 Well, good morning to all of you and welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm Ashley Telles. I'm a senior fellow here at the Endowment, and it's a special pleasure to welcome all of you to Chris Faire's book discussion, her newest book, Inside the Mind of La Shkaret Aiba. Chris works at Georgetown now. She's the distinguished associate professor in the security studies program. But I've had the pleasure of knowing Chris for at least 20 years since we were both at the Rand Corporation in a world that seems very, very far away and a long ago. She worked at Rand as a senior political scientist. After Rand, she went to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and then came back to Washington to work at the U.S. Institute of Peace before her current position at Georgetown. As all of you know, those of you who follow South Asia security issues, she's written two great books, well, many more, but two great books. One, The Pakistan Army's Way of War, which was the book published before the current one that we're going to discuss today. And this volume, Inside the Mind of La Shkaret Aiba. Now, ever since the attacks in Bombay, La Shkaret Aiba has sort of grown large in our political consciousness. But this book is very interesting because it doesn't focus merely on La Shkaret Aiba's international profile, but rather looks at its roots within Pakistan, a study of its political sociology, the way it is grafted into the Pakistani state and the challenges that it poses to Pakistani society as Pakistan meets the challenges of groups such as La Shkaret Aiba. And so this book comes at La Shkaret Aiba from a very different perspective from much of the standard international relations literature. And so I thought it would be a very useful exercise to have a discussion on this book today. We are joined by two distinguished scholars who are going to follow Chris after her presentation in offering their comments on the book before we open up the floor to a discussion. And to Chris's right is Polly Nyak, who is now with the South Asia program at the Stimson Center, but spent a career in the US intelligence community. She was in fact the South Asia manager and its senior most expert for at least six years. And I think she was the president's daily briefer for longer than probably she wants to remember. So she has a great familiarity with the issue and with the subject that we are going to discuss today. And to the furthest right is Josh White, who is now associate professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins. Josh served at the White House as the senior advisor and director for South Asian affairs of the National Security Council. And if memory serves me right was actually witness to one of the major crises that we had in India-Pakistan relations as a result of terrorist attacks. So both from the theoretical side, from the academic side and from the policy practitioner side, this panel has covered all bases. So without further ado, I'm going to invite Chris to spend a few minutes walking us through the thesis of the book. And then I'm going to invite Josh and Polly to offer remarks before we open the floor to a conversation. So thank you very much for coming this morning. I'm going to switch places with Josh. I think we can do it from here. The thing is I'm blind. I've been blind forever. Is it okay if I switch places? Does it see that way? I can see that. I've got one of those. It's like my vision and my ears are really lousy and I'm not deaf enough for hearing aids and my glasses don't correct my vision. So I'm in that terrible zone of getting old but not old enough. Okay. So actually, thank you, Ashley. Ashley was my first mentor at the Rayon Corporation. I think the first project that we did was that lovely UNICAL project, which we've got lots of stories about. That was a fun project. And Ashley introduced me to Polly many years ago on another project that Ashley and I got to work on on Cargill. And then Josh. Josh has been, it's just really fun to see Josh, I don't know, when you came. It's a graduate student. You were so smart and you had spent so much time in Pakistan. And now you're thoroughly suited and booted. And I'm the only one on this panel that's a state government service, Alhundalila, which means that I have the luxury of saying things without any impact whatsoever. So I will indulge that luxury liberally this morning. All right. So when I began this project, it actually began very similarly to the Pakistan Army project, which is with the Pakistan Army, you just kind of notice this pattern, right? That it keeps doing what it's doing, even though it's not working and it's even detrimental. So for me, that was the puzzle. When I began studying Lush Karatayaba, also incidentally back when I was at the RAND Corporation, I had been collecting their materials since I was a student, but like every humanity student that spent time in Pakistan, I didn't really understand the importance of the materials that I had gathered until many years later. But I noticed that the Lush Karatayaba would, let's say they trained 10 people, only one or fewer would actually get deployed to Kashmir. Now this is from an institutional point of view, this is really a strange puzzle, right? Because this is also a principal agent problem. You train 10 dudes that want to blow up stuff and you only let one go and blow up stuff. What are the other nine doing, right? And the one thing that you'll observe about Lush Karatayaba is that it's never done anything within Pakistan itself. So organizations, I kind of ground myself more for the logic of labor economics. You don't invest in human capital that's going to bite back at you unless it's giving you some kind of advantage. So this became my puzzle. How do we explain these unusual personnel policies of this organization? So I don't think I need to tell you guys, I think everyone looking at this audience, does anyone not know the origins of these folks? Okay. All right. So let me just say very briefly, there is a perception that the ISI created this organization. It's a very similar perception that the ISI created the Taliban. This isn't really the case. The Taliban had its own origins as did Lush Karatayaba. I think of Pakistan sort of as a petri dish, right? If you were a biologist in the 18th century and you were looking for critters that might be curative, put a bunch of junk in a petri dish and see what grows and see what you can utilize. Pakistan is like a petri dish in the sense that militant organizations are constantly cropping up, their ISI gets involved and they either get cropped down or they get cropped up or they get instrumentalized. The deep state has a fluctuating relationship. So the ISI did not make the LAT, but once the LAT came on its radar screen, the timing was propitious and the ISI invested in it. So I'm just going to try to summarize the next several slides here. So the basic story of the LAT goes like this. A couple of fellows, many of whom are quite well-known, they meet like for example, Luxi, Hafez, Said, they meet in Afghanistan. They both share in common a particular interpretation of the LA Hadith, which is a particular interpretive tradition of Islam. Hafez, Said, he has an organization that's mostly about tabligh, about converting people to their mission. I think the best way of explaining this to an audience that doesn't know a lot about tabligh would be like the mitzvah mobile in New York. In other words, they're reaching out to co-religionists, but they're trying to get them to do things differently in a way in which the organization thinks is proper. Luxi, he has a militia. So he's actually there at the very end of the anti-Soviet jihad trying to contribute, but they're a little bit late to the party. So it's like the lady in the prom dress shows up late and her date's already drunk. So that's kind of LAT. So they merge, but the one thing that you learn when you start studying LAT is that LAT from the beginning, Abinissio, does not believe in participating in intra-Muslim conflicts. And as the Soviets withdrew and there was no longer the great enemy to fight, LAT decided that there's no point staying. This doesn't fit. And there's actually a really interesting episode when L.A. Hadis Warlord wanted their intervention and they said, no, thank you. And that's sort of narrated in the book. But if you go and you look at the map at the same time period, you'll see that things are happening in Kashmir. Pakistan from 1947 onward had been trying to instigate and foment problems in Kashmir. They finally succeed after Indian malfeasance in the domestic politics of Kashmir. And Pakistan finally has this opportunity. We also know by the way that Zia, when he was investing in the different Jihadi groups, he only invested in those groups that would have utility in the Kashmir dispute. So by the early 1990s, the Pakistanis in Kashmir are playing these different groups off of each other. So first you've got the JKLF. Turns out they're not really interested in Pakistan and they're not quite Islamist enough. Then you have Hezbo Mujahideen. The problem with Hezbo Mujahideen is they're not vicious enough because they're largely Kashmiri. And so they're not able to perpetrate the spectacularly vicious violence that Pakistan believes it needs. Enter L.E.T. So L.E.T happens to come online at a time that's very useful for the Pakistani state as it's trying to manage these different assets. One word that you probably won't hear is two words that you're not going to hear me use in this discussion. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the word radicalization. Because as soon as we call someone radical or radicalized, we stop thinking about their objective, rational interest in joining an organization. So I abjure this word except when an editor makes me use it and then anyone who's battled with an editor, you know the editor always wins. If you want to get your thing published, Jonathan Landay is saying no, but Jonathan Landay is special. But for the rest of us pleads here who are academics, editors often win. Especially if you want to get tenure, right? Editors are going to win. The other thing that you're not going to hear me use is the word terrorist. By the way, it's not because I think it's a bad word and because I'm a tree hugger. I'm not. It says when we use the word terrorist, it gives us the impression that this is a sui generous actor pursuing his or sometimes her, in this case always his, agenda. The reason why I tend to not use terrorist in describing this organization is that I don't want you to forget that this is actually a proxy of the Pakistani state, right? It is not a non state actor. It is a state actor. When Pakistan looks at how it wants to prosecute its foreign policy objectives, this organization, like Jaisal Muhammad, is a part of the order of battle. So do they engage in terrorism? Absolutely. But I want to remind you that this is a proxy of the Pakistani state and that the state uses this organization for very rational reasons. I put this map up here just to give you a sense. While most of the operations that this organization conducts have taken place in Indian administrative Kashmir as Pakistan's nuclear umbrella has unfurled, it became more brazen and began conducting attacks elsewhere in India. It also has been conducting attacks in Afghanistan, which was a move that had really resisted. If you're interested in the organizational discussions that went into them, conducting attacks in Afghanistan, I'm happy to talk about that in the Q&A. But it also uses this extended neighborhood for what I'm going to call bureaucratic or back office logistics. So if you need to get some fake passport and some fake visas, you might go to Thailand to do that. There's a lot of interesting discussion about what they are or not doing with the Rohingya in Myanmar and Bangladesh. I've been studying that. I think there's more smoke and mirrors than actual people on the ground, but it's a very effective way for them to raise money. We also know that they raise money from the Gulf. They also raise money from the Diaspora. So for example, the United Kingdom, Mirpuris, they're already very politically engaged by this issue. So really, the whole world is their back office. Even though operationally, they stay focused mostly on India and to some extent in Afghanistan. As I said, you will not find a single attack by this organization in Pakistan. For those of you that don't pay attention to the alphabet soup, the Pakistanis love to take advantage of organizations having similar names. So some people will say, well, what about the cricket attack in 2000? Remember the Sri Lankan cricketers? That was Lushkar Ajungvi, a totally different organization. So don't get your Lushkar's confused. The Pakistanis bank on people getting confused. Okay. So one thing I'd like to point out, and these are some of the most notorious operations. If we were to look at the fatality yield, this is one of the most effective killing machines in Pakistan's arsenal. But what I want you to think about is what's the cost effectiveness of this instrument. So I'm going to show you some slides in a few minutes, but let me just walk you through them here. If you look at the human capital, what we know about the human capital of these Lushkar's, they fall somewhere in between an NCO and the Pakistan military and someone who could qualify for the Pakistan military academy. But unlike someone that would go in the army, either as an officer or as a Jawan, these guys cost very little in the end. If you're anyone looking at the Indian budget, Indian defense budget, where do most of the monies go in pensions? Same thing is true in the Pakistan army. They've been very clever. They move their pensions over to the civilian budget so they can do some magical wizard mass so they don't run afoul of the World Bank. With LET, they don't have that. So they're getting the same kind of human capital. They're getting the same kind of operational capabilities without this huge infrastructure to support the soldier and their family. So if you were to just monetize the attack per attacker, this is extremely cost effective. And you're still getting a similar quality of violence at a very lower price point. So this is economically very efficient. It also has, of course, the benefit of plausible deniability. And even while deniability has declined in recent years, Pakistan still has not borne the price of these activities. And that's another policy debate that maybe Josh, Ashley, and Molly can explain because to me it's just infuriating. All right. So the one thing I do want you to understand, and this is a graph that very heavily simplifies it, when you start looking at these organizations and how they market each other, they pay attention to their ideology. So back at Rand, I used to work on military manpower and in recruitment. And so there would be this constant debate, should we just run, you know, the Got Milk campaign where all the different dairy producers, they put their mind together and they say, drink milk. Why drink milk? Well, because Pepsi is there. So you want to put all your resources together to brand a concept rather than a particular brand. So one debate in the military recruitment literature was why do we have ads for the Army, the Air Force, the Navy Marines, plus the Guard and all the reserve components. All we're really doing is raising the price of any given recruit as opposed to expanding recruits. So what you'll see is that at some level, these organizations do very similar things, right? They will have these powwows where they're talking about the virtues of jihad, right? But when it comes time to getting you to sign on the dotted line, because they actually do have personnel strategies that are quite regularized, as my colleague Jake Shapiro has documented in his book, The Terrorist Alemah. When it comes to you signing on the dotted line, not only do they want you to kill on command, they also want you to embrace their worldview. And this is very important for Lashkar-Tayyaba because it is what you call Ghermokalid. It rejects all interpretive traditions or thick. And even though Pakistan doesn't ever ask this question in a census, we believe them to be about 5% or less in Pakistan's population. What's also important about Lashkar-Tayyaba, unlike the other groups, is that their ulama, their religious scholars, are at odds with other LAD scholars in Pakistan who do not believe that non-state actors can wage jihad. This means that, unlike other organizations that we're going to talk about, say the Dale Bundy's, they can't simply draw upon the mosques and mudresses as an intellectual and financial infrastructure, right? So this, from an ISI's point of view, makes them much more vulnerable because they don't have access to this extensive funding network that competitive militant organizations enjoy, most notably the Dale Bundy's. And Josh, what's the status of your book? On its way. Inshallah. Okay. Stay tuned. Josh is going to, Josh is hitting the market with a book for which there is no precedent. He is actually looking at the guts of the Dale Bundy's. You know, Vali Nasser's looked at Jamat, I looked at these guys. The Dale Bundy's have the biggest market share of killers in Pakistan and in the region. And unlike L.E.T., there's an archipelago of mosques and mudresses and multiple factions of the political party that it can free ride off of. L.E.T. doesn't have any of those. And that's why I've drawn these as I have. This blue thing in the middle are all of these Dale Bundy organizations. They have overlapping missions. They have overlapping manpower. And they have overlapping institutions in which they get money. And then it is these Dale Bundy organizations, both at the institutional and organizational levels that are contributing manpower first to al-Qaeda and now to ISIS. L.E.T., although in principle, it has much more in common with al-Qaeda because it is al-Qaeda's salafi and these guys are Ghermokalid, which are not exactly the same. They're similar. The Dale Bundy's, for historical reasons, have always had closer ties to al-Qaeda. So you'll remember back in 1998 if you were watching this then, when Clinton sent cruise missiles into the coast, we didn't kill al-Qaeda, but we killed Dale Bundy's and we killed some of their ISI handlers. And it was because of that proximity, remember the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, their Dale Bundy, that those relationships were forged. In Afghanistan, L.E.T. always had its own camps. So it didn't have the organizational organic ties to al-Qaeda that the Dale Bundy's had. So when I began, or when I studied these groups, I pay attention to how the organizations are situating themselves ideologically and how they're marketing themselves. And this is very important, by the way. Right now, L.E.T. is literally at war with ISIS because they don't agree with this notion of takfir, which is declaring a certain Muslim to be a kafir and often the subsequent determination that they're a watchable couple. Watchable couple, that only means that you're worthy to be killed but the person who kills you is actually doing, it's a boom to kill you, right? So L.E.T. and this is also part of the reason I argue in the book why L.E.T. Hadees is so important to the Pakistani state because no matter how terrible you might be as a Muslim, they can't kill you. They're very clear about this. They use the word kalimah go. As long as you have said the kalimah and you recognize that Allah is the highest authority, you can't be killed. The only way to respond to you in your behavior is through dawah and tabligh. And so this is obviously in stark contrast to the Daelbundis. And once I work through very carefully their minimum opus, Hamkion Jihad Qadrihan, this became very apparent. They say very explicitly, in fact, it's an interesting document. The follow-up to this book, it's an edited volume of all the translations of the stuff I use here. In this minimum opus, it starts out with a questioner asking, why is jihadi? Why are we waging jihad in Pakistan? Pakistan has all of these problems. Why are we waging this external