010), p. 494; and Byman, Deadly Connections, pp. 1–4.
3. See, for example, Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of
Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Caleb Carr, The Lessons
of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (New York: Random House, 2002);
Abrahms, “What Terrorists Really Want,” pp. 78–105; Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara
F. Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism,” International Security, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Summer
2006), pp. 49–80; and Pape, Dying to Win.
4. See, for example, David B. Carter, “A Blessing or a Curse: State Support for Terrorist
Groups,” International Organization, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 129–51;
Marianne Heiberg, Brendan O’Leary, and John Tirman, eds., Terror, Insurgency, and
the State: Ending Protracted Conflicts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007); Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections; and Byman, Chalk, Hoffman, Rosenau,
and Brannan, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements. Scholarship that
does directly address the issue of sponsor-state interests focuses primarily on the
difficulties that sponsors may face in getting militant proxies to do their bidding. It
usually does not systematically explore the military advantages that would lead a
state to utilize nonstate proxies in the first place. See, for example, Boaz Atzili and
Wendy Pearlman, “Triadic Deterrence: Coercing Strength, Beaten by Weakness,”
Security Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2012), pp. 301–35; and Thomas H. Johnson,
“Financing Afghan Terrorism: Thugs, Drugs, and Creative Movements of Money,”
in Jeanne K. Giraldo and Harold A. Trinkunas, eds., Terrorism Financing and State
Responses: A Comparative Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007),
pp. 111–13.
149
Notes ( 149 )
( 150 ) Notes
generally not led states to surrender and instead have increased their resolve. See Pape,
Bombing to Win.
16. On the challenges of preventing terrorist penetration of national borders, see, for
example, K. Jack Riley, “Border Security and the Terrorist Threat,” Testimony before
the House Homeland Security Committee, RAND Corporation Testimony Series,
August 8, 2006.
17. See C. Christine Fair, Urban Battlefields of South Asia: Lessons Learned from Sri Lanka,
India, and Pakistan (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2004), p. 6.
18. See Robert A. Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political
Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (August 2003), p. 346.
19. India has long suffered from this problem, which has been exacerbated by its use of
heavy-handed counterinsurgency tactics. Despite recent improvements stemming in
part from New Delhi’s attempts to foster economic development and political liber-
alization in the region, anti-I ndian sentiment in Kashmir remains high. See Parvaiz
Bukhari, “India-Controlled Kashmir Seethes as Curfew Extends to Seventh Day,”
Christian Science Monitor, February 15, 2013; and Zahid Rafiq, “Armed Resistance
Reemerging in Kashmir,” Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 2013.
20. See Praveen Swami, “Terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir in Theory and Practice,”
in Kanti P. Bajpai and Harsh V. Pant, eds., India’s National Security: A Reader (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 125.
21. For example, Pakistan has consistently denied that it uses Islamist militants as
proxy forces against India. See Jayshree Bajoria and Eben Kaplan, “The ISI and
Terrorism: Behind the Accusations,” Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder,
May 4, 2011.
22. Terrorists or militant organizations, by contrast, may issue manifestos explaining
their philosophy and justifying their behavior. Al-Qaeda, for example, has offered
numerous public justifications for its global terrorist campaign. See Osama Bin Laden,
“Declaration of Jihad, August 23 1996,” in Bruce Lawrence, ed., Bruce Howarth, trans.,
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (London: Verso, 2005).
23. Other scholars have also noted that deniability can insulate sponsor states from target-
state retaliation. See, for example, Byman, Deadly Connections, p. 22. I unpack its oper-
ational advantages in greater detail, however.
24. Identifying high-value targets can present a serious obstacle to the prosecution of
successful punishment campaigns. During the Cold War, US strategists expended
considerable resources attempting to determine what targets to hold at risk to deter
Soviet aggression. Did Soviet leaders most value their populations? Their military
assets? Their own lives? The answers to these questions were hotly contested and
remained the subject of energetic debate throughout the Cold War period. See Charles
L. Glaser, Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990), pp. 49–57; and Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 132–36.
25. Indeed, the entire conflict process may be seen as one of bargaining, where fighting
erupts because the two sides lack information about each other’s capacity and resolve
that would enable them to strike a mutually acceptable deal prior to the outbreak of
hostilities. Once capability and resolve become clear through combat, the antagonists
are better able to negotiate an acceptable settlement. See James D. Fearon, “Rationalist
Explanations for War,” International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995),
pp. 379–414.
26. These specific phenomena are known as adverse selection and moral hazard problems.
See Joseph A. Stiglitz, “Principal and Agent,” in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and
Peter Newman, eds., The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (London: Macmillan
Press Limited, 1987), pp. 966–71; and Stephen A. Ross, “The Economic Theory of
Agency: The Principal’s Problem,” American Economic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2 (May
1973), pp. 134–39.
27. Navin A. Bapat, “Understanding State Sponsorship of Militant Groups,” British Journal
of Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1 (January 2012), p. 5.
151
Notes ( 151 )
28. This discussion suggests that a degree of weakness is useful to the sponsor state as it
attempts to extract maximum payment from its adversary in exchange for ending a
proxy campaign. A relatively strong sponsor that exercised tight control over its prox-
ies would have less difficulty in calling them off and thus would probably have to settle
for a smaller payoff than a weaker sponsor for which calling off proxies was a more dif-
ficult task. It is important to note, however, that while a degree of weakness will be use-
ful to the sponsor state, excessive weakness will undermine its bargaining efforts. If the
sponsor is too weak, it will be unable to credibly commit to reining in its proxies; the
adversary simply will not believe the sponsor’s promise to end the conflict in exchange
for payment. Ideally, then, the sponsor would be sufficiently weak that controlling
its proxies is difficult and deserving of a payment premium, but not so weak that its
promise to end the proxy campaign lacks credibility. See Bapat, “Understanding State
Sponsorship of Militant Groups,” p. 16.
29. See Ibid.
30. Militant proxies could also diverge from sponsor-state preferences in the opposite
direction, behaving less aggressively than their sponsors would like. This would not be
particularly dangerous to the sponsor state, however. It would merely result in a lack
of progress toward the sponsor’s goals. To remedy the situation, the sponsor would
simply have to look for other, more aggressive proxies to employ.
31. Note that even if the proxy acted without the sponsor’s approval, and the sponsor
denied responsibility and disavowed the proxy’s action, the adversary could blame
the sponsor and attack it anyway. This could occur because the adversary’s leadership
does not believe sponsor-state denials. Alternatively, it could occur because domestic
political pressure to retaliate becomes overwhelming in the adversary state, forcing its
leaders to respond militarily, regardless of their beliefs regarding sponsor-state respon-
sibility for the proxy’s actions.
32. Stephen Tankel, “Lashkar-e-Taiba: Past Operations and Future Prospects,” National
Security Studies Policy Paper, New America Foundation (April 2011), p. 3.
33. Geoffrey Kambere, Puay Hock Goh, Pranav Kumar, and Fulgence Msafir, “The
Financing of Lashkar-e-Taiba,” Counterterrorism Exchange, Vol. 1, No. 1 (August
2011), p. 7; and Press Trust of India, “Lashkar’s Annual Military Budget Is $5.2
Million,” Hindu, December 6, 2010.
34. Tankel, “Lashkar-e-Taiba,” pp. 6–12; and Press Trust of India, “Lashkar’s Annual
Military Budget.”
35. Kambere, Goh, Kumar, and Msafir, “The Financing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, pp. 12–13.
36. Note that Pakistan was estimated to have spent approximately $50 million per year
supporting various Kashmiri militant groups during the mid-to late 1990s. This sug-
gests that the range of estimates offered earlier is well within the realm of plausibility.
See ibid., p. 7.
37. The 1999 Kargil war, in which forces from the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light
Infantry (NLI) clashed with the Indian Army, is a partial exception. Even in this case,
however, the Pakistanis avoided the use of wholly conventional military forces. Prior
to Kargil, the NLI was a paramilitary unit within the Pakistan Army. It did not become
a full-fledged army unit until after the conflict, probably as a reward for its faithful
service during Kargil. See John H. Gill, “Military Operations in the Kargil Conflict,”
in Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences
of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 120.
38. See S. Paul Kapur, “The Kashmir Dispute: Past, Present, and Future,” in Sumit
Ganguly, Andrew Scobell, and Joseph Chinyong Liow, eds., Routledge Handbook
of Asian Security Studies (Abingdon, UK: 2010), pp. 107–8; Press Trust of India,
“All-Weather LoC Fence in Kashmir: Experts to Visit Border Soon,” Times of India,
October 21, 2012; Times of India News Service, “Rashtriya Rifles to Have 30
New Battalions,” Times of India, August 2, 2001; and Times News Network, “900
Black Cat Commandos out of VIP Duty to Fight Terror,” Economic Times, October
16, 2012.
39. See Indian Express, Inside 26/11 (New Delhi: Express Group, 2009).
152
( 152 ) Notes
40. See Parvaiz Bukhari, “Human Rights Report Names Names in Kashmir, Invokes
International Law,” Christian Science Monitor, December 6, 2012.
41. Indeed, commentators have gone so far as to suggest that these cultural ties might help
to drive a more substantive rapprochement between the two countries. See C. Raja
Mohan, “Punjabiyat and India-Pakistan Ties,” Hindu, February 16, 2004.
