By T.N. Ashok
In the same week that Pakistan’s air force struck seven militant hideouts inside Afghanistan, killing 70 suspected Tehrik-e-Taliban fighters in retaliation for suicide bombings in Islamabad, Bajaur and Bannu, Delhi Police and the National Investigation Agency were quietly rolling up a very different kind of network — eight alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives, seven of them Bangladeshi nationals carrying forged Indian identity documents, arrested in raids across Kolkata’s dense urban corridors and Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu’s hosiery capital.
The juxtaposition was as stark as it was revealing. Pakistan, the nation demanding the world’s sympathy for the terrorism it suffers, was simultaneously running, or at minimum harbouring, the infrastructure of terrorism it exports. This is not a coincidence. It is policy — the most consequential, most ruthlessly sustained double game in contemporary Asian geopolitics.
For three decades, Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment has maintained a distinction that its Western patrons long pretended not to see and that its civilian governments have been either unwilling or unable to challenge: militants who strike the Pakistani state are enemies to be hunted; militants who strike India are assets to be cultivated.
The recent arrests in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, and the strikes in Afghanistan that preceded them by 72 hours, lay bare that architecture with unusual clarity. “Pakistan hunts the terrorists that threaten Rawalpindi. It protects the ones that threaten New Delhi.”
The eight individuals arrested in the latest sweep are not foot soldiers. Indian investigators describe them as module masterminds — cell organisers responsible for recruitment, logistics and ideological indoctrination, not mere couriers or lookouts.
That seven of them held Bangladeshi passports under false Indian names points to a sophisticated cross-border infiltration corridor that has been operational for years, routing operatives through Bangladesh into India’s eastern flank and dispersing them into manufacturing hubs in the south where migrant worker populations provide cover and anonymity.
Tiruppur is not an accident. It processes approximately 90 percent of India’s knitwear exports and employs hundreds of thousands of workers, many from across state lines and international borders.
For an intelligence network seeking to embed operatives in plain sight, a textile boomtown with transient labour and minimal document scrutiny is close to ideal. West Bengal, with its porous land border with Bangladesh and its sprawling urban density, has long been flagged by Indian intelligence agencies as a primary infiltration corridor for Pakistan-linked networks.
What the arrests reveal is that Lashkar-e-Taiba — the organisation that sent ten gunmen into Mumbai in November 2008, killing 166 people in a siege that paralysed the city for three days — has not been degraded into irrelevance by global sanctions, Financial Action Task Force scrutiny, or Pakistani assurances.
It has adapted. It recruits across borders. It uses proxy nationalities. And it continues to enjoy, by any operational assessment, a level of sanctuary on Pakistani soil that no genuinely committed counter-terrorism state would permit.
Pakistan’s interior minister Talal Chaudhry was unambiguous in justifying the Afghan strikes. Afghanistan, he said, has long been exporting terrorism, and Pakistan is taking all actions to secure the lives and property of its citizens.
Kabul warned of a necessary and measured response to what it called a violation of sovereignty. The exchange was grimly familiar — the same grammar of grievance and retaliation that India has employed after every major attack on its soil, and the same dismissive deflection that Islamabad has offered in response.
The parallel is not lost on Indian officials, who have watched Pakistan invoke the language of victimhood with practised fluency for years.
When India conducted airstrikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility in Balakot in February 2019, days after a JeM suicide bomber killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Pulwama, Islamabad did not acknowledge the existence of the camp.
It called the strikes an act of aggression and scrambled its air force in response. Pakistan’s right to pursue militants across international borders into Afghanistan is, apparently, self-evident. India’s right to pursue the same logic across the Line of Control is categorically denied.
“When India strikes terror camps across its border, Pakistan calls it aggression. When Pakistan does the same into Afghanistan, it calls it counter-terrorism.”
The strategic calculus behind Pakistan’s selective approach to militant groups is not difficult to decode, even if it has been diplomatically inconvenient to state plainly. Groups like TTP and the Baloch Liberation Army threaten the Pakistani state directly — they bomb markets, assassinate officials, attack military convoys, and undermine the authority of the army that has effectively governed Pakistan for much of its existence.