jihad? So it plays out in a Socratic method, but basically arguing why Pakistan cannot be a place of jihad. And to go back to my Indiana roots, my mama would say, you don't pee in your own bathtub. You're not peeing in the bathtub. But there's also a reason for this. Their argument in Hamkion Jihad Qadrihan is that until, well, they make the argument that the umma began to decline when it stopped engaging in offensive jihad. So jihad is instrumental in bringing back the greater qualities of the umma. But there's also a more near-term explanation, and they're very clear about this. They say that when we stop engaging in the external jihad, which is killing the Khufar, mostly in India, we will turn on ourself. And we will no longer be the beacon for Muslims in South Asia or elsewhere. And so this is, in a nutshell, why L.E.T. is so important to the Pakistani state. Not only is it an effective killer outside of India, it is a very important organization within. So as some of you are asking, as I'm asked all the time, they're constantly under pressure to do something about this organization, but yet they continue to grow it. They continue to sponsor Jamat al-Dawah. They continue to grow its other humanitarian organizations. The reason is they want this organization to spread its mission domestically. And I've actually done survey work, and I can demonstrate to you the rebranding effort that the Pakistani state undertook when L.E.T. flipped over to Jamat al-Dawah. Most Pakistanis now think of this as an organization that works within Pakistan, whereas L.E.T. only works in Kashmir. So this branding effort has been very successful as my data show. Happy to talk more about this, because this is really the nuts and bolts of the book, is this domestic utility, not so much the external utility with people like Steven Tankel and Ashley and others have written about it length. This is an artifact that I want to show you. So my PhD is in the humanities. I'm not a political scientist. That's important to me because it means I privilege different kinds of evidence differently. So Steven Tankel uses a lot of interviews. I don't use interviews in this book because I have found that people either don't know, they don't remember because they're human, or they're not telling the truth. I was in a meeting with a very, I won't say his name. His initials are SC, and he's written a book which is basically a bromance about the ISI. And he said, and it was the most extraordinary thing, that Lush Greta Taiba told him that ISI is no longer giving them money. And after I, you know, forked my T, I said, they didn't tell you that. A, they wouldn't tell you that. I wasn't there, I know they didn't tell you that. A, they would never admit that, right? Because admitting that would be fairly serious. Two, the dude you met doesn't know English. And he barely speaks Urdu, because his Urdu sounds exactly like Punjabi, and I can barely understand him, because he speaks such a hate Punjabi. Which means that your translator told you that, right? So I don't, I don't rely upon this stuff, because even with the best of intentions, and whether or not there was the best intentions in this case, I can't say, but what I can say is this individual then went off to write some very important articles and briefed some very important people in a very important administration about a thing that could not have possibly had been true, right? And he didn't have the linguistic skills to understand that, but he shouldn't have had enough, I don't know, as my former boxing trainer used to say, on the corner shit. OCS is he called it. He should have used his OCS to figure out no one would ever say that from this organization. But this artifact, I think it's quite, kind of illustrates my point, right? This is a business card of Yahya Mujahid, whom I used to meet fairly frequently. He loves a pro-continental. But you can see here, and I've put this on my website, I've published it in multiple places, it's got his phone and fax numbers, apparently they still use fax, in all of these different cities, Islamabad, Mirpur, Muzaffarabad, Kashawar, Quarta, Multan and Karachi, right? So this is within Pakistan, an organization which is very available, you can call them, you can meet with them, they're very open, right? Which is not something you'd expect for an organization that's been prescribed or speaks to. My earlier point is that the deep state wants them to be circulating like this within Pakistan. So let's talk about my data. I think data is important so you understand how I think about data, and therefore you can critique my use of data. A lot of data that relies upon these kinds of biographies suffer from different kinds of biases. And I think it's important we discuss them right off the bat. First, to end up my database, it's very important if you're Lashkaratayiba. Let's take Ajmal Kasab. He failed in his most important duty, which was to die. And because the dude did not die, we know a lot about the deep state's assistance to this organization. We know that a frog man taught them to swim. If you've ever been to Pakistan, very few Pakistanis swim. If you talk to someone in the Navy, they will tell you that the operations that they did at sea were very, very complicated. To take folks who are essentially hydrophobic and to teach them to do those operations changing multiple crafts at high sea, this isn't trivial. We know these things because Kasab failed to die. This is very important because this tells me that these are the folks who are most dedicated to what they were tasked to do, which was kill and then get killed rather than being taken hostage. The other thing that we learn from these biographies is that the people that end up in this database, they're organizational entrepreneurs. When my brothers went to Iraq, they didn't say, hey, big army, send me to Iraq. There was no organizational lobbying. In fact, if you wanted to get out of Iraq, you had to be an organizational entrepreneur. You say, oh, I beat my wife or I'm gay because in those days that totally worked. Instead, all you had to do was be a battle-qualified soldier in the inventory of big army and have a pulse and you went. We even sent people from the Navy to go to Afghanistan. Anyone who had a pulse at some point rotated through these battle spaces. This isn't true with these guys because they have at their disposal a much larger base of trained people than they will ever need. What we see in these biographies is this constant begging. I've done this training. I've been deployed. Someone who did their training well after me has already been deployed. To the Department of Treasury folks, I've been saying this for years. You keep saying, where's the evidence that Hafiz Said does this crap? I have biographies. These are published by Hafiz Said's own in-house press. It would be like me running a terrorist organization having a magazine called Terrorist Weekly in which I talked about my sending terrorists that I blessed this terrorist. Which place he was going to go and be a terrorist and I'm like, sorry I have no responsibility. This would be implausible at face value. But we have biographies where Hafiz Said himself is the one that undertakes the decision to let this person go forward. Hafiz Said himself picks the target that he is going to operate against. We see in this a lot of bureaucratic entrepreneurialism. Let's also remember operationally for them to end up in my database there's barriers that are constantly imposing barriers for quality. So for example, getting into India. Just getting in. The Duffers are getting weeded out because they're not getting in either because they chicken out or because they get shot. If they do multiple operations they may have to exfiltrate and infiltrate multiple times and plus be vetted repeatedly through each of these operations as maybe you've been turned by the Indians. So all of this is by way to say that the data I'm about to present cannot be extended in a facile way to all of the operatives in LAT much as everyone who wants to join. So in other words this is like looking at the SAT scores of people who not only graduated from Harvard but went on to be astrophysicists and comparing it to the scores of the SAT of everyone who took it. This is how many layers of selection I believe these fellows have gone through. So it's really important to keep these distinctions in mind. Let's talk a little bit about what this data set says. So the darker... This is a heat map of where these fellows are recruited from. I have like a little under a thousand of these guys. The darker the red the more dense that district is for LAT production. If you've seen my book Fighting to the End you'll see that there's some similarity because I've got similar data for Pocke Army recruitment. There's many districts that overlap except the Pocke Army is more diverse because you also have a lot of recruitment coming from other places where you have cores. So there's about ten districts account for a majority of LAT recruitment. One of the reasons why the Punjab is so important I believe is because when you read their literature the atrocities of partition loom large. And you see this a lot in the biographies. The mother is reticent to give her permission for her son to go and the son says but mom you know you've told me that when grandma was a little girl she saw these terrible things and that one day we should avenge it and now you're not letting me avenge this. Bad mom. And mom's like oh yeah you're totally right what a very perspicacious argument you have advanced of course here's my blessing now go kill people. So there's what you'll find in their literature and I think Josh you've done some look at some of their stuff too that we did together. The partition looms very large in these publications and so I think that's one of the reasons why we see this and of course there's endogeneity there because the Punjab itself was the most sanguinary site of partition. East Pakistan I mean what's now East Pakistan had violence but nothing on the scale of this and Steve Wilkinson had some really