42. High-level Indian and Pakistani decision makers have made this point to the author
on numerous occasions. It is important to emphasize that my claim here is not that
shared history would necessarily prevent India and Pakistan from launching large-
scale attacks against each other’s populations—only that their common past would be
an impediment to doing so and make such an outcome less likely.
43. See “India’s Muslims: Growing, and Neglected,” Economist, March 2, 2013.
44. India has a long history of such communal unrest, beginning with large-scale Hindu–
Muslim violence that may have killed up to one million people during partition.
More recently, hundreds died in Hindu–Muslim riots in 2002 in Gujarat following
a dispute over a mosque built on the site of a Hindu temple. See Christophe Jaffrelot,
“Communal Riots in Gujarat: The State at Risk?” Heidelberg Papers in South Asian
and Comparative Politics, Working Paper 17 (July 2003).
45. See Ashley J. Tellis, Stability in South Asia (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1997).
46. In the late 1980s, the Pakistanis developed a de facto nuclear capability; although
they had not yet tested nuclear weapons, they probably could have assembled one in
short order if necessary. Pakistan possessed an overt nuclear capability after the 1998
nuclear tests. See Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 10–11.
47. Shortly after Kargil, Indian leaders, including Army Chief General V. P. Malik and
Defence Minister George Fernandes, articulated the principles of a new, “limited war”
concept, under which India would fight and prevail over Pakistan while controlling the
escalation ladder and ensuring that the dispute did not result in a nuclear confronta-
tion. See “Closing Address by Gen. V.P. Malik, COAS and Chairman Chiefs of Staff
Committee, at a National Seminar on the Challenge of Limited War: Parameters and
Options,” Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, January 2000, http://w ww.idsa-
india.org/chief6-2 000.html; and C. Raja Mohan, “Fernandes Unveils ‘Limited War’
Doctrine,” Hindu, January 24, 2000.
48. During the Kargil conflict, for example, the Indian government planned to allow its
forces to cross the Line of Control into Pakistani Kashmir if necessary, but refused
to consider violating the international border and entering Pakistan proper. During
a subsequent Indo-Pakistani crisis following a terrorist attack on the Indian parlia-
ment, the Indians planned a series of shallow retaliatory attacks across the interna-
tional border, while rejecting the option of striking deeper into Pakistani territory. See
Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 120–31. As noted earlier, nuclear weapons’ limitation
of Indian military options has emboldened the Pakistanis, who believe that they can
continue to pursue their militant strategy in relative safety, insulated from the danger
of Indian retaliation by their nuclear shield. See ibid., pp. 14–31.
49. Attacks on militant training camps in Pakistani Kashmir are often suggested as a
potential means of Indian retaliation against Pakistan. See, for example, Sadanand
Dhume, “India Stands Up to Pakistan: A Delhi Less Patient with Islamabad Is Good
for Regional Stability,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2013.
50. For an encyclopedic listing see K. Santhanam, Sreedhar, Sudhir Saxena, and Manish,
Jihadis in Jammu and Kashmir: A Portrait Gallery (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003).
51. This is true even of extremely detailed, carefully researched analyses. See, for exam-
ple, Swami, who says only that Islamist militants receive “official support” from the
“Pakistan military and intelligence establishment.” Swami, “Terrorism in Jammu and
Kashmir,” in Bajpai and Pant, eds., India’s National Security, pp. 125–2 6.
52. For details on this crisis see V. K. Sood and Pravin Sawhney, Operation Parakaram: The
War Unfinished (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003).
53. Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 131–39.
54. This is not to suggest that potential conventional military costs and nuclear dangers
had no effect on Indian forbearance during this crisis. Such concerns, particularly
153
Notes ( 153 )
regarding the possibility of nuclear escalation, mattered. For example, nuclear dan-
ger led the Indians to rule out launching a large-scale conventional attack that could
threaten Pakistan with catastrophic defeat. Nonetheless, the belief that coercive
diplomacy had worked against Pakistan was crucial to India’s decision to stand down;
without it, the Indians would likely have undertaken military operations against the
Pakistanis. This Indian belief, in turn, resulted from assurances by American officials,
who were convinced that the Pakistan government was sufficiently separate from the
militants that it should not be punished for launching the attacks and would work to
prevent similar militant violence in the future. See ibid.
55. Agence France Presse, “No Rush Against Anti-I ndia Militants Says Musharraf,” Dawn,
November 10, 2010.
56. Lionel Beehner, “Musharraf ’s Taliban Problem,” Council on Foreign Relations
Backgrounder, September 11, 2006.
57. Kanchan Lakshman, “The Expanding Jihad,” South Asia Intelligence Review, Vol. 6,
No. 2 (February 18, 2008), http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/A rchives/6 _ 32.htm;
Lashkar-e-Taiba, “Hum Jihad Kyon Kar Rahein Hein” [Why Do We Wage Jihad?],
S. Paul Kapur, trans., p. 2; and Lakshman, “The Expanding Jihad.”
58. See C. Christine Fair and Seth G. Jones, “Pakistan’s War Within,” Survival, Vol. 51, No.
6 (December 2009/January 2010), pp. 162–69, 173–78, 182.
59. See Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 201–
204. Stephen Philip Cohen, “The Nation and the State of Pakistan,” Washington Quarterly,
Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 115–16; Gul, The World’s Most Dangerous Place, pp. 16–
17, 159–60; Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, pp. 33–75, 110–13; Samina Yasmeen, “Pakistan’s
Kashmir Policy: Voices of Moderation?” Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June
2003), p. 12; and Ziring, “Weak State, Failed State, Garrison State,” p. 190.
60. Douglas Lynd, The Education System in Pakistan: Assessment of the National Education
Consensus (Islamabad: UNESCO, 2007), pp. 7, 8, 16.
61. S. Paul Kapur’s discussions with senior Indian strategists, New Delhi, July and
September 2010; and Walter C. Ladwig III, “A Cold Start for Hot Wars? The Indian
Army’s New Limited War Doctrine,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Winter
2007/08), pp. 159–6 0, 164–6 6.
62. For an extensive debate over the likelihood of such escalation see Sumit Ganguly and
S. Paul Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
63. This is not to suggest that militants played no role in the Bangladesh war. As I explain
in chapter 4, both sides employed such forces extensively. Nonetheless, the conflict
was, on balance, primarily conventional in nature.
CHAPTER 3
1. The partition, which split independent India from Pakistan in 1947, triggered large-
scale Hindu–Muslim violence and population shifts. The division claimed between
one hundred thousand and one million lives, and approximately fifteen million people
left their homes to resettle in the new Indian or Pakistani states. See Yasmin Khan, The
Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2008).
2. The territorial division between India and Pakistan had been decided by two commis-
sions headed by English jurist Sir Cyril Radcliffe over a roughly one-month period dur-
ing the summer of 1947 in New Delhi. One of Radcliffe’s main qualifications for the
job was that he had never been to India and was unfamiliar with the issues and actors
involved in the partition. He thus was thought likely to act impartially. Nonetheless,
Radcliffe’s decisions were the source of significant controversy. See Alistair Lamb,
Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 103–17.
3. See Khan, The Great Partition, pp. 143–6 6.
154
( 154 ) Notes
Notes ( 155 )
25. “Sixty Years of U.S. Aid to Pakistan: Get the Data,” Guardian, July 11, 2011; Cohen,
The Idea of Pakistan, pp. 55–56; Talbot, Pakistan, p. 96; and Jinnah, “Students’ Role in
Nation Building,” in Quaid-i-A zam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, pp. 106–12.
26. See Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, p. 48.
27. George Cunningham, “Frontier Policy,” Memo to Liaquat Ali Khan, September 20,
1947, India Office Records, British Library, MS EUR D 670/13. See also Lawrence
Ziring, Pakistan: At the Crosscurrent of History (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003),
pp. 69–70; and Ilhan Niaz, The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan, 1947-2008
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 77–79.
28. See Haqqani, Pakistan, pp. 2–18; and Mohammed Ayoob, “Two Faces of Political
Islam: Iran and Pakistan Compared,” Asian Survey, Vol. 19, No. 6 (June 1979),
pp. 536–37.
29. Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism
in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 127, 128,
138, 147.
30. Allah Bukhsh K. Brohi, “Preface,” in S. K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (New
Delhi: Adam Publishers & Distributors, 1992).
31. Not all Muslim religious thinkers shared these views regarding Islam’s relationship
with the nation-state. The deobandi scholar Hussain Ahmad Madani, for example,
believed that the Koran and other sources demonstrated Islam’s compatibility
with territorially based political communities. See Seava, The Political Philosophy
of Muhammad Iqbal, pp. 1, 157. Even if views such as Iqbal’s were not unanimous
among philosophers, however, they did have a significant influence on Pakistani
state building and came to be reflected in official thinking on this issue. It is worth
noting in this vein that The Quranic Concept of War is a book authored by a serv-
ing Pakistani general officer, includes a forward by General Zia, contains a pref-
ace by a senior Pakistani diplomat who became advocate general of Pakistan, and
became assigned reading in the Pakistan Army. See Patrick Poole and Mark Hanna,
“Publisher’s Preface” and Joseph Myers, “Introduction,” in The Quranic Concept of
War. See also Joseph C. Myers, “The Quranic Concept of War,” Parameters (Winter
2006– 0 7), pp. 108–21.
