Competitive terrorism between IS, LeT is the real danger for India flowing out of the ‘horrific’ Paris attacks

http://www.firstpost.com/world/competitive-terrorism-between-is-let-is-the-real-danger-for-india-flowing-out-of-the-horrific-paris-attacks-2506978.html

Nov 15, 2015 

By Saikat Datta

A new kind of war demands new tactics and a new response. The American military and intelligence juggernaut discovered this maxim the hard way after 9/11 when airliners hijacked by the Al Qaeda crashed into the World Trade Towers, killing thousands.

Surprised by the 9/11 attack, the Americans went into a huddle to discover to their horror that all their doctrines were meant to fight a conventional war, against a state that could hold territory. The Al Qaeda was neither a state, nor did it value holding territory. They were non-state actors, who preyed on ideology and used asymmetric warfare as its preferred tool of destruction.

The attack on Paris on Friday night by the Islamic State (ISIS) is the manifestation of a new war, whose doctrines were written in the AF-Pak region. The people who worked on the doctrine were bred in madrassas in Pakistan, emerging from decades of radicalisation and actively supported by the Pakistani military-industrial complex to hit India in its asymmetric, undeclared war.

The IS, believed to have emerged out of the Syrian civil war, built its reputation on carefully developed strategy of armed assault tactics and targeted assassinations. A detailed study of their al-naba, its “annual reports” by the U.S based think tank, Understanding War, gave the world the first deep insights into its evolution into a dreaded terrorist outfit. The analysis noted that the IS specialised in “attacks utilizing small and medium arms” and “suicide operations” that was deployed near Baghdad in Iraq. The analysis concluded that the ISIS had “a strong unified, coherent leadership structure that commands from the top down”.

Clearly, this new entity was well organised and determined to take on its “enemies”. As more information trickled out, the global intelligence community was fascinated at the ability of ISIS to adapt quickly to new communication platforms to extend their reach and influence.

For India, the rising ISIS threat is worrying on two fronts in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. For the first time in decades, young Indians have shown a dispensation to align themselves with a “global jihadi ideology” as a senior Indian intelligence official explained it to me a few months ago. For years, terrorism in India had been dominated by Pakistan-sponsored outfits like the Lashkar-e-Toiba, which was focussed on attacking India.

The lure of outfits beyond Pakistan had never been a great attraction and between 2005 and 2011, only one person from Hyderabad had been fund to have travelled west to join the Al Qaeda. The man returned disillusioned and finally committed suicide.

However, as the ISIS began to spread its global tentacles, effectively using Social Media platforms like Twitter, it began to find resonance in India. At one point, one of its most influential twitter operators was found to be a young Bangalore-based Indian executive who was arrested after being exposed by the London-based Channel 4.

A detailed study of the Twitter strategy of the ISIS by the U.S.-based Brookings Institution between September and December 2014, studying 46,000 twitter accounts, found increasing support for the ISIS across the globe. The study also found that nearly 133,422 tweets per day were being sent out by ISIS supporters, peaking during acts of beheadings or other executions. Most of this online activity was controlled by a dedicated croup of 500 to 2000 users targeting supporters across the Middle East and Europe.

In India, intelligence agencies kept a wary eye on this emerging new threat. In regular meetings held by the National Security Advisor with the IB and R&AW chiefs, the ISIS would be frequently discussed and the strategy was to keep tabs on youngsters travelling to Syria via Turkey to join the terrorist outfit. However, India’s strategy was to try and avoid any legal prosecution of these youngsters, instead attempting to convince them that their chosen path was wrong.

According to a senior Indian intelligence official who spent considerable time in Europe tracking the rise of the ISIS, the failure of the elaborate French surveillance regime to anticipate the attack was the biggest worry. “After the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, French intelligence had increased its surveillance – both physical and online – to anticipate such attacks. But the fact that they managed to get through shows how well planned this attack was,” the official told me.

What was worrying the French was the suspicion that most of the attackers were probably French residents, originating from North Africa, who had also joined the ISIS in Syria and returned to France earlier this year. According to the official, these French-speaking ethnic groups exploited simmering communal tensions to find new recruits and deploy them for these attacks.

“These attacks are based on the tactics first deployed by the LeT, when it carried out the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. That was the blueprint, this was a manifestation of the same tactics,” a senior counter terrorism official confirmed. For the Indian intelligence community, the Paris Attack by the ISIS, in many ways, heightens their concerns about the LeT.

For the LeT, which chose to target vulnerable public spaces on 26/11 – train stations, restaurants and hotels – it was a new way to spread its terror to cow down the Indian state and force it to react. The tactics deployed by the LeT has now been adopted by the ISIS because it is cheap, easy to deploy and attracts massive publicity. This creates a new worry for Indian security officials.

“We know that the LeT is ready with several plans to attack India. They continue to get support from the Pakistani military leadership – travel documents, money, material and training. But the success of every attack by a competing outfit like the ISIS increases pressure on them to carry out an attack on India. So it is a twin threat – ISIS and the LeT - that we have to deal with,” the counter terrorism official said.

Their worries have some basis in the past. According to the interrogation report of David Coleman Headley, an American of Pakistani origin, who worked with the LeT to plan 26/11, a key reason for the assault on Mumbai was the outfit’s worry that they would lose their cadres to the Taliban if they did not carry out a “spectacular” attack. Now, with a “spectacular attack” in Paris, the LeT is likely to renew its efforts to repeat a 26/11-style attack.

Saikat Datta is a former editor and investigative reporter, author of ‘India’s Special Forces’, a Visiting Fellow with ORF and researching on issues of counter-terrorism, intelligence and cybersecurity. He tweets as @saikatd on Twitter