interesting ideas why. Namely the over representation of Punjabis in the great wars that they were very effective managers of violence. So that's one of the hypotheses that he puts forward and he tests it and I think he makes a convincing case. All right so let's get to the data right remember I want to remind all of those caveats that I said while you may or may not be able to see these numbers let me just tell you this whether we look at all Pakistani males in the Punjab versus everyone else rural versus urban the percentage of Pakistani males and by the way these numbers are all on my website pristinsair.net I've got articles where I've published these numbers you don't need to photograph them the anywhere between 20% and 36% of Pakistani males are illiterate in contrast 1.3% of my fellows are illiterate and to sort of get to the chase very few people anywhere between 10% and 17% have achieved the matriculation of the 10th grade 44% of my sample has and we see similar things with intermediate and above. So what's essentially happened if we think about a bell curve by lopping off all of the doofuses we're essentially shifting the quality curve right so the average quality of our let guy is much higher than the average Pakistani male. Now remember I can't say that this is true of everyone who wants to join let that it's in let but of my guys Pakistan is sending some of its most educated people to engage in violence and another thing that I found was that these guys tend to be underemployed now I don't want the USAID folks to get excited oh we just give them a job they'll stop being a terrorist what might be going on is that if you want to engage in the intensive training that you have to do to be in this organization you need a job that gives you flexibility right so the the underemployment might be an artifact of this so I can go on a link let me just hop very quickly because it actually wants me to to wrap this up the other things I found is that whereas most literature on this phenomenon focuses on the individual let focuses on the family mothers play a very important role you will read mothers saying things that is a sister of soldiers the first time I read these I don't cry easily but I really was just sickened and I just had to put it down mothers would say I told my son I don't want you to come home a gazi gazi is a veteran I want you to be a shahid things that you can never it's like the obverse of the nurturing mother that we want you to go and die why do they want you to go and die they want the status of being a mother of a shahid and they say this very clearly also they believe that their sons can intercede on their behalf that when he goes to meet Allah that he can bring mama along again there's a really good way of going to heaven if you're a muslim be a good muslim you don't need to have your son get shot so the one thing that I found going through this is this really important role of families and L.E.T. actively recruiting them so in the 30 seconds what's the so what so having gone through this and combined with the book I did on the pak army pakistan has a dilemma right it has an army first of all it's revisionist it's revisionist for a variety of reasons it has an army that can start wars but can't win them it has nuclear weapons that it really can't use right so the tool that pakistan has developed is really using actors like this under it's expanding nuclear umbrella to give it impunity india has a problem despite it's defense modernization which is large it can't defeat pakistan decisively in a short war and that's really important I argue because you really have to emasculate the army you have to break the army india can't do that it simply cannot do that it's an army that has come up with this ingenious scheme would civilians go along with it it's a counterfactual so from india's point of view from american point of view I see very few tools in our collective or isolated toolbox to make pakistan stop doing this our options are really quite limited if we are unable to muster the collective political will to do what's necessary to this state and I'm not even sure that we have the ability to do that we're left with essentially mowing the lawn I think mowing the lawn is important so this particular organization is very vulnerable to leadership decapitation and the way that other organizations aren't because it's very hierarchical it's not accustomed to replacing people when they've been taken out so I end up in the final chapter suggesting that we as an international community are unable to put the pressure on pakistan as we've done for iran which is far less dangerous than pakistan which is from the a policy puzzle for the policy types we really have no choice but to use sub-conventional means to try to limit the ability of organizations like this to operate remember this isn't the only organization in pakistan's order battle right now in fact it's kind of funny, I ended up being more prescient and I'm never prescient, I'm really not I guess I got lucky, I had good scotch that night I argued that we're probably going to see more of jaish in the near term than lushkar the reason is lushkar is so involved in pakistan's internal counter-violent strategy that jaish for a variety of reasons is probably going to be the organization that it's using so this is also a substitution effect and we can't just take out group like lushkar because it's got other groups that it can deploy thank you thank you chris can I invite to you josh to offer some thoughts thank you it's a real pleasure to be here with friends and mentors and I would encourage you to go out and buy this book chris has given just I think a snapshot of some of the key arguments but it's rich with argumentation and with details that we haven't seen before it's really a great work just a few quick thoughts having read the book and heard the presentation the first is that I really want to underscore the importance of the theological ideological argument that chris presented that the book describes the way in which lushkaritiba has a theological architecture that seems almost purpose built for being a state proxy it's one that says that no matter what the pakistani state and its muslim leaders do they deserve to be corrected but not attacked and it directs the energies of the population against the hindu threat and the way in which this is unpacked I think is very sophisticated but it's important because it reminds us that the ideology of the group really binds it to the state in a special way and makes the state presume be able to make presumptions about the loyalty of the group in a special way because of the very elaborate theological architecture and reasoning that has to be put forward to explain why it is that even the most seemingly irreligious muslim leader in pakistan does not deserve to be attacked in the way that the neighboring hindu troops I think that's a very important outcome from this research the second is that it really made me think about a long standing discussion or even debate that we had within the US government and sort of other circles about how to deal with a group like lushkaritiba and the debate is whether to focus principally on the militant or terrorist activities the operational activities at the core of the group or whether also to spend much time and attention and potentially risk engaging the seemingly benign of political activities or public activities the the institutions the rallies the publishing the recruitment the fact that this organization and its affiliates operate very openly within the state I think to the annoyance of some of my friends in the counter-terrorism community I've long pressed to focus at least to some extent on these public activities because it moves the conversation from the cloak and dagger world of intelligence which operative is doing what and it in fact moves the conversation from the world of legalisms which designated individual did which thing in violation of international law to a conversation about what we can all observe very publicly the operation, the recruitment of this organization and I like to think that a lot of what is documented in this book reinforces an argument for engaging the public dimensions of lushkaritiba and its affiliates because it focuses on just how important the wider social context is to the organization the most effective fighters at least are recruited from panjab they rely on family ascent in order to recruit the narratives of legitimacy are important the public narratives that are reinforced by the affiliate organizations and so even if you set aside the very tricky questions of does the state have directive control and how does funding work in reading this book you can't really escape the argument that the state's public support and public space available to the organization matters for its ability to recruit and operate and thrive and therefore degrading that support to some extent has to be valuable and that's not to say that it would have immediate operational effects but it does reinforce to me that this is an organization not like al-qaeda that exists in secret cells that we can't see but one that's deeply socially embedded and that there are things that the organization is doing very visibly that could be curtailed and this is why I think some of the actions in the financial action task force that the US government is pursuing to look at the very obvious things that the organization is doing and to hold Pakistan to account for those things has some value even if it doesn't operationally degrade the group the last thing I would say is that the last chapter of this book is very provocative but I think also very honest in which Chris wrestles with what policy prescriptions might work looking at sort of a status quo option in which India the United States and other friends essentially accept the costs of last very type is activity of its militancy or terrorism and reckon those costs to be acceptable costs given the larger objectives that India has in the United States a second option being leadership decapitation which may be effective