32. Olivier Roy, “Islam and Foreign Policy: Central Asia and the Arab-Persian World,” in
Jaffrelot, ed., A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, p. 134.
33. Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, p. 180.
34. See Kapur, “The Kashmir Dispute,” in Ganguly and Scobell, eds., Handbook of Asian
Security, p. 103.
35. Hari Singh also may have delayed his decision in the hope that he could somehow
strike a bargain with India and Pakistan by which Kashmir would retain its inde-
pendence. See Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 9.
36. See Robert G. Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1998), pp. 46–53; Alex Van Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of
the End of an Empire (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 285; Judith M. Brown,
Nehru: A Political Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 177–79; and
Sharif al Mujahid, ed., In Quest of Jinnah: Diary, Notes, and Correspondence of Hector
Bolitho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 84.
37. Akbar Khan, Raiders in Kashmir (Karachi: Pak Publishers Limited, 1970), pp. 10–13.
38. Ibid. See also Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 43–4 6; and Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and
the Kashmir Dispute, pp. 42–4 6.
39. Victoria Scholfield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan, and the Unending War
(London: I. B. Taurus, 2000), pp. 41–42.
40. See Khan, Raiders in Kashmir, pp. 11–23; Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 42–49; Jamal,
Shadow War, pp. 45–50, 56; and Andrew Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir (New
Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2007). See also Shuja Nawaz, “The First Kashmir War
Revisited,” India Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April–June 2008), pp. 115–5 4.
156
( 156 ) Notes
41. Khan, Raiders, pp. 12–14, 16, 20; C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947-
1948 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), pp. 38–39; and Whitehead, A Mission in
Kashmir, pp. 136–37.
42. Nawaz, Crossed Swords, p. 48.
43. See Khan, Raiders, p. 22.
44. See Haqqani, Pakistan, p. 29; Margaret Bourke-W hite, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on
the New India in the Words and Photographs of Margaret Bourke-W hite (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1949), pp. 207–8; and Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir, chapters 3 and 7.
45. Author’s personal communication with Andrew Whitehead, January 2011.
46. See Kapur, “The Kashmir Dispute,” pp. 103–4.
47. Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 48–68.
48. Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003), p. 41. See also Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-
Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 15–30.
49. See Jawaharlal Nehru, “Facts Relating to Kashmir,” Press Conference Statements in
New Delhi, January 2, 1948, in Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence and After: A Collection
of Speeches, 1946-1949 (New York: John Day Company, 1950), pp. 66, 69.
50. Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, pp. 306–7; Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy, p. 111.
51. Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, pp. 295, 302–3. See also Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), pp. 447–50, 504; Narendra Singh Sarila, Once a
Prince of Sarila: Of Palaces and Tiger Hunts, of Nehrus and Mountbattens (London: I. B.
Taurus, 2008), pp. 286–87. Note that Mountbatten later believed that Britain had gone
too far in support of the Pakistanis and urged his government to adopt an approach
more sensitive to Indian interests. See Ziegler, Mountbatten, p. 450.
52. The resolution required the Indians to withdraw from Kashmir as well, but only
after the Pakistanis had done so. See United Nations Security Council Resolution 47
(1948), https://w ww.mtholyoke.edu/acad/i ntrel/k ashun47.htm
53. Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute, p. 64.
54. Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan, and the Secret Jihad, p. 26; and Ziring, Pakistan, pp.
40–41.
CHAPTER 4
1. Khan, Raiders, pp. 125–2 6; and Jamal, Shadow War, pp. 71–73.
2. Jamal, Shadow War, pp. 72–73; and Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad,
pp. 34–37.
3. Gul Hassan Khan, Memoirs of Lt. Gen. Gul Hassan Khan (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford
University Press, 1993) pp. 115–17; and Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 205–6 .
4. See Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir, pp. 49–53; Bose, Kashmir, pp. 78–83; and
M. Rafique Afzal, Pakistan: History and Politics, 1947-1971 (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford
University Press, 2001), pp. 302–3.
5. Afzal, Pakistan: History and Politics, pp. 276– 78, 303– 5; Safdar Mahmood,
Pakistan: Political Roots & Development, 1947- 1999 (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 204–9; Ganguly, Conflict Unending, pp. 40–43; Brown,
Nehru; Ziring, Pakistan, pp. 103–4; Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir, pp. 53–55; and
Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, p. 104. Ironically, the purpose of the Pakistanis’ study of
guerilla warfare at US military institutions was to learn how to fight against insurgents,
rather than to develop expertise in supporting them. See Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan,
p. 104. For a detailed overview of developments in Pakistani thinking during this
period regarding the use of militants see Fair, Fighting to the End, pp. 227–38.
6. Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts, pp. 120–22; Khan, Memoirs, pp. 116–17, 180–81; Afzal,
Pakistan: History and Politics, pp. 306–7; and Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 206–7.
7. Khan, Memoirs, pp. 168–69.
157
Notes ( 157 )
8. Ministry of Defence, Government of India, S. N. Prasad and U. P. Thapliyal, eds., The
India-Pakistan War of 1965: A History (Dehra Dun: Natraj Publishers, 2011), pp. 51–52.
9. Afsir Karim, “The 1965 War: Lessons Yet to Be Learnt,” http://w ww.rediff.com/cms/
print.jsp?docpath=/news/2 005/sep/19war.htm; and Nawaz, Crossed Swords, p. 206.
10. Khan, Memoirs, pp. 178–82.
11. See Sumit Ganguly, “Deterrence Failure Revisited: The Indo-Pakistani Conflict of
1965,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (December 1990), pp. 77–93; Russell
Brines, The Indo-Pakistani Conflict (New York: Pall Mall, 1968), pp. 301–2; and
Shaukat Qadir, “1965: Operation Grand Slam,” Daily Times, October 4, 2003. Note
that, although the Pakistani strategy consisted of two phases, Gibraltar and Grand
Slam, Gibraltar was the centerpiece of Pakistan’s effort. It was the Gibraltar force that
would actually infiltrate Kashmir, stoke an uprising, and capture the territory for the
Pakistanis. Operation Grand Slam was designed largely to prevent Indian interference
in this project, cutting Kashmir off from India and thereby ensuring that India could
not undo the gains that the Gibraltar militants had already made.
12. Prasad and Thapliyal, The India Pakistan War of 1965, p. 56.
13. See Sumit Ganguly, “Explaining the Kashmir Insurgency: Political Mobilization and
Institutional Decay,” International Security, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 1996), pp. 76–107;
Bose, Kashmir, p. 84; Prasad and Thapliyal, The India-Pakistan War of 1965, p. 56;
Afzal, Pakistan: History and Politics, p. 307; and Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 207–8.
14. Edgar O’Ballance, “The India- Pakistan Campaign, 1965,” Royal United Service
Institution Journal, Vol. 111, No. 644 (November 1966), pp. 330–35; Khan, Memoirs,
pp. 182–85; and Ganguly, Conflict Unending, pp. 44–4 6.
15. The Indians did not attempt to launch punishment operations against Pakistan dur-
ing the 1965 war. Since there is no evidence that they actively contemplated such
operations, I do not argue that a lack of punishment resulted from the advantages of
Pakistan’s proxy strategy. It seems, rather, that punishment was simply a nonissue dur-
ing this conflict.
16. Of course, the Indians did discover the Pakistani infiltration and move to seal the Line
of Control, thereby preventing the further entry of militants into Indian territory. By
this point, however, a sizeable militant force had already infiltrated Indian Kashmir. It
is highly unlikely that Pakistan would have been able to enter Kashmir with an equally
large conventional military force.
17. Prasad and Thapliyal, The India-Pakistan War of 1965, p. 60.
18. O’Ballance, “The India-Pakistan Campaign,” p. 332; Nawaz, Crossed Swords, p. 208;
and Prasad and Thapliyal, The India-Pakistan War of 1965, p. 81.
19. Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts, p. 112; Talbot, Pakistan, pp. 176–77; and Nawaz, Crossed
Swords, p. 207.
20. This supports my point in c hapter 2 regarding the differences between militants and
special operations forces. The officers in charge of the Gibraltar force were special-
operations personnel, drawn from the Pakistan Army’s Special Services Group. They
were impeded, however, by their lack of local skills and knowledge—skills and knowl-
edge that the militants possessed. As I argued, militants will often have an advantage
over special operations forces, and sponsor states may find them preferable for this
reason.
21. Nawaz, Crossed Swords, p. 208; and Afzal, Pakistan: History and Politics, p. 307.
22. Khan, Memoirs, pp. 223–25.
23. Both India and Pakistan did make use of nonstate actors during the Bangladesh con-
flict. India supported Mukti Bahini insurgents fighting the East Pakistani government,
while Pakistan supported a number of opposing militant groups, such as the al-Shams
and al-Badr brigades. As I explain later, however, nonstate actors served primarily as
force multipliers, supporting conventional military operations. They were neither the
primary combatants nor the decisive factor in the conflict. See Richard Sisson and Leo
E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 181–86, 210–13;
158
( 158 ) Notes
Haqqani, Pakistan, pp. 78–80; and Ishtiaq Hossain and Noore Siddiquee, “Islam in
Bangladesh Politics: The Role of Ghulam Azam of Jamaat-I-Islami,” Inter-A sia Cultural
Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (December 2004), pp. 384–9 9.