These groups are enemies. Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, by contrast, have historically directed their violence outward — toward Indian targets in Kashmir and beyond. They serve as instruments of a foreign policy that cannot be pursued through conventional means against a neighbour with which Pakistan has fought four wars and lost each one that reached a decisive conclusion.
The architecture of this distinction was laid in the 1980s and 1990s when Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, working in concert with the CIA and Saudi Arabia, built the mujahideen networks that eventually expelled Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The infrastructure of religious militancy — the madrassas, the fundraising networks, the ideological supply chains — was not dismantled after the Soviets withdrew. It was redirected.
Some of it went to Afghanistan, producing the Taliban. Some of it came to Kashmir, producing JeM and LeT. The Pakistani deep state made a calculation that proxy warfare was cheaper, deniable, and strategically effective. Twenty-five years of that calculation have produced the world’s most dangerous nuclear-armed state by any honest counter-terrorism metric.
The roster of attacks attributed to Pakistan-linked groups on Indian soil reads like a chronicle of deliberate strategic escalation. In December 2001, gunmen linked to JeM and LeT stormed the Indian Parliament complex in New Delhi, killing nine security personnel and bringing two nuclear-armed nations to the brink of full-scale war.
In November 2008, ten LeT operatives arrived by sea in Mumbai and spent three days killing 166 people across the Taj Mahal Hotel, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, and the Nariman House Jewish centre — an attack that froze India-Pakistan dialogue for years and reshaped global counter-terrorism cooperation.
The Uri attack of September 2016 — 19 Indian soldiers killed by JeM militants at an army base — prompted India’s first publicly acknowledged surgical strikes across the Line of Control. Pulwama in February 2019 killed 40 CRPF personnel and produced Balakot. And then Pahalgam in April 2025, where gunmen demanded identification from tourists before shooting them at close range, killing 26 — newlyweds and honeymooners among them — in what Indian investigators described as a signature JeM operation designed for maximum civilian horror. Each attack has been followed by Pakistani denial, international hand-wringing, and the eventual resumption of a status quo that leaves the militant infrastructure intact.
The international community has not been entirely passive. Pakistan spent years on the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list — a designation that restricts financial flows and raises the cost of international borrowing — before being removed in 2022 following a series of nominally compliant legislative measures.
The removal was widely criticised by Indian officials and independent analysts as premature: the structural conditions that enable militant financing, the hawala networks, the charitable fronts, the ISI-linked facilitation — had not been dismantled, merely papered over with legislation that was selectively enforced.
LeT’s founder Hafiz Saeed remained under nominal house arrest in Pakistan for years, producing statements and giving interviews, before being sentenced to prison in what many observers characterised as a performance calibrated to FATF timelines rather than justice.
JeM’s Masood Azhar, designated a global terrorist by the UN Security Council only in 2019 after China lifted its veto under sustained pressure, has operated with remarkable freedom in Pakistan’s Punjab province. These are not the conditions of a state waging genuine war on terrorism. They are the conditions of a state managing its international reputation while protecting operational assets.
Pakistan’s strikes in Afghanistan this week will be framed in Rawalpindi as proof of resolve. Islamabad is indeed a victim of terrorism — the Peshawar Army Public School massacre of December 2014, in which TTP gunmen killed more than 130 schoolchildren, was a national trauma of genuine and lasting magnitude.
The suicide bombings in Bajaur and Bannu that triggered the latest Afghan strikes are real attacks that killed real people. Pakistan’s suffering at the hands of the militants it once cultivated is neither invented nor trivial. But suffering does not purchase impunity. A state cannot credibly demand international solidarity against the terrorism it endures while simultaneously maintaining the infrastructure of terrorism it deploys.
The eight men arrested in Kolkata and Tiruppur this week — trained, connected, and operational on Indian soil with forged documents — are not a coincidence or an aberration. They are evidence. And the evidence, accumulated across 25 years of attacks from Parliament House to Pahalgam, points in one direction, regardless of which way Islamabad’s aircraft are currently flying. (IPA Service)
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