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The Coming Wave of ISI-sponsored Terrorism

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ZURICH: The Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan must be pleased. The spy agency has patiently waged a 20-year proxy war against a superpower to a favourable outcome. Its earlier success against the Soviets (1979-89) had been gradually fading from memory. Its subsequent foray against the Indian Army in Jammu and Kashmir did not yield comparable results despite a much longer timeframe. The completeness of American humiliation in Kabul during August 2021 would therefore be a significant morale-booster. Serving ISI spooks can look at their agency’s history and say: we still have what it takes to prevail over a stronger opponent.

For its part, the American nation has been exposed before the world’s news media as an exhausted and confused giant, devoid of stamina for continental warfare. ISI planners can revel in the fact that not only was the United States military, the world’s most powerful, outfought by a tribal insurgency (as opposed to a conventional army), but that it withdrew from Afghanistan while still under fire and that it was compelled to plead with the incoming victors to allow evacuations of its own nationals even as its local allies were left to their painful fates. Not even the Soviets were subjected to the latter two indignities when they left in 1989.

It will now fall upon India to live with the consequences of American defeat. One of these consequences will be a sustained ISI effort to ramp up cross-border terrorism, both in J&K as well as in other parts of India. For years before Kabul fell, there have been reports that the agency’s favoured jihadist proxies Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) had moved cadres to Afghanistan. This shift is thought to have gained further momentum after the 2019 Balakot airstrike by the Indian Air Force. Attacks on Indian nationals had been carried out by LeT using the operational infrastructure of the Haqqani network (the latter was described in 2011 by the then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as a ‘veritable arm of the ISI’).

Consistent Obstructionism

Soon after the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) first appeared in Afghanistan in 2015, it was reportedly suffused with Pakistani nationals, leading to factionalization. One splinter group, under former LeT operative Aslam Farooqi (real name: Abdullah Orakzai) became notorious for violence against minorities. Farooqi was arrested by Afghan security forces in April 2020. Upon his arrest, the Pakistani authorities demanded his extradition, claiming that he was wanted for crimes in Pakistani territory. Through alleged collusion with the British intelligence service MI6, they ensured that when Farooqi was interrogated in Afghan custody, he was not questioned about his possible linkages with the ISI. It is possible that he and other Pakistanis in ISKP are a strategic reserve of the agency, who can be used to quietly eliminate any indigenous Taliban leader who shows too much independence from Pakistani control.

Readers of this article might remember that when Zabiuddin Ansari, an Indian national involved in planning the 26/11 attack in Mumbai, was deported from Saudi Arabia to India in 2012, Islamabad had worked strenuously (albeit unsuccessfully) to halt the deportation, falsely claiming that he was a Pakistani citizen. The same diplomatic-legal obstructionism has characterized more successful recent Pakistani efforts to prevent the deportation of Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company operatives from Thailand and the United Kingdom to India and the United States. Writers who parrot the cliché that ‘Pakistan is a victim of terrorism’ choose to ignore that Islamabad has consistently striven to disrupt Indian counterterrorism efforts.

The fact that most of these disruptions take place far from the glare of the international media does not alter a fundamental reality: Pakistan when it is not sponsoring terrorist attacks outright (an accusation difficult for researchers to substantiate without accessing intelligence data) is at the very least, procedurally shielding international terrorists from the established norms of justice. The fact that those convicted for killing American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 were allowed to remain on death row for 18 years and then quietly acquitted in 2020 demonstrates that the Pakistani state machinery, including the judiciary, is uniquely hospitable to terrorists.

What Now?

With Taliban control over most (if not all) of Afghanistan looking to be a fixture of South Asian power politics for several years to come, the terrorist threat to India will change shape. It will increasingly be Afghan territory, not Pakistani, where key elements of attack planning and preparation will occur and where masterminds will seek temporary refuge if New Delhi asks Islamabad to extradite them. Hence, Indian counterterrorism diplomacy will become a harder job than it already is. Even more worrying, is the mutated and hybridized form that terrorist attacks themselves will assume. They will continue to have elements of state-sponsorship but also will be subject to new transnational (and largely illicit) flows of manpower, material and money. All of these will make it easier for Islamabad to evade jurisdictional responsibility for any particular incident.

