Stephen Tankel’s exceedingly well researched Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba effectively nails the fiction that Pakistan turned off the terror tap and stopped the infiltration of ISI-backed terrorists into Jammu and Kashmir during former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s rule, or, for that matter, anytime before or thereafter, as a gullible Indian leadership was led to believe.

Instead, Tankel, an associate fellow at King’s College, UK, formerly associated with EastWest Institute and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, reinforces suspicions long held by the Indian establishment that Musharraf, albeit to a lesser degree than his ISI-Army-led predecessors, used proxies like the “army of the pure” and many others, to continue to keep Kashmir on the boil. The general, Tankel says, turned the tap on and off at will. As did the civilian administration, when in “the period of calm that followed the Mumbai attacks, evidence suggests Lashkar’s leash was loosened again.”
Islamabad has always trotted out Musharraf’s famed “your terrorist, our jihadi” line, and its later avatar of “good jihadi/bad jihadi” whenever India and, later, the US pushed for a crackdown on the jihadi nursery. In reality, terror groups like the LeT remained one of the favoured few against whom no action was ever taken. The Pakistan establishment’s nurturing of the group as “their jihadis” was clearly a calculated risk in the hope that the Lashkars would not turn against them, particularly in the Punjab from where the bulk of the Pakistan Army is drawn, unlike the less malleable groups that operated in the tribal areas and marched to Al Qaeda’s distant drummer.
Tankel’s extensive interaction with the ISI produces some interesting vignettes, such as one ISI operative’s confession: “Pakistan is being expected to hit Lashkar to prove we are treating every jihadi group equally when it is other groups that are hitting us, while Lashkar is not.” Some justification. Instead, the LeT was allowed, like the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammed, to change their nomenclature as a means of avoiding sanctions, while continuing to operate with the ISI’s blessings. In plain sight.
Tankel’s book is as exhaustive an overview of the history, structure and operations of the LeT as has ever been written. His interest no doubt piqued by the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks which brought the LeT to the world’s attention. The book’s finest chapters are when the scholar examines the potential of the group and the pitfalls inherent in its many roles — non-violent activism in Pakistan, militancy in J&K and terrorism in India, becoming as much a haiku for the terror group as it is for Pakistan.
The dual motives that drove the state-sponsored LeT into switching from targeting just Indian forces in Kashmir to foreigners and Indians in Mumbai, are, in fact, in keeping with Pakistan’s strategic imperative to “hurt India economically and gain jihadi credibility”.
Coming to the same conclusions that Indian spooks have reached for some time, Tankel says Pakistan’s original calculus pre-9/11 was to develop not just nuclear capability but create groups like the LeT as a tool to pry Kashmir out of India’s grasp and give Pakistan a shy at redressing the unequal balance between the two countries that saw size and economic success tilt India’s way.
Tankel’s commentary therefore on the hollowness of Pakistan’s oft-repeated mantra that Kashmir is the only stumbling block to forging peace between the bitter rivals is interesting in that it exposes yet another of the many half-truths that masquerade as state policy.
Indeed, Tankel’s book may well have persuaded Washington into finally accepting Delhi’s view that Islamabad continues to be unwilling to dismantle its terror network as it sees the use of terror as the only “source of leverage it has at its disposal”. Not, the Indian establishment please note, talks.
Tankel does not fully examine India’s own unwillingness to make concessions at the point of a gun or for that matter how India could tackle the communal malaise that Pakistan feeds into, to swell its jihadi ranks. Instead, his primary focus is on how the LeT grew into the powerful force for evil that it has become. Once limited to Kashmir, it, alarmingly, even sent its men to fight in Bosnia and Tajikistan. And, of course, Mumbai.
But in documenting how the LeT was hand-picked over the other terror groups to become the beneficiary of state largesse, how it was allowed to operate more freely than the others and win followers through a messianic proselytisation mode as well as a militant methodology, how its extensive social services network helped it acquire respectability and acceptability in Pakistan’s largely conservative Islamic milieu by “reinforcing Lashkar’s extreme anti-Hindu convictions”, Tankel has painted the truest picture yet of Pakistan’s duplicitous “hunt with the hounds and run with the hares” policy.
The Mumbai attacks was a means for the LeT to acquire a higher profile but as its leadership opened up a second front in Afghanistan and closer collaboration with jihad networks there, it came into direct confrontation with a far more powerful adversary than India, the US and the coalition forces.
The expected fall-out? Dismantling the LeT’s networks became a high priority item on the US anti-terrorism agenda. But as books like Tankel’s show, this is easier said than done. In fact, while Pakistan bleating about becoming a victim of terror, no longer able to control the genie of terrorism it allowed to escape from the bottle is a familiar refrain, Tankel shows up Pakistan for what it really is — terror’s chief backer, a nation that selectively backs terror groups that serve its own strategic interests.
The book, released only weeks before the carnage at Delhi’s high court where several innocent people were killed when a suitcase bomb exploded — some say by Pakistan’s proxies nurtured in countries like Bangladesh as part of the “transnational network” that groups like the LeT have built — also throws the spotlight on the dangers posed by groups like the LeT not just for India, but also Pakistan and the region. A double-edged sword, as organisations like these weave themselves into the social and military fabric, and threaten it from within.
As Tankel warns, “If no attempt is made to rein in LeT, it will continue to act against Indian and international targets.” At the same time, he adds, pressure on the organisation to temper its activities could also lead to increased freelancing, meaning the LeT’s capabilities could be used outside of the leadership chain of command. “This presents an inherently unstable situation,” he said during a recent interaction online.
Indeed, another ISI officer quoted in the book says it all: “Who benefits if we go after the Lashkar? And who pays?” And his response: “India and Pakistan.”
For any serious student of the contrarian, insidious, often conflicted world of Terror Central in Muridke, that the US is only just beginning to see as a bigger threat than anything the Al Qaeda ever posed, this book should be mandatory reading.