The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the prime suspect behind the Mumbai terror attacks, “represents a threat to regional and global security second only to al-Qaeda”, respected Indian American expert Ashley J. Tellis has said in a Congressional testimony.
“ Although LeT is linked in popular perceptions mainly to the terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, the operations and ideology of this group transcend the violence directed at the Indian state,” Tellis, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in his testimony to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
“Being an Ahl-e Hadith adherent of Sunni Wahabism, LeT seeks to establish a universal Islamic Caliphate with a special emphasis on realizing that dream through the gradual recovery of all lands that were once under Muslim rule,” he said. This strategic objective had made the LeT an ally of Al-Qaeda, according to Tellis.
The prepared testimony titled “Lessons from Mumbai” said, “The LeT’s initial focus on Afghanistan is significant because it refutes the common misapprehension—assiduously fostered since the early 1990s—that the group has always been a part of the indigenous Kashmiri insurgency. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Tellis asserts that the LeT has been since its inception composed of Pakistani Punjabis. That coupled with its flexible ideology “is precisely what made it so attractive to the ISI to begin with, because it could be controlled and directed far more effectively by its Punjabi dominated sponsor, the Pakistan Army, than any local Kashmiri resistance group.”
In Tellis’s words the LeT comes across as a highly organized and efficient outfit. “Unlike many of the other indigenous terrorist groups in South Asia whose command and control structures are casual and often disorganized, LeT’s organizational structure is hierarchic and precise, reflecting its purposefulness. Modeled on a military system, LeT is led by a core leadership centered on the amir, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, and his deputies, who oversee different aspects of its functional and charitable operations,” he said.
In the specific context of India, he said the country “has unfortunately become the “sponge” that protects us all. India’s very proximity to Pakistan, which has developed into the epicenter of global terrorism during the last thirty years, has resulted in New Delhi absorbing most of the blows unleashed by those terrorist groups that treat it as a common enemy along with Israel, the United States, and the West more generally.
He was critical of India’s response to the many terror strikes in the past few years. “To the chagrin of its citizens, India has also turned out to be a terribly soft state neither able to prevent many of the terrorist acts that have confronted it over the years nor capable of retaliating effectively against either its terrorist adversaries or their state sponsors in Pakistan.”
On the question of Kashmir Tellis seemed to be challenging the view among some in the Obama administration that the resolution of the Kashmir problem may deprive Pakistan the excuse to continue to pursue policies of supporting terrorist groups. “The existence of unresolved problems, such as the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir, has also provided both Pakistani institutions and their terrorist clients with the excuses necessary to bleed India to “death by a thousand cuts,” he said.
“But these unsettled disputes remain only excuses: not that they should not be addressed by New Delhi seriously and with alacrity, there is no assurance that a satisfactory resolution of these problems will conclusively eliminate the threat of terrorism facing India and the West more generally’” Tellis said.
He argued that the LeT’s objectives “go way beyond Kashmir.” “They seek to destroy what is perhaps the most successful example of a thriving democracy in the non-Western world, one that has prospered despite the presence of crushing poverty, incredible diversity, and a relatively short history of self-rule. India’s existence as a secular and liberal democratic state that protects political rights and personal freedoms—despite all its failures and imperfections—thus remains a threat to groups such as LeT, with their narrow, blighted, and destructive worldviews, as well as to praetorian, anti-democratic, institutions such as the Pakistan Army and the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence),’ he said.