In assessing the impact of this hybridizing trend, one might consider three parameters which determine the success level of a ‘spectacular’ terrorist attack, such as 9/11 or 26/11:

  • the physical ability to infiltrate a target
  • the institutional capacity to innovate tactically, and most importantly
  • the degree to which an attack seems ‘illogical’

Even before engaging in such an analysis, one point needs to be reiterated: Savagery is inherent to terrorism. Kabul fell in 2021 partly because its population had been paralyzed by a relentless urban bombing campaign for over a year prior to the Taliban’s entry into the city. The bombings had featured frequent usage of so-called ‘sticky bombs’. These were small-sized improvised explosive devices that were placed on vehicles. They were used to kill both targeted individuals, as well as purely random persons who had no connection to the government apparatus. The latter were seemingly killed only to stoke mass fear and break the population’s faith in the state: a regime unable to protect its citizens would not last for long.

Thus, even an apparent lack of logic to an individual terrorist attack can fit into a larger gameplan, provided one accepts that human life is inherently cheap. There does not need to be a grand purpose behind every incident. Sometimes, a vicious attack might be carried out for the mere psychopathic gratification of the perpetrators and their handlers who lurk in the background, and nothing else. An example is the 12 May 2020 attack on the Darsht-e-Barchi hospital in Kabul. Three gunmen entered the maternity ward. They shot dead 24 people including 16 women who were either about to give birth or had already done so, along with their babies. The attack seemed to have been cold and deliberate in its choice of targets. No group claimed responsibility, since the planners were smart enough to recognise the damaging public relations effects of publicly owning up. But the hidden message got through: the international charity Doctors Without Borders, which was running the ward, ceased its cooperation with the hospital. It recognized that no protection would be forthcoming from the government. Others likely drew the same conclusion.

From an analytical standpoint, the key lesson for threat estimators in coming years is: sometimes an ambitious terrorist project is not linked to geopolitical designs. Sometimes it is just about doing what the planners anyway want to do after having assessed that they would incur no unexpected personal costs. The ISI seems to work according to such a model. Officers of its ‘S Directorate’, the wing responsible for liaison with jihadist groups, appear to work according to the military concept of ‘mission command’. Put simply, this means they are at liberty to self-authorise missions within general parameters issued from above. Mid-rank personnel are freed of the onerous bureaucratic requirement to seek approval for each new initiative. ‘Mission command’ allows the agency’s top leadership to plausibly feign ignorance when called to account for a covert operation that gets exposed or yields blowback, such as 26/11. It can always be put down to over-enthusiastic subordinates or even ‘rogues’.

Having deceived the United States and the rest of the international community for twenty years about its true intentions in Afghanistan, the ISI as a corporate actor will be highly confident about replicating its success in future anti-Indian operations. Consequently, rather than relying on multi-lateral cooperation, India needs to find ways of combating Pakistan-sponsored terrorism unilaterally. To prepare for retaliation while ensuring that it remains proportionate to the threat requires estimating with some degree of precision, what form the threat will take.

A Three-Pronged Offensive: J&K, Indian Public Discourse And Maritime Terrorism

The ISI will likely pursue a three-layer approach to revitalizing terrorist enterprises. First, it will encourage a resurgence of domestic militancy in the Kashmir Valley. The message, disseminated through social media and jihadist cyber-forums, will straightforwardly be: if the Soviet Union and the United States can be defeated by the power of jihad, so can India, a much lesser power. To underscore this message, the ISI will facilitate an induction of American-manufactured war material recovered by the Taliban, into J&K. Of particular concern will be night vision devices, drones, armour piercing and explosive rounds, body armour, tactical radio sets, and possibly short-range rockets. Logistics will likely be handled by Pakistan-based narcotics and arms traffickers operating under ISI tutelage. By channelling the flow of weapons from Afghanistan to trusted clients within the Pakistani illicit arms trade, who would then sell on to the agency’s ‘pre-approved’ proxies in the jihadist community, the ISI will seek to ensure that looted Afghan weapons do not end up being used by criminal groups or even worse, anti-state factions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or Baloch nationalist insurgents. Either scenario could pose a law-and-order problem that would jeopardise Beijing’s keenness to invest in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

