Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [115]
As part of its programme of missionary and charitable work, and of spreading its influence by these means, the group has built up an impressive network of schools, hospitals and social welfare organizations in northern Pakistan. In 2005, it played an important part in relief work after the Kashmir earthquake, and the efficiency and honesty of its officials won praise from doctors and aid workers despite their lack of sympathy for the group’s ideology. Evidence is contradictory on whether the 2010 floods have allowed JuD to build up their prestige in the same way. Some accounts claim that this is so, but others say that the sheer scale of the catastrophe swamped their efforts, and that any boost to their popularity was local and limited. After the Mumbai attacks, the Pakistani state was forced by US and Indian pressure to take over the supervision of Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s formal educational and welfare organization – but many of the same people work there as in LeT, and the group is also thought to have an extensive informal network which the state has left alone.
Because of this, and much more importantly of the popularity of its fight against India among the great majority of the population, Lashkar-e-Taiba has struck deep roots in Punjabi society. This is despite the fact that its Ahl-e-Hadith theology is alien to most Punjabis. This theology draws Lashkar-e-Taiba closer to Saudi Arabia and indeed to Al Qaeda, with whose leaders it was once closely linked.
From my talks with Pakistani military and intelligence officers it is clear to me that, having done so much to build up Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani security forces are now very afraid of the creature they helped create, of its possible sympathizers within their own ranks, and of the dreadful consequences if it were to join with the Taleban and the sectarians in revolt against Pakistan.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s extensive international network in the Pakistani diaspora also leads Pakistani officers to fear that if they attempt seriously to suppress the group it will launch successful terrorist attacks in the West, with disastrous results for Pakistan’s international position. This is something that up to mid-2010 the Pakistani intelligence services have done much to help prevent. While the Pakistani Taleban and their allies have begun to sponsor such attacks (like the abortive one on Times Square in New York in May 2010), groups still allied to the Pakistani state have not.
However, Lashkar-e-Taiba members certainly have contacts with Al Qaeda, and helped Al Qaeda operatives escape from Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taleban, and gave them shelter within Pakistan. As Stephen Tankel writes:
Ideologically, for all of its strategic restraint following 9/11 Lashkar is, after all, a jihadi organization with a long history of waging pan-Islamic irredentist campaigns. Indian-controlled Kashmir may be the group’s primary ideological and strategic target, but it has never been the apotheosis of Lashkar’s jihad.29
Men trained by LeT and still associated with members of the group have been implicated in terrorist plots in Europe, North America and Australia, though the