24. Talbot, Pakistan, pp. 24–25; and Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 8–16.
25. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 188.
26. In East Pakistan, the league won 75 percent of the vote. Sisson and Rose, War and
Secession, p. 32.
27. Stanley Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), pp. 145–49; and Ganguly, Conflict Unending, pp. 53–6 0.
28. The purpose of these groups was not to engage the Indian military, but rather to act as
counterinsurgency forces and target Pakistan’s domestic enemies within the country.
See Haqqani, Pakistan, pp. 79–80.
29. Archer Blood, Cable to Secretary of State William Rodgers, “Selective Genocide,”
March 28, 1971; and Kenneth Keating, Cable to Secretary of State William
Rodgers, “Selective Genocide,” March 29, 1971, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB79/
30. See Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), pp. 49–62, 119–33, 191; Dennis Kux, The United
States and Pakistan 1947- 2000: Disenchanted Allies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001), pp. 186–88; Ziring, Pakistan, pp. 124–25; and Ganguly, Conflict
Unending, p. 61. Significantly, the Pakistan government’s Hamoodur Commission,
which subsequently investigated the army’s conduct during Operation Searchlight,
determined “it is clear that during and after the military action excesses were indeed
committed on the people of East Pakistan” by the Pakistan Army. It recommended
the trial and punishment of those personnel involved for “acts of wanton cruelty and
immorality against our own people.” See Hamoodur Commission Supplementary
Report (1974), as declassified by the Government of Pakistan, pp. 36–37, http://i mg.
dunyanews.tv/i mages/docss/hamoodur_rahman_commission_report.pdf
31. Ganguly, Conflict Unending, pp. 61–62; and Sisson and Rose, War and Secession,
pp. 207–8.
32. Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 181–86; Ganguly, Conflict Unending, p. 62;
Jones, Pakistan, p. 169; and Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 283, 299–300.
33. Department of State Telegram, Sydney Sober to William P. Rodgers, “Conversation
with Pak Army Chief of Staff: Indo-Pak Military Confrontation,” August 11, 1971,
in Roedad Khan, ed., The American Papers: Secret and Confidential India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh Documents: 1965-1973 (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 641; Bass, The Blood Telegram, pp. 267–68; Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 298–
99; and Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 214.
34. See John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1983), pp. 35–43 and 205–6 .
35. Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2002), pp. 335–37; and Bass, The Blood Telegram, pp. 250–57.
36. Nawaz, Crossed Swords; and Ganguly, Conflict Unending, p. 68.
37. Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 301–2 .
38. See Ganguly, Conflict Unending, pp. 67–69; and Sisson and Rose, War and Secession,
pp. 230–3 4.
39. Hasan-A skari Rizvi, “Pakistan’s Defense Policy,” in Mehrunnisa Ali, ed., Readings in
Pakistan Foreign Policy, 1971-1978 (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2001),
pp. 210–11; and Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 233.
40. Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 67– 68; Shahid Amin, Pakistan’s Foreign
Policy: A Reappraisal (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 72; and
Rizvi, “Pakistan’s Defense Policy,” in Ali, ed., Readings in Pakistan Foreign Policy,
p. 211. See also Hamoodur Rehman Commission Supplementary Report.
41. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Speech at Lahore Airport, June 28, 1972.
42. See Text of Simla Agreement, http://w ww.mea.gov.in/i n-focus-a rticle.htm?19005/
Simla+Agreement+July+2+1972
159
Notes ( 159 )
43. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Speech at Pakistani Institute of International Affairs, Karachi,
July 31, 1972.
44. Quoted in Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto, p. 195.
45. Ibid., pp. 191–92.
46. Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, p. 54; Ganguly, Conflict Unending, pp. 71–72; and
S. M. Burke and Lawrence Ziring, Pakistan’s Foreign Policy: An Historical Analysis
(Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 420–21.
47. Ziring, Pakistan, pp. 164–65, 171, 183, 184–85; Talbot, Pakistan, pp. 270–83; Shahid
Javed Burki, Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999),
pp. 51–53; Mir Zohair Hussain, “Islam in Pakistan Under Bhutto and Zia-u l-Haq,” in
Hussin Mutalib and Taj ul-Islam Hashmi, eds., Islam, Muslims, and the Modern State
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), pp. 60–68; Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism,
pp. 103–7; Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, The Armed Forces of Pakistan (New York: New York
University Press, 2001), p. 150; Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, p. 19; Craig Baxter,
“Restructuring the Pakistan Political System,” in Shahid Javed Burki and Baxter, eds.,
Pakistan Under the Military: Eleven Years of Zia ul-Haq (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991),
pp. 29–30; and Haqqani, Pakistan, pp. 131–57. Note that, in addition to promoting
national unity, Zia hoped that Islamicization would increase his personal legitimacy
after his execution of Bhutto. See William L. Richter, “The Political Dynamics of
Islamic Resurgence in Pakistan,” Asian Survey, Vol. 19, No. 6 (June 1979), pp. 551–
52; Aqil Shah, “Pakistan’s ‘Armored’ Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 4
(October 2003), p. 33; and John L. Esposito and John Obert Voll, Islam and Democracy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 109.
48. Jahan Dad Khan, Pakistan Leadership Challenges (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p. 167; and Cheema, The Armed Forces, p. 147.
49. Muhammed Zia ul-Haq, “Foreword,” in Malik, The Quranic Concept of War.
50. Ibid.
51. Rizvi, Military, State and Society, pp. 245– 2 6; and Hussain, Frontline Pakistan,
pp. 19–2 0.
52. Ziring, Pakistan, pp. 131–32. See also Vali Nasr, “National Identities and the India-
Pakistan Conflict,” in T. V. Paul, ed., The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 178–2 01; and Shaikh, Making
Sense of Pakistan, p. 187.
53. Feroz Hasan Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), p. 87.
54. See Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 72–73.
55. Ibid., pp. 32–63.
56. Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010), pp. 225–38; and Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless
War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2001), pp. 54–58.
57. The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, known as the Durand Line, was drawn
in 1895 to separate Afghanistan from British India. Since 1947, Pakistan has con-
sidered the line to mark its border with Afghanistan. Afghan leaders, however, have
refused to formalize it. See Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi, “Introduction,” in Crews
and Tarzi, eds., The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), pp. 16–17; and Barfield, Afghanistan, pp. 153–55. Although
a direct Soviet attack on Pakistan was possible, Pakistani leaders thought that the
Soviets were far more likely to have designs on access to the Iranian port of Chah Bahar
on the Arabian Sea than on Pakistani territory. Thus, they believed that Iran was prob-
ably in more direct military danger as the result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
than was Pakistan. Still, the Soviets’ presence on the Pakistani border was worrisome,
particularly in light of possible Indo-Soviet cooperation jointly to threaten Pakistan.
See Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, pp. 36–39; and Talbot, Pakistan, p. 268. See
also Deepa M. Ollapally, “The Evolution of India’s Relations with Russia: Tried, Tested,
and Searching for Balance,” in Sumit Ganguly, ed., India’s Foreign Policy: Retrospect
160
( 160 ) Notes
and Prospect (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 227–29; and Mahmood,
Pakistan: Political Roots and Development, pp. 210–22.
58. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, pp. 234–42; Talbot, Pakistan, p. 249; Nawaz,
Crossed Swords, p. 370; Robert G. Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, 1977–
1988: The Policy Imperatives of a Peripheral Asian State (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1991), pp. 34–37; and Tanner, Afghanistan, p. 250.
59. Marvin G. Weinbaum, “The Politics of Afghan Resettlement and Rehabilitation,” Asian
Survey, Vol. 29, No. 3 (March 1989), pp. 287–307; Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, “Impact of
the Afghan War on Pakistan,” in Ali, ed., Readings in Pakistan Foreign Policy, pp. 333–
39; and Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, pp. 43–4 4.
60. Ahmed Rashid, “The Afghan Conundrum,” in Maleeha Lodhi, ed., Pakistan: Beyond
the “Crisis State” (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 312–14;
Ziring, “Weak State, Failed State, Garrison State,” p. 184; Goodson, Afghanistan’s
Endless War, p. 165; Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, pp. 200–8; Cohen, The Idea of
Pakistan, pp. 190, 195; and Fair et al., Pakistan, pp. 110–12.
61. Rizwan Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 61–75, 78–80; and Imtiaz Gul, The World’s Most
Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier (New York: Viking, 2009), pp. 2–3.
62. Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, pp. 27–2 8, 54.
63. Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 81, 83; Max Boot, Invisible Armies: An
Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Liveright,
2013), pp. 495–98; Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 258; Talbot, Pakistan,
pp. 268–69; and Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, p. 54.
64. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, pp. 252–53, 262; Swami, India, Pakistan, and the
Secret Jihad, pp. 144–45; Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, p. 38; and Tanner,
Afghanistan, p. 250.
65. Tanner, Afghanistan, p. 247; Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, pp. 50, 64; and
Barfield, Afghanistan, pp. 237–38.
66. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, pp. 64–67; Tanner, Afghanistan, p. 255; and
Lester W. Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
(New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 77, 201.
67. Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau, The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen
Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War (Quantico, VA: United States Marine Corps Studies
and Analysis Division, 1995), pp. XX, 3, 37; Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain,
pp. 135, 197–98, 202; Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, pp. 66–67; Barfield,
Afghanistan, p. 235; and Bruce Reidel, “Comparing the U.S. and Soviet Experiences in
Afghanistan,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 2, No. 5 (May 2009), p. 2.
68. Tanner, Afghanistan, pp. 264–65; Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 281; Milt
Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown
with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 241–4 6; and Rafael Reuveny
and Aseem Prakash, “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union,”
Review of International Studies, Vol. 25 (1999), p. 697.
69. Tanner, Afghanistan, pp. 266–67; Bearden and Risen, The Main Enemy, pp. 246–5 4;
and Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 281.
70. Reuveny and Prakash, “The Afghanistan War,” pp. 697–98, 705–6 .
71. Ibid, pp. 697–98; Artemy Kalinovsky, “Decision-Making and the Soviet War in
Afghanistan,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 60–61; Tanner,
Afghanistan, p. 268; “Text of Gorbachev Statement Setting Forth Soviet Position on
Afghan War,” New York Times, February 9, 1988.
72. See Bill Keller, “Last Soviet Soldiers Leave Afghanistan,” New York Times, February
16, 1989.
73. Ziring, The War in Afghanistan, pp. 64, 54.
74. This account draws on Arif Jamal’s interviews of senior Pakistani military officers and
Kashmiri leaders close to Zia, including Maulana Abdul Bari, founding amir of Jamat-
i-Islami of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. They are discussed in Jamal, Shadow War, and in
161
Notes ( 161 )
S. Paul Kapur’s conversations with Jamal, New Brunswick, New Jersey, February 2011.
See also Shaun Gregory, “The ISI and the War on Terrorism,” Brief No. 28 (Pakistan
Security Research Unit, January 24, 2008), pp. 4–7; Christophe Jaffrelot, “A Fruitless
Search for Democracy,” in Jaffrelot, ed., A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, pp. 79–
80; and Bruce Reidel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global
Jihad (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011), p. 26.
75. Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, p. 56.
76. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden,
from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 60–
74; Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan–The Bear Trap (Havertown,
PA: Casemate, 1991), pp. 81, 96, 98, 117; Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan,
pp. 252–53, 274; Swami, India, Pakistan, and the Secret Jihad, pp. 144–45; and Abbas,
Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, p. 110.
77. Jamal, Shadow War, p. 112.
78. Ibid., pp. 109–12, 126–2 8; Kapur’s discussion with Jamal; and S. Paul Kapur’s dis-
cussion with a senior Indian counterinsurgency force field commander and a retired
senior Indian intelligence officer, New Delhi, September 2010.
79. Swami, India, Pakistan, and the Secret Jihad, p. 142; and Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant
Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000).
80. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, p. 68; and Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 377–79.
CHAPTER 5
1. See Ganguly, “Explaining the Kashmir Insurgency”; Ashutosh Varshney, “India,
Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism,” Asian Survey, Vol. 31, No. 11
(1991), pp. 1014–17; Anand Mohan, “The Historical Roots of the Kashmir Conflict,”
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1992), pp. 302–3; and Simon Jones,
“India, Pakistan, and Counterinsurgency Operations in Jammu and Kashmir,” Small
Wars & Insurgencies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2008), pp. 5–6 .
2. Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir, pp. 96–9 7; and Sten Widmalm, “The Rise and Fall of
Democracy in Jammu and Kashmir,” Asian Survey, Vol. 37, No. 11 (1997), pp. 1009–23.
3. Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir, pp. 98–9 9.
4. Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, pp. 160–63.
5. Ibid., pp. 162–63.
6. Jones, “Counterinsurgency Operations in Jammu and Kashmir,” pp. 8–9.
7. Jamal, Shadow War, pp. 128–30; Kapur’s discussion with Jamal; and Kapur’s dis-
cussion with a senior counterinsurgency force field commander and a retired senior
Indian intelligence officer.
8. See Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir, pp. 65– 73; Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and
the Kashmir Dispute, pp. 113–18; Bose, Kashmir, pp. 107–35; and Iffatt Malik,
Kashmir: Ethnic Conflict International Dispute (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), pp. 158–6 0, 283.
9. Jagmohan, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2002),
pp. 518–19.
10. Figures from South Asian Terrorism Portal, http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/coun-
tries/i ndia/states/jandk/data_sheets/casualtiesmilitency.htm
11. See text of Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (1987), http://w ww.
satp.org/satporgtp/countries/i ndia/document/actandordinances/TADA.HTM
12. Amnesty International, “India: The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention)
Act: The Lack of Scrupulous Care” (November 1984), pp. 1–4.
13. Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War
(London: I. B. Taurus, 2003), pp. 156–57, 168–70; and Asia Watch and Physicians
162
( 162 ) Notes
for Human Rights, The Human Rights Crisis in Kashmir: A Pattern of Impunity
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993).
14. Schofield, Kashmir, p. 169.
15. Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, pp. 166–67.
16. Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, “Our Ideology” and “Our Aims and Objectives,”
http://jklfajkgbzone.org/i ndex.php/2 012-11-2 3-13-2 4-14/2 012-12-0 2-19-0 8-3 4/
our-ideology and http://jklfajkgbzone.org/i ndex.php/2 012-11-23-13-2 4-14/2 012-12-
02-19-08-3 4/our-a ims-a nd-objectives
17. Bose, “The JKLF and the JKHM,” in Heiberg et al., eds., Terror, Insurgency, and the
State, pp. 232–3 4; and Kapur’s discussion with a senior Indian counterinsurgency
force field commander and retired senior Indian intelligence officer.
18. Jamal, Shadow War, p. 146.
19. Ibid., p. 143. See also Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, pp. 178–80; and
Navnita Chadha Behera, Demystifying Kashmir (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 2006), pp. 151–67.
20. See Bose, “The JKLF and JKHM,” pp. 237–38; John R. Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan
in the Age of Jihad (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 81–82; Schofield,
Kashmir in Conflict, pp. 157, 174–75; and Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, p. 25.
21. Data from South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/
india/states/jandk/data_sheets/casualtiesmilitency.htm
22. Bose, Kashmir, p. 133–35; Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, pp. 198–9 9; Shale Horowitz
and Deepti Sharma, “Democracies Fighting Ethnic Insurgencies: Evidence from
India,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 31, No. 8 (2008), pp. 767–68; and Jones,
“Counterinsurgency Operations in Jammu and Kashmir,” pp. 14–15.
23. S. Paul Kapur’s discussion with Indian counterinsurgency force field commander, New
Delhi, September 2010.
24. Security force deaths, however, remained high, at nearly 260. Figures from South
Asia Terrorism Portal, http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/i ndia/states/jandk/
data_sheets/casualtiesmilitency.htm
25. Schmidt, The Unraveling, pp. 84–85; Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad,
pp. 180, 189–9 0; Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, pp. 56–57; and Kapur’s discussion with a
senior Indian counterinsurgency force field commander.
26. S. Paul Kapur’s discussion with Indian counterinsurgency force field commander
and senior retired intelligence official, New Delhi, September 2010; Tankel, Storming
the World Stage, pp. 51–5 4; and Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,
pp. 287–89.
27. For profiles of these groups, see Muhammad Amir Rana, A to Z of Jehadi Organizations
in Pakistan, trans. Saba Ansari (Lahore: Marshall Books, 2004); and Santhanam,
Sreedhar, Saxena, and Manish, Jihadis in Kashmir.
28. Tankel, Storming the World’s Stage, pp. 40–4 4.
29. Ibid., pp. 60–61.
30. Lashkar- e -
Taiba was not the only militant organization to employ fedayeen
attacks. Other groups, such as Jaish-e -Mohammed, used these tactics as well.
LeT, however, is recognized as having pioneered fedayeen operations. See Bose,
Kashmir, pp. 140–47; Tankel, Storming the World’s Stage, p. 63; Praveen Swami,
“Lashkar Honed Fidayeen Skills in Srinagar Attacks,” Hindu, December 1, 2008;
C. Christine Fair, “Antecedents and Implications of the November 2008 Lashkar-
e-Taiba (LeT) Attack upon Several Targets in the Indian Mega-City of Mumbai,”
RAND, Testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, March 11,
2009, http://w ww.rand.org/c ontent/d am/r and/pubs/testimonies/2 009/RA ND_
CT320.pdf, p. 8.
31. Tankel, Storming the World’s Stage, pp. 63–6 4.
32. Figures from South Asian Terrorism Portal, http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/coun-
tries/i ndia/states/jandk/data_sheets/casualtiesmilitency.htm
33. See Arif Ashfaq v. State of NCT of Delhi, Supreme Court of India, August 10, 2011,
pp. 1–4.
163
Notes ( 163 )
( 164 ) Notes
Notes ( 165 )
pp. 90–93; Seymour M. Hersh, “The Getaway,” New Yorker, January 28, 2002; and
Press Trust of India, “India Protests Airlift of Pak Fighters from Kunduz, Fears They
Will Enter Kashmir,” Indian Express, January 2002.