This leads to the second level of ISI subversion, separate from the first but pursued on a parallel track: cultivation of select Indian intellectuals and journalists. The aim will be to manipulate such individuals by offering them career-enhancing access to Pakistani officialdom and use them to discredit their own government. A prime talking point will be using the Indian media to constantly project Islamabad’s spurious willingness for ‘dialogue’ (loosely defined).

Through public and private engagement with critics of the current government in Delhi, Pakistan will seek to portray itself as responsible actor being rejected by a Hindutva-influenced establishment in New Delhi. The ISI and Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) will also mount a psychological warfare campaign to signal to third parties, i.e. foreign governments, that India is reluctant to discuss the so-called ‘core issue’ of Kashmir. In the worst case, a degree of diplomatic and domestic momentum could build up to initiate a dialogue in which mentions of terrorism will once again, be placed alongside Kashmir. This would be a setback for India, because it would link Pakistani inaction against the 26/11 planners to wider bilateral issues including the status of Kashmir. Whereas, since 2008, the strength of India’s diplomatic position has been that the 26/11 attack took place when a dialogue on Kashmir was already ongoing and when people-to-people contact was cordial. Hence, the attack’s context required that Islamabad first rebuild trust by punishing the planners. Pakistani officials have since striven to neutralize this advantage by calling for dialogue even as they know this would have the effect of ritualizing talks, routinizing terrorism and trivializing India’s trauma from 26/11.

The third level of ISI subversion would be to carry out a major terrorist strike against India that originates from the territory of another state and whose planning and instructional bases lie in Afghanistan. Here, recollecting the IC-814 hijack in December 1999 is helpful: the flight originated from Kathmandu, with the hijackers allegedly having been helped by a local Pakistani embassy official. It flew to Amritsar, then Lahore, then Dubai and finally to Kandahar. From an outsider’s perspective, linking the hijackers specifically to Pakistan would have been difficult due to the number of jurisdictions involved. The fact that Masood Azhar, one of the terrorists released by India in exchange for the aircraft and passengers at Kandahar, subsequently entered Pakistan and went on to launch a new jihadist organization can be explained away as not being compelling proof of ISI complicity in the hijack itself.

The fact is, international law as it currently stands makes it difficult to hold state sponsors of terrorism accountable. That applies especially when an attack is routed via third countries.

For a future mass-casualty attack on India, the ISI will likely use maritime drug trafficking routes in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. In recent years, the district of Gwadar in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province has been the source of sizeable heroin shipments bound for Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The shipments seem to depart the Makran coast on either Iranian or Pakistani vessels and on the high seas are transferred to Sri Lankan boats. The latter have been detected close to India’s Lakshadweep Islands, as well as off the coasts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In some cases, drugs have been seized from these boats along with assault rifles and ammunition. It is quite possible that using Sri Lankan traffickers as cut-outs, the ISI has begun test runs to check the strength of Indian maritime surveillance along the southern coast.

One case from March 2021 involved a Sri Lankan national staying in Tamil Nadu illegally, but who had managed to obtain genuine identity documents, including an Indian passport. Tellingly, this individual is thought to have had ties with the erstwhile Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LeT and LTTE have long pursued discreet cooperation through linkmen who run travel agencies in the Thai capital Bangkok. Using these commercial fronts, LTTE sympathizers are believed to supply forged travel documentation to LeT operatives.

An indication of the ISI’s continuing determination to access Indian territory through third countries was manifested within hours of the Taliban entering Kabul on 15 August 2021. A facility that issued Indian visas was ransacked, reportedly by Urdu-speaking men, and a number of Afghan passports seized. This led to worry that the ISI, using LeT operatives fighting alongside the Taliban, had obtained Indian visas which could be used in doctored passports. Through such methods, the Pakistani agency can potentially infiltrate terrorists via legal entry points into India and embed them as ‘sleepers’. It would be difficult for New Delhi to have clinching evidence that a particular cross-border attack originated from Pakistani territory if Islamabad can counter with a half-credible claim that poor document security on the Indian side makes establishing the source of such an attack impossible.

