“It’s also eating at Pakistan’s integrity as a state,” says Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution. The existence of armed and violent non-state actors in Pakistan makes its government look weak. The obvious similarity is with the Taliban. Pakistan supported the Islamist group as a means of projecting influence into Afghanistan. Then Pakistani Pashtuns, some of whom had fought with the Afghan Taliban, began to emulate it. Now Pakistan has a full-on insurgency raging along its frontier with Afghanistan and terrorist attacks in its capital. Hundreds have been killed, millions displaced.
So why won’t Pakistan at least try to shut down the LeT? There are two possible explanations. It can’t. And it doesn’t want to. The most important thing to understand about Lashkar is that, unlike the Pakistani Taliban, it is not a frontier-based outfit of illiterate Pashtun tribesmen. It has hundreds of thousands of supporters in Pakistan’s Punjab heartland, many of whom are educated. Confronting the LeT would be an enormous undertaking for which Pakistan’s armed forces might not be ready.
“I think they can make a convincing case that it’s actually more dangerous for them to go after Lashkar than not to go after Lashkar,” says Christine Fair of Georgetown. “Because Pakistan can reasonably say that their military is probably the best-trained military that has never won a war, that it is massively overstretched in its current operations, and they’ve got serious morale issues. So the army can say: ‘Look, we’ve got this India issue. We’re trying to support your forces [by allowing coalition troops and supplies to traverse Pakistan] in Afghanistan. We’ve got holding operations going down in Swat and Buner [districts that the Pakistani army recently retook from the Taliban]. And we’ve got a military offensive in Waziristan [against the Taliban].’ And Lashkar-e-Taiba is square in the Punjab.”
According to Stephen Cohen, even if Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari were to order his country’s security forces against Lashkar, it’s uncertain whether they’d pay attention. “Zardari doesn’t control all of Pakistan,” says Cohen. “He sits there and pulls the levers and presses the buttons, but sometimes nothing happens. The civilian government is weak because the state bureaucracy has its own internal logic and its own strategy.”
This touches on the second reason why Pakistan is unlikely to do much to weaken the LeT. In the eyes of much of the Pakistani establishment, and certainly in military and intelligence circles, Lashkar-e-Taiba is a useful tool rather than a liability. Its goal of “freeing” Kashmir is widely supported in Pakistan, and its Islamist ideology is becoming increasingly ingrained in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. “They are, after all, their boys. I mean, they raised the little monsters,” says Fair. “From their view, Lashkar-e-Taiba is an asset. It has exclusively targeted outside Pakistan.”
Unless Lashkar commits some sort of outrage inside Pakistan, it’s unlikely Pakistan will stop considering the LeT as a resource—a means of waging war in Kashmir and of striking at India while maintaining a fig leaf of deniability. Lashkar, for its part, has good reason not to provoke the Pakistani state. Its members enjoy the unofficial shelter Pakistan provides them, and they share a common enemy in India.
What’s unclear is how long this state of affairs can last. Cohen believes it is inevitable that Lashkar will eventually turn on its creators. “That’s what the spooks call blowback,” he says. “If you allow these groups to operate, then sooner or later they’re going to operate against you, in your own country. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s ideology would lead them to conclude that a government that is working with the United States is an enemy.”
This hasn’t happened yet. But the LeT’s affiliation with groups that have hit Pakistan, including al-Qaeda, suggests it might. Pakistan is playing a dangerous game.