68. See Jayshree Bajoria and Eben Kaplan, “The ISI and Terrorism: Behind the
Accusations,” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder, May 4, 2011, http://
www.cfr.org/pakistan/i si-terrorism-behind-accusations/p11644; Matt Waldman,
“The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents,”
London School of Economics, Crisis States Research Centre, Discussion Paper 18,
June 2010, pp. 12–17; Bruce O. Riedel, “A New Pakistan Policy: Containment,”
New York Times, October 14, 2011; Peter Tomsen, “Pakistan: With Friends Like
These …,” World Policy Journal, Vol. 28, No. 82 (2011): pp. 86–88; Thomas F. Lynch
III, “The 80 Percent Solution: The Strategic Defeat of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and
Implications for South Asian Security,” in Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann,
eds., Talibanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 406–8; and Adrian
Hänni and Lukas Hegi, “The Pakistani Godfather: The Inter-Services Intelligence
and the Afghan Taliban 1994-2 010,” Small Wars Journal, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2013),
pp. 6–11.
69. Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-
2012 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 152–55; Anand Gopal, Mansur
Khan Mashud, and Brian Fishman, “The Taliban in North Waziristan,” in Bergen
and Tiedemann, eds., Talibanistan, pp. 132–38; Jeffrey A. Dressler, “The Haqqani
Network: From Pakistan to Afghanistan,” Institute for the Study of War, Afghanistan
Report, October 6, 2010, http://w ww.understandingwar.org/sites/default/fi les/
Haqqani_ Network_Compressed_0.pdf, pp. 9, 11– 12; Jeffrey A. Dressler, “The
Haqqani Network: A Strategic Threat,” Institute for the Study of War, Afghanistan
Report 9, March 2012, http://w ww.understandingwar.org/report/haqqani-network-
strategic-t hreat, pp. 11–15; and Eric Schmitt, “White House Backs Blacklisting
Militant Organization,” New York Times, September 6, 2012.
70. Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, pp. 162–81; and Dressler, “The Haqqani
Network: A Strategic Threat,” p. 8.
71. Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 201–
4; Waldman, “The Sun in the Sky,” pp. 1–2 6; Seth G. Jones, “Pakistan’s Dangerous
Game,” Survival, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 17–19; and Dressler, “The Haqqani
Network,” p. 37.
72. Senate Armed Services Committee, “Statement of Admiral Michael Mullen,”
September 22, 2011, p. 3.
73. Department of Defense Press Briefing by General Joseph F. Dunford on Operations in
Afghanistan in the Pentagon Briefing Room on Afghanistan, March 13, 2014, http://
www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=5392
74. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report 2006-2 007, p. 143.
75. Ibid.
76. This is not to argue that India never succeeded in preventing militant infiltration, cap-
turing militants in its territory, or thwarting ongoing militant operations. It did so on
many occasions. My point is simply that, despite some successes, India failed at these
tasks much of the time. This resulted in thousands of militant infiltrations and attacks,
as well as well over one thousand civilian and security-force deaths per year.
77. Department of Defense, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in
Afghanistan,” December 2012, pp. 3, 18. See also p. 21.
78. Ibid., p. 152.
79. See Seth G. Jones, “Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,” RAND, Counterinsurgency
Study, Vol. 4, 2008, pp. 54–61; Seth G. Jones, “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?
Allowing a Sanctuary in Pakistan,” Foreign Policy, March 5, 2013; Thomas H. Johnson
and M. Chris Mason, “No Sign Until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan-
Afghanistan Frontier,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2008), pp. 43–58;
Steven Metz, “Destroy the Taliban’s Sanctuary,” Joint Forces Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 3
(2009), p. 62; Gilles Dorronsoro, “Afghanistan: The Impossible Transition,” Carnegie
166
( 166 ) Notes
Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Papers, June 2011, pp. 15–17; Antonio
Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 190, 202; Jason Motlagh, “The
Taliban’s Changing, and Deadly, Tactics,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, July
1, 2010, http://pulitzercenter.org/a rticles/talibans-changing-a nd-deadly-tactics-
afghanistan; Thomas H. Johnson, “Taliban Adaptations and Innovations,” Small Wars
& Insurgencies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2013), p. 6; Kenneth Katzman, “Afghanistan: Post-
Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service,
RL30588, March 4, 2014, p. 17; Tom V. Brook, “Afghan Insurgent Tactics Shift to
Dodge Airstrikes,” USA Today, January 20, 2009; Fred Kaplan, “The Insurgent’s
Playbook,” Slate, February 27, 2012, http://w ww.slate.com/a rticles/news_ a nd_
politics/ w ar_ s tories/ 2 012/ 0 2/ t he_ k illing _ o f_ t wo_ a merican_ o fficers_ i n_
afghanistan_ i s_destroying_t he_t rust_ needed_to_ rebuild_t he_c ountry _. html;
Dressler, “The Haqqani Network: A Strategic Threat,” pp. 31–35; Johnson, “Taliban
Adaptations,” pp. 7–8, 10–2 0; Department of Defense, “Report on Progress Toward
Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” p. 152; Defense Casualty Analysis System,
“U.S. Military Casualties—Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Casualty Summary
by Casualty Category,” https://w ww.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_oef_t ype.
xhtml; and Susan Chesser, “Afghanistan Casualties: Military Forces and Civilians,”
Congressional Research Service, December 6, 2010, pp. 2–4.
80. In Musharraf ’s Words: “A Day of Reckoning,” New York Times, January 12, 2002.
CHAPTER 6
1. Olivier Roy, “Islam and Foreign Policy: Central Asia and the Arab-Persian World,” in
Jaffrelot, ed., A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, p. 137.
2. See Mumtaz Ahmad, “The Crescent and the Sword: Islam, the Military, and Political
Legitimacy in Pakistan, 1977-1985,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Summer
1996), pp. 381–86.
3. Jean-Luc Racine, “Living with India: Relations Between Pakistan and India,” in
Jaffrelot, ed., A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, p. 115.
4. Tariq Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (New York: Random House,
1984); Rashid, Descent into Chaos, pp. 33–37; National Intelligence Council, Global
Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington, DC: US Government Printing
Office, 2008), pp. 45, 72; and Ahmad Faruqui, “Can Pakistan Survive?” Outlook India,
January 23, 2009.
5. Talbot, Pakistan, p. 368.
6. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, p. 270; and Christophe Jaffrelot, “Nationalism Without
a Nation: Pakistan Searching for Its Identity,” in Jaffrelot, ed., Pakistan: Nationalism
Without a Nation (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 7.
7. S. Paul Kapur’s discussion with a senior serving Pakistani military officer (2013).
8. See Shah, The Army and Democracy, pp. 14–15; Haroon K. Ullah, Vying for Allah’s
Vote: Understanding Islamic Parties, Political Violence, and Extremism in Pakistan
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014), p. 25; Niaz, The Culture of
Power and Governance in Pakistan, p. 190; Ziad Haider, “Ideologically Adrift,” in Lodhi,
ed., Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,” p. 123; and Aminah Mohammad-A rif, “The
Diversity of Islam,” in Jaffrelot, ed., A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, pp. 233–3 4.
9. See South Asia Terrorism Portal, “Jammu and Kashmir Data Sheets: Fatalities in
Terrorist Violence Since 1988,” http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/i ndia/
states/jandk/data_sheets/a nnual_casualties.htm; and Correlates of War Project, Inter-
State War Data, ver. #4.0, http://w ww.correlatesofwar.org/
10. South Asia Terrorism Portal, “Jammu and Kashmir Data Sheets.” Indian civilian losses
in its other conflicts with Pakistan were negligible. As Ganguly points out, these wars
167
Notes ( 167 )
were fought by “gentlemen’s rules,” which eschewed the use of violence against non-
combatants. See Sumit Ganguly, “Wars Without End: The Indo-Pakistani Conflict,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 541 (1995),
pp. 167–78.
11. Although India would have to maintain some troop presence in Jammu and Kashmir
even under normal conditions, its current commitment is far larger than would be nec-
essary in the absence of the rebellion.
12. Human Rights Watch, India’s Secret Army in Kashmir: New Patterns of Abuse Emerge
in the Conflict, Vol. 8, No. 4 (May 1996). See also Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and the
Kashmir Dispute, pp. 154–62; and Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, pp. 168–72.
13. For example, the United Nations has, since 1947, maintained a military observer group
in Kashmir, and the United States has recently broached the idea of helping the two
sides to resolve the Kashmir dispute. See United Nations Military Observer Group in
India and Pakistan, http://w ww.un.org/en/peacekeeping/m issions/u nmogip/; and
Chidanand Rajghatta, “Obama Mulls Clinton as Special Envoy on Kashmir,” Times of
India, November 7, 2008.
14. See, for example, Ken Dilanian and David S. Cloud, “U.S. Intelligence Reports Cast
Doubt on War Progress in Afghanistan,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2010.
General David Petraeus characterized coalition progress against the Taliban as “frag-
ile and reversible.” Statement of Gen. David H. Petraeus before the House Armed
Services Committee on Afghanistan, March 16, 2011.
15. Susan B. Epstein and K. Alan Kronstadt, “Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance,”
Congressional Research Service Report (July 2013), pp. 10–11.
16. See T. V. Paul, South Asia’s Weak States: Understanding the Regional Security Predicament
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 5.