Lastly, at least one Indian Muslim from Kerala is known to have died in Afghanistan in 2020 while fighting for the ISKP. This is worrying. The regional franchise of Islamic State as mentioned earlier, is subject to considerable (although probably not total) ISI influence. Through its tenuous contact with radicalized youths from Kerala, the group makes for a suitable ‘flag of convenience’ to disguise the origins of any major jihadist attack on India.

Integrating Psychological Operations With Organized Crime And Commando Training

The next major attack overseen by ISI will likely feature a ‘jumping-off point’ as far from Pakistan as possible. Like the 1993 Mumbai blasts which used the mafia triggermen of Dawood Ibrahim, it will either predominantly be fronted by Indian citizens, or Pakistanis with genuine documents and possibly a history of long-term residency in third countries. The drug flow from Pakistan to Sri Lanka is thought to be coordinated by Pakistani drug traffickers serving prison terms on the island nation. To use this smuggling infrastructure to land a suicidal team of gunmen, or a large consignment of arms and explosives for use by locally-embedded operatives, would not be difficult. All that the ISI would really need for such an attack to be disguised as a ‘local’ or at least ‘non-Pakistani’ operation, would be a convincing narrative.

This is where the three points made earlier are relevant. A mass-casualty terrorist strike would need quick access to unprotected (‘soft’) targets in Indian cities, something that is easier to accomplish via a seaborne infiltration than penetrating fairly well-guarded land borders. It would need a degree of innovation, in terms of attack pattern, so that Indian police and other first responders are confounded by the complexity of the rapidly-developing threat. Thus, using hardware seized in Afghanistan – night vision devices, tactical radios, explosive rounds, as well as sniper rifles – will help confuse and disorientate the security forces. But most important of all would be a prevailing discourse that terrorist attacks are the work of ‘non-state actors’.

Such a discourse would become easier to fabricate with training camps once again appearing in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, access to which would be regulated by ISI appointees in the Taliban’s security forces, possibly from the Haqqani network. It is believed that JeM chief Masood Azhar visited Kandahar in August 2021, shortly after the city fell, to urge the Taliban to support jihadist fighters in J&K. What is to be expected next is the mushrooming of commando schools close to Taliban troop concentrations, which would be open to Pakistani and other foreign volunteers. After ‘graduation’, the latter would launch ostensibly freelance operations against India, adding another layer of deniability to the ISI’s covert sponsorship. Meanwhile, as has been done with the United Kingdom, the agency will likely barter sensitive intelligence on these camps to the United States as well as select European governments, in exchange for their silence regarding its paramilitary activities vis-à-vis India.

The Question Of ‘Illogicality’

Perhaps the ISI’s best defence in seeking to cloak its sponsorship of individual terrorist attacks, is that fact that most analysts whether in government or outside, agonize over the ‘why’ question: Why did this specific attack take place just now, why would such-and-such group do it? The questioning is further compounded when the actual perpetrators publicly disclaim responsibility, as LeT initially did with 26/11 and Al Qaeda did with 9/11 before that.

In searching for a ‘motive’ that would justify the attack, what is often forgotten is that an operation’s chances of success are greatest when there is no evident logic to the choice of target or the timing of the attack. The best way to beat intelligence agencies’ efforts to thwart an attack is to do what the typical white-collar, university-educated analyst would least expect. Once the deed is done, experts both within the government as well as the media and academics can ponder over the debris as much as they like and try to divine a deeper meaning from it. The real rationale for the attack would be known only to the actual planners and no one else.

