Anatomy of a terrorist organisation

What motivates Lashkar-e-Tayyaba's three-decades-long history of cross-border assaults? A book on the literature of the outfit attempts to provide some insights into this pressing question

The Literature of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba: Deadly Lines of Control

Authors: C Christine Fair & Safina Ustaad 

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 658

Price: Rs 1,495

For nearly 35 years, India has experienced murderous assaults from extremist organisations nurtured, armed and trained by Pakistani state organisations. All of them carry names such as Hizbul Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed, or Harakat -ul-Ansar, attesting to their drawing their doctrinal bases from Islam while wreaking havoc in different parts of India and Afghanistan and even within Pakistan itself. But the most lethal among them has been Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT, “The Army of the Pure”), which has been responsible for numerous attacks in India, including the Mumbai carnage of 2008, and on Indian targets in Afghanistan as well.

The distinguished American scholar of South Asian history and politics, Christine Fair, has collaborated with Safina Ustaad to translate numerous texts from Urdu that are the foundational documents of the LeT. These relate to the organisation’s justification for resort to jihad; the worldview that shapes its political and military approaches; the areas where it parts company from other militant Islamic organisations in South Asia, and, above all, its commitment to the “jihad” in Kashmir.

LeT emerged in the last days of the “global jihad” in Afghanistan in the late 1980s following the merger of two radical outfits in Pakistan — the Jamaat-ud-Dawah led by Hafiz Saeed and the extremist organisation headed by Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. The product of this union was initially the Markaz ud-Dawah wa’al-Irshad (MDI, “Centre for Preaching and Guidance”). A few years later, possibly in early 1990, Hafiz Saeed set up LeT as the armed wing of the MDI. He heads both organisations, affirming the link between dawah  (proselytisation) and jihad.

The MDI has its headquarters at Muridke, 30 km from Lahore, where it has a seminary, residences for students and faculty, and facilities for training and leisure activities. The Pakistani armed forces, specifically the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), honed the LeT’s fighting capacity with a tough training regime and by placing military personnel at LeT’s bases, mainly in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

Starting with attacks on Indian targets from January 1990, LeT soon became the most formidable threat to Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir and, from 2005, to Indian assets in Afghanistan. In 2008, the ISI and LeT worked closely with the American-Pakistani David Headley to plan and organise the attacks on several targets in Mumbai in November that year.

LeT’s operations are supported by substantial literature that sets out the doctrinal justifications for its militant assaults. Professor Fair and Ms Ustaad have noted that the texts they have examined are marked by “internal consistency, sophistication, logic, and repeated appeal to and deployment of a variety of Islamic historical sources”.

The organisation’s foundational document is: “Why Are We Waging Jihad?” Drawing on diverse Islamic sources, the author has identified eight specific reasons for resorting to jihad. The most important of these are: Defending the defenceless, avenging murder, and freeing occupied lands, all of which are viewed as justifications for jihad in Kashmir. The author of this document emphatically rejects the suggestion that jihad is principally an internal struggle against one’s self-interest and ego, asserting controversially that there are no credible sources for this view.

A significant position that the LeT has taken, which distinguishes it from other radical groups, is to reject the practice of takfir, the declaring of a Muslim as an apostate (kafir). LeT’s scholar has put forward quotations from numerous sources and concludes that takfir is “the most dangerous and terrifying manifestation of perfidy” that is usually followed by “gruesome recordings of beheadings and pillage”. Again, unlike other radical organisations, the LeT refuses to attack targets within Pakistan itself.

The LeT’s position on the Kashmir conflict is set out in a 348-page text written in 2011 that, Professor Fair and Ms Ustaad note, provides “the same distorted history to which Pakistanis have become accustomed to and which many accept as reality”. In his brief introduction, Hafiz Saeed asserts that “the liberation of Kashmir is critical to Pakistan for a number of political, religious, and economic reasons”. The Kashmir freedom struggle, he says, “is an existential battle for Pakistan”. Kashmir’s freedom, he concludes, “is imperative to preserve Kashmiri Muslims’ faith, to guard their Muslim identity, to protect Pakistan’s economic and military resources, and to end the oppression of Indian Muslims.

The authors have concluded their presentation of LeT’s literature with extracts from a 590-page tome, Noble Warriors and Battlefronts, written in 2001, that gives a detailed and very lurid account of the organisation’s operations in India, including the Red Fort attack in Delhi in 2000 and the attack on Srinagar airport in October 2001. The narrative highlights the nobility of the mujahideen and the victimisation of the Kashmiri Muslims at the hands of the violence-prone Indians. The book has a Foreword by Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi who describes the LeT’s jihad as a mission wherever “Muslims are being persecuted and oppressed”.

With their pioneering and painstaking research, deft translations and valuable background notes that contextualise the issues being discussed in different chapters, the authors have elucidated the doctrinal and ideological vision that drives the LeT, thus complementing the numerous existing writings on the organisation’s barbarous operations over the last three decades. This is a valuable source to understand the well-springs of radical Islam and the impulses driving its perpetrators to launch crossborder assaults on India.

The author is a former diplomat