17. The TTP’s three main goals are to enforce Sharia, battle coalition forces in Afghanistan,
and engage in defensive jihad against the Pakistan Army. See Qandeel Siddique,
“Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan: An Attempt to Deconstruct the Umbrella Organization
and the Reasons for Its Growth in Pakistan’s North-West,” Danish Institute for
International Studies Report, Volume 12 (2010), pp. 4–8; and Fair and Jones,
“Pakistan’s War Within,” pp. 162–69, 173–78, 182.
18. Rob Crilly, “Peace Talks Collapse as Taliban Execute 23 Pakistani Soldiers,”
Telegraph, February 17, 2014; Karen DeYoung, “Pakistan Plans Military Operation
in North Waziristan, Targeting Extremist Groups,” Washington Post, February 25,
2014; Fair et al., Pakistan, pp. 94–95; and Siddique, “Tehrik-e -Taliban Pakistan,”
pp. 71–7 2.
19. Although it was carried out by an American drone strike, the militants viewed
Meshud’s killing as part of the Pakistani government’s broader campaign against the
Taliban. See Jon Boone, “Pakistani Taliban Claim Karachi Attack and Leave Peace
Talks in Crisis,” Guardian, June 9, 2014.
20. Declan Walsh, “In Drive Against Militants, Pakistani Airstrikes Hit Strongholds,”
New York Times, June 17, 2014. Note that a willingness on the part of some TTP ele-
ments to negotiate with the Sharif government may have led the rest of the group to
demonstrate its opposition to such compromise in dramatic fashion. See Jason Burke,
“Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Asserts Itself After Split by Attacking Karachi Airport,”
Guardian, June 9, 2014.
21. Walsh, “In Drive Against Militants.”
22. Particularly provocative was the Pakistan Army’s 2007 takeover of the Lal Masjid in
Islamabad. Since approximately 70 percent of the Masjid’s students were from the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the militants viewed
the army’s action as a direct affront. This appears to have been a catalytic event in the
founding of the TTP. See Akbar Ahmed, Thistle and Drone: How America’s War on
Terror Became a War on Tribal Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press,
2013); and Saiddique, “Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,” pp. 9–10.
23. Nazar ul Islam, “The Caliphate Cometh: The Pakistani Taliban Open Up,” Newsweek
Pakistan, February 11, 2014.
168
( 168 ) Notes
24. Michael Kugelman, “When the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban Unite,” Foreign Policy,
March 25, 2014, http://southasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2 014/03/25/when_t he_
afghan_a nd_ pakistani_taliban_u nite
25. Saiddique, “Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,” p. 9.
26. Kugelman, “When the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban Unite.”
27. See Khaled Ahmed, “The Fiction of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Taliban,” Friday Times,
September 15, 2012; Fair and Jones, “Pakistan’s War Within,” pp. 162, 181; and Jones,
“Pakistan’s Dangerous Game,” pp. 19–2 0.
28. Tankel, Storming the World Stage, pp. 6, 40–41; and Haqqani, “The Ideologies of South
Asian Jihadi Groups,” pp. 24–25.
29. Kanchan Lakshman, “The Expanding Jihad,” South Asia Intelligence Review, Vol. 6, No.
2 (February 18, 2008), http://w ww.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/A rchives/6 _ 32.htm
30. Lashkar-e-Taiba, “Hum Jihad Kyon Kar Rahein Hein” [Why Do We Wage Jihad?],
S. Paul Kapur trans., p. 2.
31. Lakshman, “The Expanding Jihad.”
32. See Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, pp. 201–4; Cohen, “The Nation and the State of
Pakistan,” pp. 115–16; Gul, The World’s Most Dangerous Place, pp. 16–17, 159–6 0;
Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, pp. 33–75, 110–13; Samina Yasmeen, “Pakistan’s Kashmir
Policy: Voices of Moderation?” Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2003),
p. 12; Ziring, “Weak State, Failed State, Garrison State,” p. 190; John R. Schmidt, The
Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011),
p. 128; “Jaish Behind Attempt to Kill Musharraf,” Daily Times, January 1, 2004; and
Tankel, Storming the World’s Stage, pp. 30, 64.
33. See Clarke, “Lashkar-I-Taiba,” pp. vi, 7–8, 10, 12, 44, 78–79; Fair et al., Pakistan,
pp. 54– 55, 101– 2; Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, pp. 53, 60– 61; Nicholas
Howenstein, “The Jihadi Terrain in Pakistan: An Introduction to the Sunni Jihadi
Groups in Pakistan and Kashmir,” Research Report No. 1 (Pakistan Security Research
Unit, February 5, 2008), p. 21; and Tankel, Storming the World’s Stage, p. 44.
34. Douglas Lynd, The Education System in Pakistan: Assessment of the National Education
Consensus (Islamabad: UNESCO, 2007), pp. 7, 8, 16.
35. Pakistan’s current rate of economic growth—averaging 2.9 percent between 2009 and
2014—is, in the words of the Economist, “dismally low,” creating large-scale unemploy-
ment and “bleak prospects” for the future, particularly for Pakistan’s large youth popu-
lation. “Pakistan’s Economy: The Urdu Rate of Growth,” Economist, February 15, 2014.
36. The proportion of full-time Pakistani schoolchildren attending madrassas is probably under
10 percent. The proportion of children supplementing their educations through mosque
schools is likely to be considerably higher. See Fair, The Madrassah Challenge, p. 10.
37. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
38. Fair et al., Pakistan, p. 124; Pakistan Ministry of Education, “FAQs,” http://w ww.moe.
gov.pk/faqs.htm. See also Jessica Stern, “Pakistan’s Jihad Culture,” Foreign Affairs, Vol.
79, No. 6 (November/December 2000), pp. 115–2 6.
39. Shuja Nawaz and Mohan Guruswamy, “India and Pakistan: The Opportunity Cost of
Conflict” (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, 2014), p. 5.
40. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Military Expenditure Database
2014; and Kamran Yousef, “Defence Budget Hiked by 15 Percent,” Express Tribune,
June 13, 2013.
41. Not surprisingly, Pakistan does not publicize the portion of its defense budget devoted
to supporting militancy. For a detailed discussion of the costs of fielding a militant orga-
nization such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, see Wilson John, The Caliphate’s Soldiers: Lashkar-
e-Tayyeba’s Long War (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011). See also Peter Chalk, “Pakistan’s
Role in the Kashmir Insurgency,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, Vol. 13, No. 9 (September
2001), pp. 26–27.
42. See Zeeshan Haider, “Militancy-H it Pakistan Ups Defense Spending by 17 Percent,”
Reuters, June 5, 2010.
169
Notes ( 169 )
43. See Sood and Sawhney, Operation Parakaram; and Harinder Singh, “Rethinking
India’s Limited War Strategy,” Working Paper (New Delhi: Institute for Defence
Studies and Analysis, December 2010).
44. S. Paul Kapur’s discussions with senior Indian strategists, New Delhi, July and
September 2010; and Ladwig, “A Cold Start for Hot Wars?” pp. 159–6 0, 164–6 6.
45. See Manu Pubby, “No ‘Cold Start’ Doctrine, India Tells U.S.,” Indian Express,
September 9, 2010.
46. S. Paul Kapur’s discussion with senior Indian strategist closely involved with doctrinal
planning, September 2010.
47. World Bank, World Development Indicators: India, http://data.worldbank.org/coun-
try/i ndia; World Bank, World Development Indicators: Pakistan, http://data.world-
bank.org/country/pakistan; World Bank, Global Economic Prospects: South Asia,
http://w ww.worldbank.org/en/publication/g lobal- e conomic-prospects/d ata?vari
able=NYGDPMKTPKDZ®ion=SAS; and “India Likely to Become 3rd Largest
Economy by 2030: Report,” Economic Times, November 6, 2013.
48. See Usman Ansari, “Pakistan Again Boosts Defense Budget, but at a Smaller Rate;”
Defense News, June 5, 2014; and Laxman K. Behera, “India’s Interim Defence Budget
2014-15: An Appraisal,” Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses Comment,
February 23, 2014.
49. S. Paul Kapur, “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia,” International Security,
Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2008), p. 90.
50. Shashank Joshi, “Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Nightmare: Déjà vu?” Washington
Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer 2013), p. 161.
51. Pakistan has traditionally maintained tight, centralized control over its nuclear
weapons. During a crisis, however, lines of communication between the weap-
ons and higher headquarters may get overrun, rendering the weapons unus-
able. To avoid this situation, some form of predelegation of launch authority to
field commanders during a crisis seems likely. See Barry Posen, Inadvertent
Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991), pp. 1–4 ; Khan, Eating Grass, pp. 331-3 32; Rajesh Basrur, “South
Asia: Tactical Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Risk,” RSIS Commentaries 65/
2011, April 27, 2011, pp. 1–2 ; Naeem Salik, “Tactical Nuclear Weapons and
Deterrence Stability,” Working Paper, Naval Postgraduate School (2012), p. 3;
Zafar Jaspal, “Tactical Nuclear Weapon: Deterrence Stability Between India and
Pakistan,” Naval Postgraduate School, Working Paper (2012), p. 9; and Joshi,
“Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Nightmare,” p. 165. This discussion is also based on
the author’s private discussions with Pakistani military officers and strategic ana-
lysts in Islamabad, Pakistan, in December 2011.
