| Laila Bushra |
The military and geostrategic implications of the India–Pakistan conflict in May 2025 after the Pahalgam attack have been widely discussed. But India’s campaign against Islamic militants inside Pakistan has received less attention.
Since 2021, India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is reported to have targeted at least twenty Pakistani militants through an elaborate network of intelligence agents and mercenaries. The targets belonged to prominent jihadi organisations and were alleged by India to have been involved in major terrorist attacks since the 1990s.
The first reported instance was the June 2021 suicide bombing outside the heavily guarded residence of Hafiz Saeed, the founder and leader of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, which later operated through its front group Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and whose affiliates went on to form the Milli Muslim League. Saeed survived, but three people were killed and 24 were injured, including police personnel.
Subsequent attacks have all been close-range shootings and the trend has picked up pace across multiple cities, killing important members of JuD, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Hizbul Mujahideen among others. The Pakistani press did not initially acknowledge the identity of the targets and accusations of Indian involvement were muted.
But as both the profile of targets and the frequency of such shootings have risen, it has been difficult to deny their affiliations or rule out involvement of RAW. The most notable killings in 2025 were JuD leaders Zia ur Rehman in Punjab in March and Abdul Rehman in Sindh in May. The attacks are reported to follow the same pattern — UAE-based Pakistani workers or Afghan nationals are recruited by RAW in return for cash, and they work with a small local cell for months to plan and execute the killing.
The strategy has worked for middle-ranked militants. While RAW has not eliminated top leaders like Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar, it got as far as Saeed’s residence and members of Azhar’s family were killed in Indian airstrikes in Bahawalpur in May 2025. Indian intelligence officials proudly cite Israel as their inspiration for this kind of warfare.
Indian policymakers might also be congratulating themselves on finally having turned the tables on Pakistan by supporting the insurgency in Balochistan. Yet India shares more demographic and political features with Pakistan than with Israel, and its leaders would do well to draw some sobering lessons from their neighbour’s experience.
A familiar pattern emerges in many states — intelligence agencies eventually employ their covert war strategies and personnel for domestic political ends rather than geostrategic purposes. After 2001, the Pakistani military used its longstanding relationship with Islamic militant groups not only to shield the Afghan Taliban and extract financial returns from its US alliance, but also to consolidate its control over national politics.
This included a deliberately ambiguous, tacitly tolerant approach as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) assassinated Benazir Bhutto and the entire leadership of the secular Awami National Party in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, clearing the way for the army’s favoured political contender — Imran Khan.
Notably, the Mumbai terrorist attack in 2008 came soon after the president of the newly elected Pakistan People’s Party government made dovish statements about India to the international press. Similarly, the 2016 Uri attack came after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Pakistan in December 2015, when the Pakistan Muslim League was in power. These tactics served several short-term aims — eliminating political threats, undermining civilian governments and keeping tensions with India alive. But the strategy has unravelled since 2021 amid financial crises, international sanctions and political instability after the fallout with Imran Khan and a more aggressive TTP campaign.
Two weeks after the Pahalgam attack, Satya Pal Malik — the last governor of Jammu and Kashmir — accused the central government of serious security lapses. He charged that they were stoking communal divide and ‘war hysteria’ for political mileage ahead of the November 2025 Bihar elections, rather than prioritising investigation and accountability. There were also widespread allegations of manipulation and mass disenfranchisement before these elections. For observers of the TTP-army relationship in Pakistan, patterns of intelligence and security failures before well-timed terrorist attacks, followed by thin accountability, warrant scrutiny.
The second lesson is more obvious — mercenaries and proxies invariably turn on their patrons. Only recently did the United States learn this lesson from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pakistan is learning it at an even higher price, struggling with armed insurgencies in its western provinces and hostile relations with Afghanistan, Iran and India.
Covert warfare policies temporarily strengthen the military and intelligence apparatus at the expense of democratic institutions but ultimately undermine both. Assassinations and helping separatists inside Pakistan pose minimal diplomatic risks to India — unlike in the United States and Canada. But an important reason to question the value of going down this road is the cost to India’s own social and political fabric.
First published on East Asia Forum. https://doi.org/10.59425/eabc.1765620000
Dr Laila Bushra is a research affiliate at the Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne. She was trained as a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and previously taught in Pakistan for several years while contributing to and reviewing articles for East Asia Forum.
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