but comes at significant costs and the third being I forget how you characterize it but escalation escalating coercion to pressure the Pakistani state to to deal with this group or to come to a reckoning my only view is that there's probably very little that we can do to force a reckoning and at best there are things that we might do that would accelerate a reckoning but those come with costs and I would just say from a policy point of view having seen a little bit of this at any given moment the United States has things that it wants from Pakistan you can think about avoiding nuclear escalation you can think about nuclear safety and security which I would break out into a separate category terrorism against the United States terrorism against India terrorism targeted toward Afghanistan Pakistan's general dispensation toward Afghanistan and then you have humanitarian and economic interests and it seems to me that the United States puts the question of last very type of movement not at the top of that list not at the bottom but usually somewhere in the third or fourth quartile and given its placement in the hierarchy of US interests the strategy of escalating coercion is I think at this moment when Afghanistan is again at the top of that list unlikely to be very palatable particularly coercive measures that are focused on this particular problem set as opposed to ones that are focused on Pakistan's actions vis-à-vis Afghanistan so that's not a pleasant way to conclude but I think it's looking at the hierarchy of interests and where this particular problem, this very vexing problem sits within that interest but please go by the book because it's even richer than what you heard here today and even deeper I'm donating all of the proceeds to Indian victims of Indian victims of terrorism so buying the book will also help a good cause Bobby? Yes, I'm actually very pleased to be here to make a few comments on this book I read the book once and then I read the book again because I felt as though on the first time through I couldn't possibly have caught the entire richness I rarely do that in all honesty and I just found it fascinating we've touched on several dimensions of the book including the fascinating emphasis in a major part of the book on the domestic roots and the domestic consequences of those roots for both Pakistani society and the LET organization itself and I won't repeat some of the themes that have already been brought out so let me just touch on a couple of thoughts that take us a little bit outside the book but then bring us back in to the themes that Chris has so ably brought out first of all I asked myself after I read the last chapter of the book well looking beyond LET in Pakistan how do militancies anywhere then what are some of the roots as in R-O-U-T-E not the other kind by which for example the IRA becomes more of a political force although tugging at the pant legs of the IRA leadership are younger people who wish this hadn't happened that the IRA were still fighting and we can't say that some of these may not be reborn but the one answer that seems common to all of these ending stories where they have ended is they end messily and I wanted just to highlight a couple of messinesses that might result from any of the efforts to decrease LETs activities internally and externally so I wanted to start with decapitation because I had a fair amount of experience looking at the effects of decapitation on counter narcotics and on several continents so if you decapitate a major drug group and of course the parallel is that really well organized drug lords exercise a tremendous influence culturally and politically in the areas where they work and on the leaders of whatever countries they operate in or next to so what did our decapitation our meeting us decapitation strategy do it immediately brought forth other groups that were waiting in the wings everybody said these are all very hierarchical groups so you take out the leader you take out the group well that's true for a while until they grow a new leader but in the meantime other groups jump in maybe from other bases and take that space and move with it and if you think about what we've heard regarding the groups that are they counterweight for LET just thinking about the Pakistani ones without even adding al-Qaeda ISIS or whatever we're talking about the deobandi groups which are considerably less tolerant and more likely to foment disarray than array within Pakistan so that's a problem that immediately arises if we think about decapitation strategy I was fascinated to follow up on your points about the formation or the greater attention being given to LET as a political party even though that hasn't really taken off again that brought me back to Irish and other examples and of course the the the wisdom in Pakistan which I've been hearing since before 9-11 is that if you decommissioned LET if the government stopped supporting them and ordered them to the bench they would turn they basically would become gangsters they have capabilities particularly the fighters the fighters are not used to sitting on their hands we read in Chris's book and we've read elsewhere that when after 2001 after the attack on India's parliament they told LET to stand down for a time LET LET was divided on this issue there was some in LET who said we ought to go against the government this is unacceptable they can't make us stand down when we have a a huge issue to pursue and this could even be an opportunity that was Jaish was it? yeah and that's what precipitated a split of Jaish it's the same story in fact I actually heard it at the time I'm confusing that with what you put in your book but that was an important discussion and I actually had the privilege of talking with somebody a Pakistani gentleman who was very close to what this book makes clear is a scene between ISI and LET a very close one that even includes the intelligence people being involved in supplementing what LET pays to the families of Shahid so when you start looking again at that the possibility of really angering those devoted fighters who represent the pointy end of a large organization with many other missions that's a challenge I think most Pakistani even Pakistanis who believe that LET is in the employ of Pakistan military intelligence in particular and that this is counterproductive for Pakistan would have the choke on how do you get these guys decommissioned on a longer basis without their becoming as their counterparts having a number of other countries an internal security problem of a different sort I have done some comparative work on the end of militancies in South America and in Africa and that has always been a big challenge most of the first consequence is that they start replacing their earlier income by going out on more entrepreneurial bases and they become an internal security problem of a different flavor I wanted to pick up on a scrant of something you mentioned in your book which I found really interesting and that is the extremely limited information channels that are acceptable in LET culturally LET dominated villages and LET families they aren't supposed to watch TV they aren't supposed to what in effect is happening is that the LET narrative is reinforced in part by the absence of any contradictory information so one question I have and I know it's very difficult when people have grown up entirely in an ambiance with a narrative that is self-reinforcing in all the ways that they have access to the public domain is there some way to begin to inject other approaches to the same problems? I doubt very much that simple propaganda the sorts of things that public diplomacy does and even nick this influence and begin to open things up but there might be some more thought about just opening up the apertures around Pakistan to other Pakistani narratives there are other Pakistani narratives so I will stop my comments here except to agree with the somewhat pessimistic conclusion of my colleagues here about the U.S. ability to influence Pakistan to get rid of LET for all the reasons that each of us has discussed I don't think that's a successful strategy we can't buy a change of heart on this it's deeply embedded and the social embedment is the greatest obstacle of all Thank you Polly I would recommend one I would recommend that all of you think for the reasons that Chris mentioned as well but one thing that struck me about the book which is worth looking at is the enormous amount of detail that Chris has been able to mine from literature that LET has put out over the years I mean it's really quite remarkable I remember from our days when Chris would go to Pakistan she would come back with boxes full of everything from posters to pamphlets and obviously there was an enormous amount of data those of us who were focused only on the more rarefied sources missed this entirely and it's really wonderful to see in this book that Chris has been able to mine that subterranean literature to sort of tell a story with much greater texture than the international relations that Richard otherwise does I want to open the floor to your comments and questions but I do want to ask one question of all our panelists if they want to answer it Chris from your book and from your presentation I got the very strong sense that LET objectives and Pakistan state objectives are very closely aligned but are they perfectly congruent so are we really talking of a group that is a wholly owned subsidiary in functional terms or is there some room for a principal agent problem that could be exploited down the line now obviously in the here and now it may be hard but it isn't the question that Polly and Josh raised which is as this group evolves is there any possibility that a delta might open up between their own objectives and the objectives of the state and does that offer some opportunities with respect to so there is an anecdote but then I very much agree with Polly which way will this principal agent problem that might open up be down to the advantage of India in the United States or the disadvantage so there is