The Resistance Front
One could therefore conclude that the old machinery is finally breaking down. Or, rather less reassuringly, that it has simply learned to travel lighter.
On July 22, a lone terrorist shot dead Head Constable Ashiq Hussain while he was deployed for Amarnath Yatra security duty in Anantnag. Nine days later, terrorists opened fire on two migrant labourers from Chhattisgarh working at a brick kiln in Kulgam, killing Deepak Ratray and injuring Bhupinder. TRF claimed both attacks. Neither required an infiltration column, a large operational cell or anything resembling the cumbersome militant infrastructure of the 1990s and early 2000s. A weapon, a carefully selected target, a local or hybrid operative and somebody capable of providing instructions and logistical support were sufficient.
This is precisely where the apparently encouraging statistics become less comforting. For years, and with considerable success, Indian counter-terrorism policy has progressively dismantled the visible architecture of militancy in Kashmir. Training networks have been disrupted, infiltration routes placed under increasingly effective surveillance, commanders killed, local modules penetrated and the ability of Pakistan-based organisations to maintain large numbers of armed cadres inside Jammu and Kashmir drastically reduced. All of this is real, and all of it matters. The problem is that Pakistan has had exactly the same number of years to study what India was destroying and to adapt accordingly.
Lashkar-e-Toiba became a liability not because it ceased to be useful but because, eventually, everybody knew exactly what it was. Hafiz Saeed was hardly an invisible mastermind, Muridke was not a mysterious location and, after Mumbai, the endless succession of charities, welfare organisations, political fronts and supposedly independent entities linked to Lashkar could provide only so much plausible deniability before the whole exercise became faintly ridiculous. Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation and the rest of the alphabet soup could be renamed, reorganised and occasionally banned, but the organisation had acquired an international biography, complete with leaders, addresses, bank accounts, training facilities and an operational history that was becoming increasingly difficult to explain away as the spontaneous enthusiasm of non-state actors.
TRF solved part of the problem. The name contained no conspicuous religious reference, its propaganda spoke the language of resistance rather than jihad and its emergence after the abrogation of Article 370 allowed it to present itself as the expression of a newly radicalised indigenous Kashmiri anger rather than another incarnation of Pakistan’s old jihadist machinery. Local recruits, so-called hybrid terrorists and small, decentralised operations added credibility to the fiction and allowed Islamabad, whenever necessary, to rediscover its perennial astonishment at the existence of terrorism on the other side of the Line of Control.
The trick, however, is becoming considerably more sophisticated than simply changing the label on the box.
What is emerging is an operational environment in which the organisation itself matters progressively less than the network surrounding it. A local operative does not need to belong permanently to Lashkar. An Over Ground Worker does not need to carry a rifle or spend months hiding in a forest. A cleric can provide shelter and food, a courier can move narcotics or money, a sympathiser can identify a target, somebody else can arrange communications and a handler sitting in Pakistan can remain several stages removed from the man who eventually fires the gun. Each participant performs only part of the operation; each additional layer makes the chain more difficult to reconstruct and the political responsibility easier to deny.
The figures themselves reveal the transformation. Police have identified hundreds of people originally from Poonch who are now operating from Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir and are allegedly involved in infiltration, narcotics smuggling, radicalisation and logistical assistance. Many are associated with Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed or Hizbul Mujahideen, but their usefulness no longer necessarily depends upon functioning as conventional terrorists. On the contrary, a man who can organise transport, identify a route, arrange accommodation or recruit somebody locally without ever appearing in an encounter may be far more valuable than another permanently armed militant waiting to be detected.
The same logic applies to financing. Investigations into LeT-linked narco-terrorism networks in Jammu and Kashmir have exposed an increasingly porous border between organised crime and terrorist logistics, in which narcotics generate revenue, revenue sustains facilitators, facilitators sustain local cells and the organisation itself can remain several transactions away from both the money and the attack. It is not the grand architecture of the old jihad, but it does not need to be. The large camps, identifiable cadres and elaborate command structures that once demonstrated the strength of an organisation also made it visible. Connections are cheaper, more flexible and considerably harder to bomb.
Which is why the declining number of LeT fatalities, while unquestionably evidence of sustained Indian counter-terrorism success, does not necessarily demonstrate an equivalent decline in Pakistan’s ability to generate violence. Fewer permanently deployed terrorists may simply be required when the infrastructure around them becomes more decentralised, more civilian in appearance and increasingly capable of producing an operative only when an operation requires one.