For precisely this reason, the author of this article will desist from offering predictions of just when the ISI might strike India next, or where. Doing so would require reliable inside knowledge of the operational logic being adopted by key players within the agency at a specific point of time, which the author lacks. All that can be said with certainty is that:

  1. Pakistan as a state is relying on China, partly through CPEC, to help it resist Western diplomatic and economic pressure to clamp down on so-called ‘good terrorists’,
  2. that it has just won a major victory in Afghanistan by proxy warfare which reduces its susceptibility to such pressure, and
  3. that the existing policy consensus within the US and especially the UK establishments prioritizes maintaining a working relationship with Islamabad at an ‘acceptable’ cost of forgoing any sense of justice for Indians killed in cross-border terrorism.

All of which suggests that the next big attack on India is not a matter of speculation but an assured fact. An India-Pakistani dialogue initiated under Anglo-American urging will serve to camouflage the reality of constant ISI preparation for more mass-casualty strikes on India. It will also enhance Islamabad’s plausible deniability at the international level by suggesting that any such attack, were it to happen, would be ‘illogical’ for the Pakistani state to sponsor.

Policy Options For New Delhi

At the moment, not even a month has passed since the Taliban seized Kabul. Much remains unclear about the nature of the new regime in Afghanistan as well as Pakistan’s control over it, especially in comparison to other influential actors such as China, Russia and Iran. Even the role of the United States is unclear, with a defeated Washington showing willingness, however begrudging, to talk with the victors in Afghanistan. Should the Taliban regime receive a measure of international recognition, it would be difficult for India to stay aloof purely for the sake of principle. Yet, if New Delhi recognizes the Taliban that would in itself offer no guarantee that the regime would be willing or even capable of preventing Afghan territory from being used for anti-Indian terrorist operations. Eventually, what matters is not whether India might possibly have diplomatic representation in Kabul, but rather, the basic reality that Pakistani jihadists will conduct training and long-range attack planning from Afghan soil.

India’s main defence will therefore be to remain focused on the issue of terrorism even as it faces up to two even bigger strategic challenges: a perennial face-off with China along a disputed frontier, and the inherent unreliability of American support against both Pakistan (concerning terrorism and insurgency) and China (concerning conventional military threats).

New Delhi cannot stop LeT or JeM from experimenting with drone attacks, or conducting urban warfare training, or assembling target portfolios through radicalized and trained reconnaissance agents (i.e. the next generation of David Headleys). India thus cannot prevent tactical innovation within the enhanced terrorist threat from Afghanistan-Pakistan. Where it has slightly more intervention capacity is in making physical infiltration to its own territory a bit harder, through population surveillance and movement controls. Both have become more politically and socially acceptable due to the Covid pandemic. But even this has limited value in a country as large, and with a population as ill-disciplined, as India. The fact that large sections of society are unwilling to follow personal health guidelines for social distancing and mask-wearing suggests that no set of restrictions can be imposed, top-down, on a permanent basis. Basically, India is not a totalitarian state and lacks the ruthlessness of one.

This leaves only one option for the Indian policy establishment: to deny Pakistani spokesmen and the ISI their traditional shield of ‘illogicality’ in the narrative space. New Delhi must resist, through aggressive diplomacy and strategic communication, any pressure from abroad and domestically to publicly talk to Pakistan. It must avoid being manoeuvred into indulging the publicity stunts and emotionally-pleasing optics that are typically associated with ‘dialogue’ processes but which also would dilute its larger case for grievance against Islamabad.

Eventually, whichever political party or coalition rules India at any one time, would still command irreducible strengths: a popular mandate, a powerful economy, a strong army and a nuclear arsenal. Thus, policymakers from all points of the national-ideological spectrum actually have zero obligation to please foreign interlocuters, including from the United States, before Indian ‘core interests’ (to use a Chinese phrase) are protected on the matter of cross-border terrorism. Any dialogue with Pakistan must be subject to extremely cautious beginnings and totally arbitrary suspension, with no commitment to persist with talks unless the issue of justice for terror victims precedes Kashmir as well as any other discussion point.

(The author is a specialist on terrorism and organised crime and has written a book titled ‘Islamism and Intelligence in South Asia: Militancy Politics and Security’. Views expressed in this article are personal. )

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