New study on LeT challenges conventional myths about terror
A
detailed analysis of over 900 biographies of dead LeT operatives has revealed
that some of Pakistan's best educated men are being “dispatched to die” in the
unending conflict with India over Kashmir with Punjab providing the bulk of this
cannon fodder.
Based on historical precedent, the study on ‘The Fighters of LeT:
Recruitment, Training, Deployment and Death’ warns that the reduction of the
U.S. footprint in Afghanistan could bring them back to Kashmir. While admitting
difficulty in predicting the directional priorities of Pakistan-based militant
groups, it warns that internal security challenges faced by Pakistan and the
state's own shifting threat priorities could result in some of these groups
reorienting and investing more broadly in the conflict in Indian Kashmir; the
preferred “fighting ground” for 94 per cent of LeT recruits.
The study -- conducted with the support of Combating
Terrorism Centre at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point -- challenges the
official narrative that Pakistanis are not involved in acts of terrorism, and
only “diplomatic and moral support” is rendered to indigenous mujahideens
fighting in India.
“There is considerable overlap among the districts that
produce LeT militants and those that produce Pakistan army officers, a dynamic
that raises a number of questions about potentially overlapping social networks
between the army and LeT.”
In
fact, according to the authors of the study, the expansive and overt presence of
the LeT throughout the country and its ability to recruit from schools, mosques
and madrassas besides circulate its publications “speaks to a degree of
tolerance if not outright assistance from the Pakistani
state”.
As
for the best-educated men being sent for jihad by LeT, it does not reflect the
quality of their education but the level. The biographies challenge conventional
wisdom that these terrorists are the product of low or no education and are
being produced in madrassas. The “LeT militants are actually rather
well-educated compared with Pakistani males generally” and the data shows that a
bulk of them are products of regular schooling, not madrassas.
About 63 per cent of them have at least a secondary
education; “suggesting that their educational distribution is slightly higher
than the national attainment levels”. Majority of them have completed secondary
school with high grades and quite a few of them have gone up to graduation
levels.
Reflecting a concern expressed in several quarters
that Pakistan's breeding grounds for terrorism are not just the tribal areas but
a more fertile ground exists in the heart of the country, the
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