The Pahalgam massacre should have disposed of any remaining illusion that lower numbers automatically mean lower intent. On April 22, 2025, twenty-six civilians, primarily Hindu tourists, were murdered at Baisaran. TRF initially claimed responsibility and then withdrew the claim, an unusually revealing manoeuvre considering that terrorist organisations do not generally become modest after successful operations. Indian investigators subsequently linked the attack to LeT/TRF handlers in Pakistan, alleging that Sajid Jatt, operating from Lahore, coordinated communications, logistics and targeting instructions through Pakistan-based digital channels. Hafiz Saeed was later named in a supplementary chargesheet.
The retraction was, in its way, almost as interesting as the original claim. TRF was useful when it created distance between an attack and Lashkar. It became rather less useful when the scale and brutality of the operation made that distance politically expensive. The name could therefore be discarded while the infrastructure remained exactly where it had been.
But there is another development which suggests that Pakistan’s proxy architecture may now be evolving beyond the familiar multiplication of fronts and aliases. Intelligence assessments indicate that LeT cadres may increasingly be encouraged to make use of networks linked to Islamic State Khorasan Province in Jammu and Kashmir, both to revive militant activity and to make attribution considerably more complicated. Reports also suggest that, following the destruction of the Muridke facility during Operation Sindoor, parts of Lashkar’s training and logistical infrastructure may be moving towards areas closer to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
At first sight, this seems almost absurd. Pakistan claims to be fighting ISKP. ISKP has carried out attacks against Pakistan and considers the Pakistani state an enemy. Islamabad has spent the past several years presenting itself internationally as one of the principal victims of terrorism emanating from the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands, while simultaneously insisting that Kabul is responsible for preventing those terrorists from crossing into Pakistan.
Anyone familiar with Balochistan, however, has seen this apparent contradiction before.
There, jihadist and sectarian organisations have for years occupied an extraordinarily useful space within Pakistan’s war against Baloch nationalism. The Baloch movement is overwhelmingly secular and nationalist; jihadist organisations regard precisely that nationalism, together with its political and cultural claims, as an ideological enemy; and the Pakistani establishment wants the insurgency destroyed. The interests do not have to coincide perfectly and the actors certainly do not have to like one another. They merely have to point their weapons, from time to time, in the same direction.
ISKP made that convergence particularly visible when, in 2025, it explicitly declared war on Baloch pro-independence organisations following clashes with Baloch militants in Mastung. For the Baloch insurgency, the consequences are obvious: another enemy, another front and another source of violence directed not only against armed organisations but against the broader nationalist environment from which those organisations emerge. For Pakistan, the advantages are equally obvious.
This does not mean that every ISKP militant operating in Balochistan takes orders from the ISI, nor does Pakistan need such an arrangement for the system to work. That is precisely the point. The conventional image of proxy warfare — an intelligence service creating an organisation, financing it, arming it and issuing orders — is only its most primitive form. A state with sufficient experience can do something subtler: cultivate, tolerate, infiltrate, redirect or simply exploit an environment in which independent actors pursuing their own ideological objectives repeatedly produce outcomes useful to the state.
Whether a particular operation is ordered, facilitated, tolerated or merely allowed to happen is then extremely difficult to establish, which is hardly an inconvenience. Pakistan has had decades to learn that plausible deniability functions considerably better when there is something genuinely plausible to deny.
The terrorist does not always need to know that he is useful.
He merely needs to shoot in the useful direction.
Seen from Balochistan, therefore, the possibility of ISKP-linked networks becoming part of the operational landscape in Kashmir no longer looks particularly exotic. What Pakistan may be transferring from one theatre to another is not an organisation but a method.
The method, naturally, performs a different function according to the battlefield. In Balochistan, jihadist organisations weaken a predominantly secular national liberation movement, force Baloch insurgents to divide attention and resources between different enemies and create violence within the very social environment Islamabad is attempting to control. In Kashmir, ISKP-linked networks could provide something equally valuable but different: another layer of separation between Pakistan and an attack, another identity behind which Lashkar’s infrastructure can disappear and another explanation which competes with the obvious one.
An attack associated directly with Lashkar immediately points towards Pakistan. An attack carrying an Islamic State signature opens an entire catalogue of alternative explanations: transnational jihadism, Afghan networks, autonomous radicalisation, Central Asian militants, online recruitment. Pakistan becomes one possible element of the story rather than its immediate centre.
For an establishment that has spent decades trying to preserve the strategic utility of militancy while avoiding its diplomatic consequences, the attraction is hardly mysterious.
