The Mumbai attack of 26/11 was a clear demonstration by Pakistan’s jihadist organisations’ and its military-intelligence establishment’s strategic culture of causing hurt and harm to India. Pakistan uses jihad, conducted by subnational groups (with state support) as an instrument that allows it to punch above its geopolitical weight.
<1> Part of the country’s strategic thinking is believing in the false idea that the only way to preserve its own security is by ensuring India is weak, defeated or kept in a constant state of chaos. Pakistan believes it can achieve this imperative by supporting militant actors, thereby ensuring the Pakistani State has plausible deniability when the militant group strikes.
Pakistan’s strategy of ‘bleeding India by a thousand cuts’ has been implemented by exploiting religious sentiments and whipping up passions on communal and sectarian lines. Before launching its proxy war in Kashmir in 1989, it exploited the tribal areas in Northeast India, and exploited discontented youth in Punjab to fight for the creation of Khalistan, a new Sikh nation-state. By supporting the Sikh militancy in Punjab, it hoped to tie down Indian security forces and divert them from the defence of Kashmir. When India crushed the Khalistani separatist movement, Pakistan turned its attention once again to Kashmir, fomenting instability in the state to check India’s power.
By supporting the Sikh militancy in Punjab, Pakistan hoped to tie down Indian security forces and divert them from the defence of Kashmir.
With the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Inter Services Intelligence agency or ISI, backed with logistical and financial support from the CIA and Saudi Arabia, fostered and supported Islamic militants in Afghanistan and the bordering Pakistani tribal regions to fight Jihad against the Soviets. At the time, not only did over a million Afghan refugees flee the fighting and cross the Durand line into neighbouring Pakistan, but thousands of mujahedeen warriors found themselves — albeit temporarily — without a cause or enemy after their victory over the Soviets. The war economy of narcotics and weapons had become valuable currency in this region and the tribal area refugee camps served as an easy recruitment ground.
<2> Empowered by their victory over a Great Power’s massive, regular army, the idea that militant campaigns could defeat a strong nation gained force.
Pakistan has applied the same strategic thinking when it comes to India and Afghanistan. While on the one hand it has fuelled Afghanistan’s instability by providing weapons, intelligence and protection to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network, on the other, it has used militant proxies to weaken India.
<3> Terror groups such Lashkar e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) have been the Pakistani establishment’s preferred tools towards fighting India in Kashmir. LeT’s agenda of wresting Kashmir from Indian control and joining it with Pakistan is compatible with the state’s own strategic interests and it has provided extensive financial, logistical and military support to the group over the years.
<4> For much of the 1990s, LeT operations were limited to Kashmir. It was only after 2000 that LeT began conducting operations in other parts of the country.
<5> Fedayeen attacks, involving heavily armed militants launching large-scale attacks, such as the ones on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and in Mumbai in 2008, are the group’s signature tactic. Militants continue to fight in what is primarily a suicide mission, killing mercilessly and maximising damage, until they are shot dead.
Pakistan has applied the same strategic thinking when it comes to India and Afghanistan. While on the one hand it has fuelled Afghanistan’s instability by providing weapons, intelligence and protection to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network, on the other, it has used militant proxies to weaken India.
The primary objective of the Mumbai attacks was to exacerbate tensions between India and Pakistan. While outright war would not have been the best-case scenario for Lashkar, the intended casualty was the ongoing India-Pakistan peace process.
<6> Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was visiting Delhi the night the attacks began, in what was seen as a sign of improving ties. When news of the attack broke, Qureshi was asked to immediately leave the country.
<7> A key feature of the attack was its targeting of popular places frequented by foreigners. The choice of Nariman House and the Taj and Oberoi hotels suggests that one of the objectives of the attacks was to increase the group’s stature in the
jihadi community by targeted killings of Westerners and Jews.
<8> The militants hoped that by targeting a large number of foreigners, India’s image in the ‘eyes of the west’ would fall, with people seeing it as an unsafe country.
LeT which sees India as part of the “Crusader-Zionist-Hindu” alliance, as enemies, has on numerous occasions declared that its objective is not limited to liberating ‘Muslim’ Kashmir from a ‘Hindu’ India but breaking up India completely. Through the attack, it hoped to aggravate tensions between India’s Hindu and Muslim communities, and provoke a Hindu reprisal that would help divide the country and facilitate greater recruitment by Islamist extremists.
<9>
An argument can be made that the militants were ‘successful’, in causing large scale death and destruction, hurting Indian security forces and civilians, humiliating India and garnering global media attention. The attack strengthened hardliners in both India and Pakistan, as was expected, and hoped for, by the militants. Keeping India and Pakistan at loggerheads is the only way LeT can justify its existence and ‘usefulness’ to the ISI. Attempts at dialogue between Delhi and Islamabad often fall victim to terrorist violence, perpetrated with the blessings of Pakistan’s military-intelligence structure, forcing the political leadership into a corner, and ensuring a mutual distrust festers. The policy keeps Jihadist groups like the Lashkar both relelvant and relevant. Should peace prevail, the group would fade into irrelevance.
Keeping India and Pakistan at loggerheads is the only way LeT can justify its existence and ‘usefulness’ to the ISI.
Realising the risks that Indian retaliation would bring, the United States emphasised the importance of restraint, and offered US intelligence assistance in investigating the attacks. While the Indian government had a number of military and non-military options to choose from, the decision was made to not attack Pakistan, but find other legal methods to bring the perpetrators of the attack to justice, uniting the international community, and working to ensure Pakistan faced consequences for its actions.
<10> While Pakistan made half-hearted attempts to arrest members of the LeT, and cracked down on small militant training camps, their idea seems to have been to get by and escape both international censure and a full blown military response from India, with just the bare minimum. While India did not want to risk an open-ended war at the time, there was an understanding that should the LeT or any other Pakistan group conduct an attack at a similar scale on civilians, India’s cost-benefit calculus could change. Perhaps that is why, since 26/11, Pakistani backed terrorist groups have trained their weapons on the Indian military, attacking a number of army and air force bases in Kashmir and Punjab.
<1> Ashely Tellis et all, “The Lessons of Mumbai”, RAND Corporation, OP 249, 2009. (accessed on 18 October, 2018)< style="vertical-align: super">
<2> T.V. Paul, “The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World”, Random House (2014), pp 58
<3> Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Why Pakistan supports terrorist groups, and why the US finds it so hard to induce change”, Brookings, January 5, 2018. (accessed on 17 October, 2018)
<4> S. Paul Kapur, “Jihad as Grand Strategy: Islamist Militancy, National Security and the Pakistani State” Oxford University Press (2017) pp 90
<5> Daniel Byman, “The Foreign Policy Essay: C. Christine Fair on ‘Lashkar-e-Taiba: Pakistan’s Domesticated Terrorists”, Lawfare Blog, December 29, 2013. (accessed on 20 October, 2018)
<6> Stephen Tankel, “Lashkar-e-Taiba: From 9/11 to Mumbai”, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, April/May 2009. pp 23 (accessed on 19 October, 2018)
<7> D.K. Singh, “26/11 attacks: India asked Pak foreign minister to leave, reveals Pranab book”, The Hindustan Times, October 14, 2017. (accessed on 17 October, 2018)
<8> Op. cit. Stephen Tankel, “Lashkar-e-Taiba: From 9/11 to Mumbai”, pp 24
<9> Op. cit. Ashely Tellis et all, “The Lessons of Mumbai”
<10> Shivshankar Menon, “Why India didn’t attack Pakistan after 26/11 Mumbai attacks”, Livemint, November 22, 2016. (accessed on 19 October, 2018)
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