Pakistan’s renewed alliance with ISIS-K signals a dangerous revival of its decades-old jihad strategy — blurring lines between global and regional terror. As Islamabad plays its proxy games once more, the Indian subcontinent face escalating security concerns, ideological dilemma and geopolitical challenges

ISIS’s Khorasan Province, a regional branch of Daesh responsible for Central and South Asia, has begun expanding its influence in the region, as the Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) has formed an alliance with Daesh’s Khorasanis. Perhaps after a long period, Pakistan has renewed its terror strategy to develop and strengthen its terror networks, which will have serious impacts not only on India but also on the broader subcontinent.

The Imprints of Pakistan’s Global-Regional Jihad

Pakistan has a decades-old strategy of mixing global and regional jihad to sharpen its terror capabilities against India. Pakistan employs a double terror strategy, which is driven by three main factors: first, countering forces on the internal front (TTP and Balochis); second, recalibrating its strategic depth in Afghanistan by countering Taliban leadership; and third, providing a substantial basis for the global jihadist organisations to establish a logistical network, thereby strengthening India-centric jihadist groups. A fourth element involves a degree of plausible deniability, allowing Pakistan to shift blame to global jihadists — an approach where Pakistan acts partially but covertly maintains relations with these groups.

Allowing ISKP to operate in Pakistan will give it an opportunity to further expand its operations by striking at TTPs and Balochis. This will, to some extent, help Pakistan to clean its internal front, which was mired by BLA and TTP woes. The reason that ISKP will go aggressive against TTP and have an upper hand is due to decades of factionalism — ISKP was earlier part of disgruntled TTP members who defected to the more extreme, global Islamic State ideology. According to some reports, ISKP had targeted TTP key leaders in Afghanistan last year.

The Afghanistan strategy is reflected in the 2017 secret agreement between Pakistan and ISKP, where Pakistan agreed not to act against ISKP. In return, ISKP would carry out attacks in Afghanistan targeting the Taliban. Recently, ISKP has successfully targeted the Taliban’s core, attempting to destabilise its rule in Afghanistan. The assassination of Khalil Haqqani last year by the Islamic State demonstrates its ability to weaken the Taliban’s political stability. ISKP also seeks to disrupt the Taliban’s global outreach efforts; the bombing of the Russian Embassy in 2022 is a key example of its broader strategy against the Taliban. ver recent years, ISKP has expanded its limited presence beyond Nangarhar and Kunar provinces to include areas in the north and west. Strengthening the Lashkar-ISKP alliance will help ISKP extend its reach and develop its operational capabilities in Afghanistan, using Pakistan as strategic depth to rally against the Taliban, echoing a similar strategy that was used by the Afghan Mujahideen to wage a sustained guerrilla campaign against the Soviets.

Interestingly, Americans would use this as a limited strategic tool to weaken and deter the Taliban, as the US is pressing hard for the Bagram Base.

This limited opportunity will help Pakistan increase counter-terror cooperation with the US and ease the US’s oversight of its counter-terror operations, much like during Operation Cyclone, when the US supplied weapons and finances to Pakistan’s ISI to fight the Soviets. In exchange, the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s efforts to pursue its own strategic interests in Afghanistan, such as supporting a hardliner Islamist leader like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose militant group was heavily funded by ISI despite Hekmatyar not achieving significant success against the Soviets.

Similarly, Pakistan used the funds of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone in building a jihadist network against India and cultivating logistical networks of Al-Qaeda by opening training camps and madrassas for Arab Afghans who took up global Jihad.

Interestingly, the precursor of Al-Qaeda, Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or the “Services Bureau”, was founded by Osama Bin Laden in Peshawar in 1980, just a year after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In an effort to make a centre of global Jihad, Pakistan further cultivated cross-terror relations with global and regional jihadist organisations, especially Indian-centric ones.

The Proxy Games

Apart from providing a breeding ground for the global jihadist network and supporting them with financial and logistical aid, Pakistan’s ISI worked on strengthening its terror strategy against India. Zia’s ‘bleed India with a thousand cuts’ doctrine began to take shape in Kashmir by the mid-1980s. In the 1980s, infiltration and terror incidents increased. The reason was clear: Pakistan had started to strengthen its Kashmir-centric jihadi proxies by creating a platform through cultivating their finances, logistics, and operational capabilities. Al-Qaeda perhaps played a major role in establishing a financial and logistical network — Al-Qaeda’s South Asia Branch and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s (KSM) network — a key financial and operational network of the outfit operated by its influential and high-profile leader, who is also said to be the principal architect of 9/11, along with covert support from Pakistan’s ISI, formed a web of finances and logistics. A report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) explains that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has a history of backing groups like Al-Qaeda.

This network was used to fund and effectively operationalise JeM and LeT. The most notable instance is that in return for a safe operational environment for training and a financial-logistical network, Al-Qaeda provided specialised training and ideological legitimacy to JeM and LeT. The 2002 kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl was allegedly a joint operation involving JeM and Al-Qaeda members.

Pakistan’s ISI Covert Action Division has a long history of arranging alliances among global and regional jihadists through two methods: first, ideological negotiations, and second, strategic negotiations, where it exploits opportunities to link a network of jihadists despite ideological differences. Overall, a key aspect of Pakistan’s terror strategy is the use of coordinated efforts among global and regional jihad organisations against India. Decades ago, they did this using Al-Qaeda, and now they are doing it with ISIS-KP. However, there is a double-edged sword to this strategy, at least with ISIS-KP. The Daesh are strong hardliners at the ideological level; they will only commit to an alliance till their tactical objectives are met, post which they will pay allegiance to their larger goal — Islamic rule in South Asia, which will dangerously damage Pakistan’s own security and ideological calculations, as it once faced with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda post 9/11, and that could lead to a dangerous security situation for the subcontinent.

India’s Strategy

At both strategic and tactical security levels, India should be concerned as the convergence of global-regional jihadist networks has become a nightmare for the Indian security landscape, especially from the 1980s to the mid-2000s. India’s strategy should be more assertive — moving beyond a minimal functional relationship with the Taliban and using the upcoming visit of the Taliban’s foreign minister as a key opportunity.

This will help disrupt Pakistan’s pursuit of strategic depth in Afghanistan and enable India to expand its influence, thereby increasing its operational reach across the Af-Pak and Central Asian region. While strengthening ties with the Taliban is a necessary option, India must also adopt integrated deterrence and advance network-based operations — including in-depth counter-terrorism strategies in J&K to foil terror plans.

Abhinav is an advocate and columnist. Srijan is a national security analyst