52. The development of a tactical nuclear weapons capability can thus be viewed as a
Pakistani precommitment strategy, creating a system in advance that will make it dif-
ficult for Pakistan not to use nuclear weapons in the event of an Indian attack. On pre-
commitment strategies see Schelling, Arms and Influence. Tactical nuclear weapons can
also serve in a denial capacity, defeating attacking forces on the battlefield and thereby
blunting enemy offensives. Recent studies suggest that Pakistani weapons are unlikely
to be effective in this role, however. See Joshi, “Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Nightmare,”
p. 163. In reality, Pakistani tactical nuclear weapons are likely to be most useful as
means of credibly threatening escalation of a conflict from the conventional to the
nuclear level.
53. See Ganguly and Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, pp. 77–78.
54. S. Paul Kapur’s discussions with senior Pakistani military officers, Islamabad, Pakistan,
December 2011. See also Usman Ansari, “Pakistan Tests ‘Nuke-Capable’ Short-R ange
Missile,” Defense News, April 20, 2011; and Rajesh Basrur, “South Asia: Tactical
Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Risk,” No. 65, S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies Commentaries (April 27, 2011), pp. 1–3.
170
( 170 ) Notes
CHAPTER 7
1. See Clarke, “Lashkar-I-Taiba ,” pp. 41–45; Fair et al., Pakistan, pp. 94–100; Gul, The
World’s Most Dangerous Place, pp. 179–86; and Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, pp. 141–53.
2. Saeed Shah, “Pakistan Vows to Target All Militants in Tribal Area,” Wall Street Journal,
July 6, 2014.
3. Saeed Shah, Safdar Dawar, and Adam Entous, “Militants Slip Away Before Pakistan
Offensive,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2014.
4. For a discussion of this point, see Fair, Fighting to the End, pp. 3–4, 18.
5. Although numerous definitions of rationality exist, I define it simply as an actor choos-
ing means that are designed to achieve the ends that the actor seeks. Note that this
definition does not pass judgment on the actor’s preferred ends. The fact that an actor
is pursuing goals that some might consider foolish or undesirable does not make the
actor irrational. Note also that under this definition, an actor’s mistakes or failures do
not preclude rationality. Assuming that the actor behaved in a manner that it believed
was most likely to achieve its desired ends, the actor would be rational, even if it was
ultimately proved to be wrong. For a discussion of rationality in this spirit, see Richard
A. Posner, “Rational Choice, Behavioral Economics, and the Law,” Stanford Law
Review, Vol. 50 (1997), p. 1551, 1553, 1554.
6. Paul, The Warrior State, pp. 17–23, 116–2 6. Theoretically, Paul’s argument is closely
related to an extensive literature on the relationship between natural resource endow-
ments and economic development. As this literature shows, states that are richly
endowed with natural resources, and that depend heavily on their export to gener-
ate gross domestic product, often underperform economically. This “resource curse”
results from a range of causes, including a lack of incentives for leaders to develop
optimal policies and institutions, particularly with respect to rule of law and property
rights; the production and export of resources crowding out other economic sectors
such as manufacturing; problems associated with commodity price volatility on world
markets; and an abundance of natural resources encouraging armed conflict. Paul’s
argument regarding Pakistan’s “geostrategic curse” rests on similar if not identical
logic. See Jeffrey A. Frankel, “The Natural Resource Curse: A Survey,” Working Paper
15836, National Bureau of Economic Research (March 2010), pp. 2–3.
7. This is also the case with the more general resource curse in the economic literature.
The negative correlation between states’ export of natural resources as a percentage
of gross domestic product and economic performance is only modest. In many cases,
states that depend heavily on resource exports perform well economically. Thus, the
most accurate view of the relationship between resources and development is not that
rich resource endowments necessarily lead to poor economic performance. Rather, it
is that rich resource endowments do not necessarily result in economic success. See
Frankel, “The Natural Resource Curse,” p. 3.
8. Between 1946 and 2010, Turkey received over $40 billion in total military assistance
from the United States, ranking it fourth among aid recipients, behind Israel, Vietnam,
and Egypt. Pakistan, by contrast, received over $11 billion during this period. It
ranked twelfth, behind such countries as France, Greece, and Italy. See US Overseas
Loans and Grants, United States Agency for International Development.
9. Paul, Warrior State, pp. 153–63.
10. Fair, Fighting to the End, pp. 6–7.
11. S. Paul Kapur’s discussion with Benazir Bhutto, 2004.
12. Shekhar Gupta, “Playing with Fire,” India Today, May 31, 1990.
13. Pew Global Attitudes Project, “2012 Spring Survey Topline Results,” June 27, 2012,
pp. 47, 53. Popular attitudes toward the militant groups are also fairly lenient. Only
32 percent of Pakistanis favor use of military force against militants in tribal areas.
171
Notes ( 171 )
And only 23 percent of Pakistanis have a “highly unfavorable” view of Lashkar-e-
Taiba, with 41 percent either claiming not to have an opinion or refusing to answer the
question. Ibid., pp. 57–58. It is possible, of course, that some of these public statements
and survey responses have resulted from military pressure. In most cases, however,
they seem unconnected to or even divergent from the military’s views. For example,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto clung to his revisionist position even when Pakistan was in no posi-
tion to pursue change in Kashmir or confront India militarily. Nawaz Sharif has, in
important cases, shown even more tolerance for militants than has the military. And
ordinary Pakistanis responding to polling questions are not under military pressure.
See Victor Mallet and Farhan Bokhari, “Army Support Bolster’s Pakistan’s Nawaz
Sharif,” Financial Times, August 18, 2015.
14. See Azhar Hussain and Ahmad Salim with Arif Naveed, Connecting the Dots: Education
and Religious Discrimination in Pakistan (Washington, DC: US Commission on
Religious Freedom, 2011), pp. 15, 42–4 4, 47–4 8; Tim Craig and Haq Nawaz Khan,
“In Pakistan’s Ideological War over Textbooks, Helen Keller Doesn’t Make the Cut,”
Washington Post, February 14, 2015; and “Kashmir Is Pakistan’s Jugular Vein: Nawaz
Sharif,” Economic Times, February 5, 2015. Despite their concerns regarding Kashmir,
Pakistanis view it as being less important than a host of other problems, such as crime,
lack of employment, and corruption. See Pew Global Attitudes Project, “Pakistani
Public Opinion Ever More Critical of U.S.,” June 27, 2012, p. 23.
15. Naved Hamid, “Rethinking Pakistan’s Development Strategy,” Lahore Journal
of Economics, Special Edition (September 2008), pp. 47–4 8; and Parvez Hasan,
“Learning from the Past: A Fifty-Year Perspective on Pakistan’s Development,”
Pakistan Development Review, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter 1997), p. 356.
16. Hamid, “Rethinking Pakistan’s Development Strategy,” p. 48; and Hasan, “Learning
from the Past,” pp. 358–59.
17. Hamid, “Rethinking Pakistan’s Development Strategy, pp. 47–49.
18. Ibid., p. 49; and Asian Development Bank, Pakistan: Economy, http://w ww.adb.org/
countries/pakistan/economy; World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), http://data.
worldbank.org/i ndicator/N Y.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG
19. See generally S. Akbar Zaidi, “Pakistan’s Roller-Coaster Economy: Tax Evasion Stifles
Growth,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief 88 (September
2010), pp. 1–11.
20. Zaidi, “Pakistan’s Roller-Coaster Economy,” p. 5.
21. Hasan, “Learning from the Past,” p. 356.
22. World Bank, Annual GDP Growth.
23. World Bank, GDP per Capita, World Bank Open Data, http://data.worldbank.org/
indicator/N Y.GDP.PCAP.CD
24. UNICEF, Statistics, India, http://w ww.unicef.org/i nfobycountry/i ndia_statistics.
html; and UNICEF, Statistics, Pakistan, http://w ww.unicef.org/i nfobycountry/paki-
stan_ pakistan_statistics.html
25. Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 24–25, 26.
26. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, pp. 310–11.
27. Paul, Warrior State, pp. 196–9 7.
28. Fair, Fighting to the End, p. 19.
29. Jean-Luc Racine, “Living with India,” in Jaffrelot, ed., A History of Pakistan and Its
Origins, p. 112.
30. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “Power, Ideas, and the End of the Cold
War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3
(Winter 2000/01), pp. 5–53.
31. Robert G. Herman, “Identity, Norms and National Security: The Soviet Foreign Policy
Revolution and the End of the Cold War,” in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of
National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), pp. 271–316.
32. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 348–49; Archie
Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 240–42;
172
( 172 ) Notes
Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War
(Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 180–83; and Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a
New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1991 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998).
33. This is by no means to suggest that Gorbachev’s efforts were wholly successful, or that
today’s Russia comports with the vision of the future that Gorbachev held while he was
in power. It is simply to point out that Gorbachev and his allies were able to respond to
an existential crisis in the Soviet Union by fundamentally changing the meaning and
purpose of the Soviet state.
34. Stephen M. Walt, “International Relations: One World, Many Theories,” Foreign Policy,
Vol. 110 (Spring 1998), pp. 29–4 6.
35. Where violent state behavior results from insecurity, the international relations lit-
erature generally prescribes reassurance, to reduce the state’s motive for violence. See
Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, Vol. 30, No.
2 (January 1978), pp. 176–214.
173
INDE X
( 174 ) Index
Index ( 175 )
( 176 ) Index
Index ( 177 )