It also helps explain the apparently schizophrenic relationship Pakistan has maintained with jihadism since the Afghan war. The distinction endlessly described as that between “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists” was never primarily ideological and certainly never moral. It was functional. The terrorist attacking Pakistan is a threat to national security. The terrorist attacking somebody Pakistan wants weakened belongs to an altogether more complicated category and may suddenly become an unfortunate manifestation of local grievances, an uncontrollable non-state actor or simply somebody whose existence the security establishment appears remarkably reluctant to notice.
The categories are not permanent. Yesterday’s asset can become tomorrow’s enemy, and tomorrow’s enemy may become useful again somewhere else.
Balochistan offers perhaps the clearest contemporary example of this flexibility. Islamabad portrays the Baloch insurgency as foreign-sponsored terrorism, blames India for virtually every manifestation of nationalist resistance and simultaneously benefits from the presence of jihadist actors ideologically hostile to precisely the secular nationalism it is trying to destroy. At the same time, Pakistan presents itself to Washington as a victim of Islamist terrorism, tells Kabul that Afghanistan is responsible for providing sanctuary to terrorists, reassures Beijing that only the Pakistani military stands between Chinese investments and jihadist chaos and demands international sympathy for a war against extremism which, depending on the identity of the victim, it has shown an extraordinary capacity to define rather selectively.
The contradiction is not an accidental flaw in the system. It is one of its principal advantages.
What may now be emerging in Kashmir is the next stage of that architecture: not the replacement of Lashkar, and certainly not the disappearance of Pakistani sponsorship, but a gradual movement away from dependence upon easily identifiable organisations towards the manipulation of a much broader militant ecosystem.
TRF provides one layer of distance. Hybrid militants provide another. Over Ground Workers blur the boundary between civilian and operative. Narcotics and criminal networks separate financing and logistics from the formal terrorist organisation. Digital communications separate the handler from the man carrying the weapon. ISKP-linked networks, if the current assessments are correct, could introduce another organisational identity altogether.
Each additional layer makes attribution harder without necessarily making the strategic objective any less recognisable.
For India, this represents a substantially more complicated challenge than the militant infrastructure it confronted twenty years ago. The old system was enormously dangerous but comparatively legible. Training camps could be located, commanders identified, infiltration routes mapped, organisations proscribed and financial networks sanctioned. When the political threshold changed, as Operation Sindoor demonstrated, physical infrastructure inside Pakistan could also become a target.
An ecosystem is considerably more elusive. It extends into criminal networks, religious institutions, informal finance, digital communications, narcotics routes and communities where an individual may remain apparently civilian until shortly before an operation. Destroying a training camp does not eliminate such a structure. Killing a commander may remove an important node without dismantling the network around him. Ban one organisation and another can appear, sufficiently different in name and presentation to restart the argument over what exactly it is.
None of this diminishes the significance of India’s counter-terrorism successes in Jammu and Kashmir. In fact, the transformation of the Pakistani model is partly the consequence of them. Large militant formations are no longer sustainable in the way they once were. Permanent cadres are easier to track. Famous organisations are internationally toxic. Recognisable infrastructure has become vulnerable not only to surveillance and sanctions but, increasingly, to direct military retaliation.
Pakistan has therefore adapted, because the strategic incentive that created the proxy war has not disappeared merely because one particular method has become too expensive.
Kashmir remains embedded in Pakistan’s national mythology, in the army’s institutional justification for its extraordinary political power and in a security doctrine that has treated permanent confrontation with India not simply as foreign policy but as one of the organising principles of the state. Islamabad has little incentive to abandon an instrument which has served those purposes for decades merely because the old instrument has become blunt.
It has every incentive to build a less visible one.
Which is why the relative quiet in Jammu and Kashmir should not be confused with strategic resolution. The old proxy war advertised itself through camps, infiltrators, commanders and organisations whose relationship with Pakistan eventually became almost impossible to conceal. The emerging version may involve fewer militants, fewer recognisable structures and considerably fewer Pakistani fingerprints.
That would not necessarily make it weaker.
It would make it harder to see.
Pakistan once required organisations it could control while pretending it did not control them. The model now taking shape may be more sophisticated than that: networks it can exploit, identities it can discard, rivalries it can manipulate and terrorists whose interests need coincide with those of the state only long enough to perform a useful function.
Balochistan has already shown how effective that ambiguity can be. Kashmir may now show how easily it can be exported.
The perfect proxy, after all, is not necessarily the terrorist who takes your orders.
It is the terrorist whose war you can quietly make your own.