one really important vignette and this was after it was very similar to what Jaish went through so Jaish those you don't know in there there was an Indian hijacking in 19 with the very end of 1999 and the Pakistanis had been trying to get some factions of these Dale Bundy groups, Harkethul and Saar Harkethul, Mujahideen, Hujiz all of these are Dale Bundy groups the ISI will both prop up and undermine these different Dale Bundy groups as a way of managing their aggregation of powers one of the ways they divide and conquer divide and rule so they the ISI orchestrated a hijacking display from Kathmandu who had a very horrific circuitous route that ultimately ended in Khandahar and the Indian government traded several high value terrorists one of whom was Masood Azar who set up Jaish another was Daniel Pearl who the murderer of Daniel Pearl Sheikh Omar in exchange for the surviving passengers now the reason why Khandahar was so important was that these guys had very good ties with the Taliban for the reasons that I had noted and with ISI assistance they go into Pakistan a few weeks later Jaish pops up right so Jaish when 9-11 happened and we invaded Afghanistan Jaish immediately flipped on the state because from their point of view the Taliban were the only emirate that followed Dale Bundy prescriptions of Sharia obviously there were problems because it was more plush tuned but it doesn't matter they immediately split and Jaish went and ratted on them which is why Jaish becomes this protective Masood Azar becomes this protected character of the state and everything it can to build him up because he becomes an important strategy in Pakistan's effort to put down the Pakistan Taliban which actually begins with this initial break in Jaish so this is a whole other story about a whole other organization but similar debate happens with Lushkar Atayaba right and they're getting pressure from their cadre you know right now the great Satan is in Afghanistan why aren't we fighting the great Satan now Lushkar knows that for it to operate in Afghanistan it has to be co-located with these Dale Bunnies in the tribal areas and the Dale Bunnies are in many ways its organizational nemesis right so they make this decision just to sort of let off the steam but if you want to go fight in Afghanistan they're going to be very limited targets you're going to go out to the Indian embassies the Indian consulates, some Americans you become a you'll become a functional interchangeable player with the Haqqani network you really want a high value target with probability of success being high send one of these guys in but it's really a valve and it's really being driven by Luxi Luxi is really a problem but then so we go back and people ask why did the Pakistani state do Mumbai and by the way there's a movie out about this I'm going to see it tonight Spouse J, you all should see it Hotel Mumbai about the hotel attack well this is a very propitious attack in retrospect we see that from the ISI's point of view this solves a whole lot of problems Pakistanis were really getting exhausted with the operations against the tribal elements you see this in the public polling they're also very exhausted with the Pakistan Taliban itself and this becomes this peaks actually in 2009 after the attack well what this attack does is that it gives the militants in Pakistan a chance to throw up a we support you flag Khayani actually says of the head of the Pakistani Taliban who offered ceasefire that this dude is a patriot right it also gives the opportunity for the Pakistani military to swing from the looking west towards Afghanistan of these very unpopular operations to swing towards the east which traditionally have a lot of support it also reminds Pakistanis of the really terrible indian emesis and we need to be unified and therefore it revivifies their ability to go knock heads right so it does all these things most importantly it gives them an excuse to put Lucky in prison Lucky was the third story or as I like to say in Hindi that Takti Hovani he was the one causing a lot of great for the organization so they put Lucky basically the fall guy and they put him in protective custody in jail right but protective custody allows him to do the things that the state want him to do but it limits his ability to do the Takti Hovani that he had been doing about fighting in Afghanistan going to your point and to your question Ashley there is but is this a good thing unless that's why now going to the leadership of the capitation I take all of your points Pali but there's a difference between them and the IRA this is a proxy right and I say very clearly because that you don't there's really nothing you can do to make this group go away there's this fascinating debate in the literature about target substitution right when a terrorist group can no longer effectively operate it what it will do is it will substitute to other targets and we've seen this with the Pakistan Taliban right thanks to the drones Alhamdulillah peace be upon them the Pakistan Taliban sees to be able to go after core commanders they cease to look for ISI headquarters and instead they began going after domestic targets so what you've essentially done is that you've switched the targeting from security targets to civilians you basically switch the cost that's called target substitution so you don't get rid of the you don't get rid of the terrorism but you degrade the quality of terror right so I'm very realistic about this but let so different because you can tell from their organization they've got like a handful of dudes I mean they're it's like musical chairs that you never take a chair out right so unlike the Dale Bundy organizations that work as networks of networks and they do this to protect against leadership decapitation the impunity of J.U.D. suggests a lot of scope for at least in the near term to degrade their capabilities does this fix the problems that Polly identified no but I'm really straightforward in the book that given the realities and the talk about principal agent problem and free writing there's they're never going to have a consortium of states for one reason China is now increasingly Russia is carrying water for Pakistan all we're really left with is mowing the lawn right that's really all we can do and so if you're an Indian and some people don't like this comparison in contrast every single day is a massacre in the streets same thing for here actually when you normalize for population our fatality on roads are really quite similar right but we don't politicize street fatalities even though road fatalities are something that a government can control to a much greater extent and terrorism fatality right so if you were to look at this as the cost of prosperity right the other option is doing what we've seen with this current government right which is you know try to impose a cost but even after Bala Coat I submit to you and we don't know what did or did not happen at Bala Coat this isn't enough to make Pakistan decide that oh okay because India may or may not have sent some mirages across the LSE and may or may not have blown up Bala Coat we're going to stop using these guys absolutely not and then going to your point about not propaganda I have to tell you I've become a pessimist about this Pakistan is narratively a self-licking ice cream cone like look at Bala Coat those dudes managed to to basically seize a victory out of the jaws of the feet right and when I meet Pakistani students I just I was just at Columbia on Friday discussing this book when you tell them that the cherished fission that they have learned from a curriculum that has been deliberately aligned with the ideology of the state that something isn't true they don't believe you and this is where the conspiracy theories are quite interesting they'll always deploy a conspiracy theory and this has actually prepared me to understand the time of Trump right and my own Americans I'm from Indiana conspiracy theory is not to tell you what the truth is it is to simply destabilize what you say the truth is and we will never have the cultural expertise to outrun the ISI they have deceited us every single time whether it was the the way they run the info ops on the drones I can't think of a single time when we've actually and the few times that we thought we have done info ops well when I pointed out to them we don't understand what's happening we were we were subsidizing these films to be made by ISPR one of them was translated as God hasn't left God hasn't yet abandoned us and we thought that this was great and we were encouraging people to support the PAK military operations what the lovely geniuses at the the mythsome the Islamabad myth was that the film is actually causing was promoting people to support these military operations because they were arguing that these militants were proxies of India and when I pointed out the really important first two minutes of the show they're like oh we totally didn't catch that right let me take two questions at a time because I'm conscious of time so Taysie please there's a microphone the remarkable account of the sort of thing I think you do best Chris so thank you for that I was struck by the education table but I wonder if you've got data to take that a little bit further geographically where do these guys come from where are they strongest sociologically I mean the educational figures would suggest that you're talking about middle class maybe lower middle class but is that what you actually found where do they otherwise fit into Pakistani society do any of these dudes start out with ambitions other than killing people or are there other things in their world which might give them ambitions other than killing people yes sir thanks Jonathan Landay with Reuters after Paloma the United States seemed to change its policy towards Pakistan where once upon a time we heard administrations pass talk about both sides needing to exercise restraint you then heard this administration talk about the Indians right to self defense and that last part self restraint was missing but we also heard