Leaving behind his beloved four-year-old son, and the primary school students at the Falah-e-Aam primary school in Doda, Jammu and Kashmir, Tariq Ahmad Wani had begun his journey to the graveyard on the hill. Following his training in 1993, Wani returned across the Line of Control to take charge of building a jihadist presence in Rajouri, Poonch and Doda, the Pir Panjal range along Kashmir’s southern fringe. In the forests above the remote town of Gulabgarh, Wani began hosting the Lashkar-e-Taiba sent in to wage a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Following a firefight with Indian soldiers on 20 April 1996, Wani’s body was carried in procession to the Mazar-e-Shuhada, the so-called martyr’s graveyard, in Farrukhabad, on the outskirts of his home town, according to police records.
The lethal ambush, which claimed the lives of five Indian soldiers on the lonely road to Bhimber Gali in Poonch district last week, took place on the anniversary of Wani’s death, encrypted social media platforms linked to Lashkar recorded.
Four years ago, the killing of 40 Indian paramilitary police personnel in a suicide-attack at Pulwama pushed New Delhi to unleash missiles across the Line of Control, leading India and Pakistan to the edge of war. Terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad have since been reined in by Pakistan, and foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto’s visit is expected in New Delhi next month—but attacks across the Line of Control have continued.
Ever since the execution-style killing of five sleeping soldiers near Chamrer in 2021, and four more in subsequent combing operations, there have been more than a dozen terrorist attacks on the Pir Panjal. These have included a suicide attack on an army outpost, multiple grenade attacks and bombings, as well as an attempted massacre of Hindu villagers. Ease of terrorist operation across the Line of Control has been enhanced by the thinning out of troops, necessitated by the crisis in Ladakh.
The violence shows just how unstable the peace on the Line of Control in fact is. Facing a historically-unprecedented economic meltdown, and savage jihadist violence by the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP), Islamabad knows it can’t risk war. The country’s military, though, has been telling India in covert talks that it is owed political concessions on Kashmir in return for ensuring low levels of violence in the region after 2019.
For its part, convinced that time is on its side in Kashmir, India sees no reason to make political concessions.
Learning from the Balakot crisis that the abyss can be closer than imagined, both sides have maintained a kind of grim peace. The deadlock, though, is more unstable than it seems.
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The low-dose jihad
Late in the summer of 2005, a small group of friends and family gathered at Abdul Salam’s home in the south Kashmir village of Kadder to witness the marriage of his stepdaughter, Shabbira Kuchay. The colour and local custom, which marks rural Kashmiri weddings, was conspicuous by its absence, a guest present there told ThePrint. Following a brief religious ceremony conducted by the village cleric, a few dates were handed out to the guests. Then, the groom disappeared into the darkness—without his new bride.
The husband who disappeared—Sajid Saifullah Jatt—also known as Sajid Langda, or Sajid the Lame—commands Lashkar operations like the Bhimber Gali attack from a dairy farm near Lahore, Indian intelligence officials say.
Together with Mohammad Qasim, a one-time resident of the village of Angrela near Mahore, Sajid has built networks around small-time criminals and cross-border narcotics traffickers. Instead of sustaining operational units deep inside Kashmir, the operations rely on highly-trained Lashkar commandos to stage attacks near the Line of Control. Following each recent operation, the attackers have rapidly exfiltrated back into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Lashkar commanders have long experience of this kind of low-grade warfare. Faced with international pressure, and wary of ending up at war with India, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former military ruler, had ordered a ceasefire along the Line of Control and curtailed the activities of jihadist groups in Pakistan. The militant organisation Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, divided over secret peace talks with Indian intelligence, fractured. The jihadist movement almost collapsed.
Through ethnic Kashmiri jihadists Muhammad Abbas Sheikh, the 1975-born son of a small peasant who worked as a roadside tailor in southern Kashmir’s Qaimoh, Sajid focussed on setting up local networks of support and recruitment.
Early in 2007, Shabbira and Sajid fled to Pakistan ahead of a police raid, leaving behind their two-week-old child. Now a teenager, their son Umar Raja Afaq, still lives in the family home in Kulgam. The networks Sajid had set up also thrived.
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Fragile deterrence
From 2014, these networks were to become critical to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, as it began crafting a response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to retaliate against terrorism by escalating shelling across the Line of Control. In 2015, Jaish-e-Muhammad fidayeen struck in Gurdaspur, following up with attacks on the Pathankot air base and an army brigade headquarters in Uri in 2016. Furious, India struck back with cross-Line of Control strikes—but the ISI chose to raise the stakes.
Even though the 2016 strikes ended jihadist attacks outside Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad fidayeen units struck at military bases in Nagrota and Sunjwan as well as a CRPF training centre in Lethpora. Former chief of defence staff General Bipin Rawat began publicly advocating for more strikes across the Line of Control in September 2018, five months before Pulwama.
Few authoritative accounts have emerged out of Pakistan’s decision to hit back across the Line of Control following India’s missile strike on Balakot—a move which led both countries to fear imminent escalation into nuclear war. Lieutenant-General Tariq Khan—former commander of Pakistan’s Mangla-based I Strike Corps—provides fascinating insights, though, in private messages. Islamabad, he argued, should “push the envelope of hostilities so that nuclear war is a likely outcome.”
Even though the prospect of conflict actually escalating to this point was low, General Tariq noted, the risk of escalation would itself serve as a deterrent. That it was “a mindset and never a tangible posture.”
“It is an outcome of a possibility,” he said.
Tough questions
Former army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa saw India and Pakistan both slowly pulling back from the edge, with secret diplomacy eventually leading to a ceasefire in 2021. The ceasefire, though, has become caught up in Pakistani politics, with former prime minister Imran Khan claiming Bajwa compelled him to keep the peace with India. Fearing Khan, prime minister Shehbaz Sharif has been reluctant to normalise ties with India, without securing some concessions on Kashmir.
The lessons India drew from the Balakot attack were also mixed, as scholar Rohan Mukherjee has noted. Even though the country demonstrated its resolve to retaliate against terrorism, he observes that Indian military power is “unable to dominate the escalation ladder”. Though Pakistan was shaken, India also came away with a bloodied nose.
Modi has since shown he’s acutely aware of the crippling costs of an India-Pakistan conflict. Leave aside cross-Line of Control strikes, he has even avoided harsh polemic in the wake of attacks since 2021. As elections near, though, this restraint could become harder to sustain—especially if a terrorist attack ends up claiming a large number of lives.
As elections near in both countries, the Bhimber Gali ambush shows that the risk of war—by missteps and miscalculations—will escalate.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)