Jihad under the Nuclear Umbrella
Jihad under the Nuclear Umbrella
This chapter exploits Pakistan’s defense literature to historicize Pakistan’s use of nonstate actors to prosecute asymmetrical conflict in India and Afghanistan from the beginning of the state’s history. In the 1950s, Pakistan military publications envisioned sustaining a peoples’ war in Indian-administered Kashmir in an effort to coerce India to relinquish its claim. From the 1980s onward, Pakistan’s army reimagines the peoples’ war as jihad. From the late 1970s, Pakistan’s defense literature evidences an understanding that the nuclear weapons will allow Pakistan to revisit the Kashmir issue principally by allowing Pakistan to use nonstate actors (usually but not always Islamist militants) with increasing impunity as nuclear weapons raise the cost of Indian intervention. The chapter uses Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the most important Islamist terror groups that Pakistan has deployed against India, as an important case study. It demonstrates that this group not only helps serve the army’s external goals but also advances several domestic political objectives.
Keywords: asymmetrical conflict, Islamist militants, jihad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, peoples’ war, guerilla war, Kashmir
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