them talking about Pakistan needing to take quote sustained irreversible unquote actions against the proxy groups that it sponsors are those just based on what you you all are saying it sounds like those are just more empty words from an American administration and if so to what extent based on historical record will those actually end up encouraging and fanning the use of these groups by Pakistan so to go to Taze's question oh I'm not sure how I lost the connection here but I'll show you here's here's the map I don't know how to bring it back online so if remember the author of these biographies unfortunately did not have my checklist of data elements not all of the biographies and we can't have a seance to ask these these out of fact hey what did you do so we are really we are hostages to what the biographies say and I didn't take everything that the biographies said as chronic truth so one of the things that I find is like you know this fellow you know he single-handedly killed 150 Khufar with a single pea shooter so I don't take those things at face value but I did take things like where are they from what was their education how many siblings did they have were they married those were generally an employment those are the kinds of things that we generally got so this tells you and as I said 10 districts account for the majority but what we do get and by the way so I'm doing I'm working right now on the sequel to this which is where I'm publishing with a colleague of mine of an annotated translation of the things that I used to write this book and we'll be using some of these biographies but what do we get from them they fall into a couple of themes the first is that they look a lot these young men and they're all men like the young men that my brothers recruits in the U.S. Army my brothers are recruiters and at this point some people get really angry at me and I organizationally they're doing the same thing they're manning a mission the boys will talk about they are bored there's just there's gotta be something else in this world waiting for them by the way my brothers talk the same way it's like the Army has this bumper sticker join the U.S. Army meet interesting people and kill them so I find engaging these biographies they are much more similar to any other violent organization recruiting people you also get the sense this is what we do in the U.S. Army no one, very few people come in actually wanting to kill people this is something that you're taught to do both my brothers joined the Army at 16 the idea of killing someone they went for other reasons adventure, education you see this happening within L.E.T this is why a lot of scholars have moved away from the radicalization literature they're not radical when they join they're taught to kill once they are in so you do see in these biographies the parent will talk about the restlessness of the kid the kid wanted to be something greater than working in the CD shop of his uncle this is a very common scene now then you have and this is also something that you see with U.S. military recruitment there's some kid you meet in high school he's got this great plan come talk to a recruiter he can get you into you'll see a lot of friends pulling people into the organization and the kid will remark well you know since my friend joined this organization he's much more focused he's a better person he's more caring he's a better son I want to be that and then we're just moving sort of along the religious motivations then you get to and this is someone points out how slutty their mothers and sisters are that they're running around they're not covered they shop by themselves they hang out with their friends they're texting with their boys and the boys is infuriated that their mothers and sisters are acting like such hussies and Lusker becomes a way where they're exerting control over their females and their families you also have women that are disgusted with the immoral behavior of their sons, husbands and uncles and they become part of Lusker to exert control over them so what I see in these biographies is a whole lot of agency there's a bunch of brainwashed idiots who had no other opportunities which is why I don't like the word radical I see at every point the people in my biographies making decisions and they're not just making decisions on their own they're making decisions in the context of a society every once in a while we see a sociopath why do I say a sociopath there's one mother who is missing her son he has such a great sense of humor and what was some of the funny things he liked to do was kill animals and torture local children with now then there's this whole other thing which is just genuinely Islamic in the Pakistani sense which is the young boy he wants to save his family both in this life by encouraging them to live better but then also he wants to intervene on their behalf and you'll see the boy telling his parents I'm gonna go to Allah to bring you with me don't make me look like a fool so you have this whole range of motivations that I think is really important and I have a much larger study of just these motivations that I'm working on as well going to Lande's point so actually Lande the US narrative shifted after Uri I noticed that which was in 2016 after Uri there was no more of those both side-isms and personally I think that was a very important move because Pakistan knows it's not going to get Kashmir I mean if you ever get a chance to talk to Mashara or JK or anyone else they'll tell you we're not going to get it we have to take these calculated risks so that India doesn't think that they've defeated us that we've rolled over Pakistan's a weevil, it wobbles it doesn't fall down so what it does get out of these things what it historically got was a time headline, most angels placed on the earth a bunch of ill-informed presidents, prime ministers saying the both sides you need to resolve XYZ and ultimately legitimizing Pakistan's equity in this field so I think actually this narrative shift that actually began in 2016 in Uri is an important part of depriving Pakistan of what it so desires which is bestowing legitimacy now when Malia Lodi gets up and opines about Kashmir people are more likely to simply smear at her than they are to yes, yes, yes va, va, va, right so I think depriving Pakistan of that legitimacy is a really important step in explaining to Pakistan that we are going to deny you the dividends of your terrorism and this is one of their important dividends is resolve your disputes which legitimizes their story say something to this no, I largely agree with Chris on that and the timing as well the shift after Uri I would say that that now was standing the way in which this administration after the most recent attack managed the aftermath was disconcerting to me in that it seemed to me to telegraph to India in a way that I entirely understand you get one really good punch which I totally support that's interesting I just wanted to make that punch count more and I think that after that one really good punch then the rhetoric shifted to both sides should be escalate and Pakistan should not get a counter punch if you will and I think that this was very understandable from the perspective of the U.S.-India relationship is trajectory there's a certain catharsis to it I think from my perspective if you weigh what India is likely to gain from such a punch which is in my view mostly political catharsis and the risks that we the risks that we are implicitly enabling escalation between both countries I think there was a an off-ramp that happened in this crisis on the ground in every crisis that might not be a sustainable policy prescription it might not be a sustainable wager the other thing I would say to the second part of your question about sustained irreversible action I'm all for sustained action against L.E.T. I think irreversible is probably a nonsensical rhetorical flourish by a U.S. government official almost nothing is irreversible in fact the problem I mentioned in my earlier comments about the public and non-public dimensions of this group's activities and not of its affiliates it's very difficult to see what happens within the small core of the group's operatives their preparation, their activities and the degree if any of direct control by the state over those activities there's a very large public dimension of what we can see which is in fact quite elaborate and growing and so to some extent what I have argued is that the United States should say to Pakistan that it recognizes that if Pakistan were to dismantle dismantle the group in one fell swoop there would indeed be blowback there would be all sorts of substitution effects and challenges but at the very least we should be seeing the state trying to systematically reduce the public domain of activities which provides this apparatus of support of social support and institutions from the political party to the relief organization to the institutions don't just change the leadership of the institutions close the institutions and that in doing so this might not get to the operational activities immediately but it's something that would be visible it's something that over time would have a cumulative effect given the deep social fabric and it would begin to signal that we are not a legitimate actor in the eyes of the state those are the things that are actually possible to do without blowback and those are the things that we're not seeing we need to go further take away the friggin Punjab police protecting them there are public trains that take them to the rallies and the apparatus they have support in the Punjab budget and so in that sense I'm sympathetic to the fact that a hammer blow would potentially be very difficult for the state but my view just to conclude is that when the Pakistani state has decided that a group needs to be dealt with it has shown itself very capable of dealing with that group along the full spectrum of operations from delegitimizing them to defunding them to substituting them and we saw this with the take a time and works right and so I'm fully capable that it can begin that process in a way that is visible and sustained even if nothing is irreversible okay we've got one two let's see I want to try and give all of you a chance so why don't the two of you quickly and keep your answers on the panel as succinct as possible my name is Pati I'm from Cindy American Pack my focus is more on the human rights and the important role they play on daily basis because I am from Cindy and especially the forced conversions and how ISI is closely working with these people who are very much involved so it's like two girls every day being falsely converted and abducted so my focus is more of human rights how America can put more pressure on human rights levels thank you Jaleel Afri from the frontier post one is that like you are trying to give an impression that there is nothing wrong in Kashmir don't you think there is something wrong in Kashmir from the Indian side as well the second is I'm really hurt with the fact that twice on two occasion you made a satire on the Islamic words with very negative things inshallah on a negative thing and you said alhamdulillah on a negative thing for a professor like you doesn't I don't think it's nice to make fun of religion I'm not making fun of religion maybe for three years I have never heard anybody say funny things about somebody's religion it's not about I'm sorry terrorism is not religion but let me don't say alhamdulillah on it alhamdulillah thank you for your point it doesn't look nice you and I can discuss these let's go to the Kashmir issue alright and by the way let's talk about PTM it's a perfectly good example of a state using everything at its disposal including lethal violence to degrade a group effectiveness so this idea that it can't I'm not persuaded by this is not a conversation about India and about India Kashmir but I'm very glad that you raised the issue of Kashmir because there's actually three pieces of Kashmir right there is the Pakistan administered Kashmir and it has an appalling human rights record to be completely blunt with you the place has zero development they basically kept that place as a petting zoo for the launching of terrorist operations into India let's also talk about the part of Kashmir that was illegal illegally ceded to China what's the human rights situation there right what part of China did that fall into remind me again okay you know where I'm going with this right so if we were to talk about what India is doing in Kashmir I appreciate your sentiment I have never shirked from criticizing India's appalling human rights record I have never shirked from criticizing major gogoy from putting you know this because you are on LinkedIn you see my posts and not only was he not punished he was accolated by the army chief so sir your question I have to say is disingenuous anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I will not shirk from criticizing those things however Pakistan is you also know has put India deliberately in a very bad situation Pakistan knows that India has to maintain a large counter-insurgency grid because of the incessant threat of Pakistan sponsored terrorism this is why it is so easy for Pakistan to pay a youth 500 ruby to throw a rock at a police officer with full knowledge that there is a very large probability that at least one of those rock throwers will be killed so I will say to you sir and I don't care if they offend you the only Kashmiri Pakistan cares about is a dead Kashmiri if Pakistan cares about Kashmir it will stop using terrorism this will allow Delhi and Trinagar to sort out their very real problems that cannot happen until Pakistan stops the terrorism habit you want to take the second question I will I don't think we have a lot of hammer there but I will tell you Lusker yes they are they are and they're yes and also to convert Hindus and so they actually have a couple of Hindus from tar who's become a J.U.D. spokesperson because they're investing because of the water problems with the tube wells and of course the environment itself is not very water friendly they've been investing in well infrastructure and they are very explicit about using social welfare to convert Cindy Hindus they also are in many cases the sole provider of medical care of course the state's doing this by choice the state could provide those things but the state actually wants community in this role in the same way that J.U.D. and it's the sole source provider of earthquake relief for example in Balochistan so this goes back to my argument about them being a domestic partner they have a fascinating treatment though of Hindus the the leadership has been very clear they cannot be killed even though they are the greatest of polytheists within Pakistan they can only be converted and so by the way they have a very similarly sophisticated take on enmities because if you ask them to articulate their view they won't say that they're Kali Mago but they're not going to advocate killing them either so I agree with you at a larger point I haven't seen evidence that the United States is able to do anything on human rights issues in part because it doesn't really rank you know as Josh said there's all these other things that kind of rank higher but I'm not going to comment about it further I'll take the last two questions yes sir Peter, a pre-intelligence and a former diplomat of course these operations have killed plenty of Muslims and it's wonderful to see them ignoring those collateral damage bigger question though is those who do interview these people find that almost without exception operations are signed off by some cleric and to the extent that we've even seen operations delayed waiting for the clerical fatwa that means the center of gravity here is ISI funding and the imprimatur of certain clerics where's the naming, shaming and targeting of these clerics well that does not apply to this organization let me just take the last questions my name is Malika Wan and I'm executive member of Republican national committee and my question is not based on my personal views and opinions but our large Indian American diaspora living in the United States there's one book published from Canada the bit trial of India by an author named Elias Jefferson and if you read that book actually is very much discussed today on twitter and on various social media platforms and in that book the author is investigative journalist and he has given some proofs in which he according to the author that Indian intelligence itself is involved into the Mumbai attacks and they have received the benefits by the hike in military budget at 21% and certain benefits thank you so to your point sir the point that you raised really follows more the Dao Bundy groups again but even they they're like a self looking ice cream because they have mudraces and they have mosques and they have ulama that are sympathetic now they don't actually have to bless every single operation so one of the most important things was for example blessing suicide operations because this was something where there was a lot of debate amongst different ulama or alums we saw in Afghanistan and we also saw in Pakistan when the ulama refused to agree that suicide operations are halal that they were killed so one of the issues that one has in this approach that you're adopting is that unless you're willing to provide security for those alums that will de-legitimize certain kinds of violence you provide them with no incentive to do that conversely if you do provide them with security you take away their legitimacy because now they look like a paid alam right so it's I am very sympathetic to your point but I think it's much harder to do than what you're suggesting with let it doesn't matter because they have already broken away from the L.A. Hadith ulama because the L.A. Hadith ulama have already said what this organization does is not halal going to your point sir I don't think everything is worth reading I don't think everything is worth believing having read it I will point you to a more credible volume and that is a book written by Avinash Paliwal sometime ago in 2008 I caused a bit of a controversy by stating what I thought was a fairly basic truth India has done intelligence operations in Afghanistan it has done intelligence operations in Balochistan and I think the best account of those which draw from raw interviews other intelligence operators my only grouse about it is realized through heavily upon interviews and it doesn't rely upon other information that could buttress those interviews but Avinash Paliwal's book is absolutely superb it is unflinching in sort of describing what India has done but sir this book that you just described I am profoundly offended that anyone would take that would take that credibly not you, not you him sir I mean you know as you know Americans, Israelis and many Indians died in that attack to say that Indian intelligence was behind it that this was a false flag operation I think kind of insults our collective intelligence and it also insults my sense of a human, my sense of morality but we'll agree to disagree I was in elasto well I do want to second your your view on Mumbai and to say that enough of the joint British, American Israeli, Indian forensic investigation after the fact but not to mention the confessions of the surviving member of the L.E.T. team really as far as I can see completely negates what you mean this is in the public domain enough of it was out in the public domain to I think make that really quite clear and David H.B. Coleman was a more complicated fellow that does not involve Indian intelligence, that's on us well I want to take the opportunity on behalf of all of you to thank our three panelists today and especially Chris for having taken the time to walk us through the book do we have there are copies on sale outside if you want to pick one up but in any event thank you for coming this morning I look forward to seeing you again at the Carnegie Endowment and thank you for being such an active audience with your thoughts your questions and your queries and thank you to all our panelists