Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate did not stumble into the business of sponsoring terrorism against India. It architected terrorism as state policy across four decades, selecting which groups to fund, which leaders to elevate, which attacks to authorize, and which front organizations to create when international scrutiny demanded cosmetic rebranding. The ISI’s relationship with Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Al-Badr, and over a dozen other armed groups represents the most extensive state-sponsored terror infrastructure built by any intelligence agency in the post-Cold War era. To understand the targeted elimination campaign now dismantling that infrastructure across Pakistani cities, from Karachi to Rawalpindi to Lahore, one must first understand the system that built it. The ISI did not merely tolerate these groups. It created them, armed them, trained their cadres, financed their operations, protected their leaders, and deployed them as instruments of foreign policy against India, Afghanistan, and any regional actor Islamabad considered a threat. The shadow war now reaching into the heart of Pakistan’s cities is targeting not random individuals but ISI clients whose patron can no longer guarantee their safety.

Understanding the ISI-terror nexus requires moving beyond the simplistic framing of a rogue intelligence agency operating without state knowledge. The ISI is not rogue. It is the institutional expression of a strategic doctrine that treats terrorism as a legitimate instrument of statecraft, one that successive Pakistani governments, military chiefs, and political leaders have endorsed, funded, and defended at international forums for over three decades. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged in a 2015 interview that Pakistan had supported and trained groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba throughout the 1990s, calling fighters like Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi “our heroes” during that era. The candor was unusual; the policy was not. From the moment Lieutenant General Hamid Gul redirected Afghan jihad veterans toward Kashmir in 1989, the ISI operated as what former US National Security Council members Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon described as a “terrorist conveyor belt,” radicalizing young men in Pakistani madrassas and delivering them to training camps where they were transformed from seminary students into armed fighters. The pipeline that Gul built in the late 1980s has never been fully dismantled. It was expanded, professionalized, and diversified across organizations, geographies, and operational objectives. The result is a terror ecosystem so deeply embedded in Pakistan’s military and political institutions that eliminating individual operatives, however tactically valuable, addresses symptoms rather than the disease. The disease is the ISI itself, or more precisely, the institutional culture within the ISI that treats proxy warfare as Pakistan’s primary strategic tool against a militarily, economically, and demographically superior India.

Origins and Founding of the Terror Nexus

The ISI was established in 1948 by Brigadier Syed Shahid Hamid in the aftermath of the First Kashmir War, created because the conflict had exposed catastrophic weaknesses in intelligence gathering, sharing, and coordination between Pakistan’s military branches and its civilian Intelligence Bureau. In its early decades, the ISI functioned as a conventional military intelligence organization, tasked with foreign and domestic intelligence collection, monitoring of the media and political opposition, surveillance of foreign diplomats, and signals intelligence along the Indian border. Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who ruled Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s, expanded the ISI’s mandate to include monitoring opposition politicians and sustaining military rule, establishing the precedent that the agency would serve the military establishment’s domestic political interests alongside its foreign intelligence mission. This dual mandate, foreign intelligence coupled with domestic political management, created an organization whose institutional interests aligned more closely with the Army than with any elected government.

The organization’s transformation from a traditional intelligence agency into a terror sponsor began under President Zia ul-Haq during the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989, when the Central Intelligence Agency selected the ISI as its primary conduit for channeling weapons, money, and training to Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet forces. The selection of the ISI as the primary conduit was a decision of enormous consequence, one whose reverberations continue to shape global security four decades later. The CIA’s choice was driven by geography and Cold War expedience: Pakistan shared a border with Afghanistan, and Zia’s military government was a willing partner in the anti-Soviet campaign. The Americans needed a distribution mechanism for weapons and funds; the ISI provided it. What neither side fully anticipated was that the ISI would use the opportunity to build an institutional capability for proxy warfare that would long outlast the conflict it was created to serve.

The scale of the Afghan pipeline was staggering. The United States and its allies pumped arms and ammunition worth approximately five billion dollars into Afghanistan through the ISI. The Soviet Union contributed weapons valued at approximately 5.7 billion dollars to the Afghan government’s side, many of which were captured and redistributed. The ISI, under Director General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, managed the day-to-day distribution of this weaponry through a specially created Afghanistan section known as the SS Directorate, commanded by Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf. Rahman’s strategic vision extended beyond Afghanistan; he established contacts with jihadi groups as far afield as the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, laying the groundwork for the pan-Islamist turn the ISI would take under his successor.

Critically, the ISI siphoned off a substantial portion of the weapons flowing through its hands. According to strategic analyses of the era, the agency diverted roughly sixty percent of the small arms, light weapons, ammunition, and explosives supplied by the CIA for the Afghan mujahideen. These weapons did not disappear into a black hole. They were stockpiled for a purpose that became clear only after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989: the arming of a new proxy front in Kashmir. When Lieutenant General Hamid Gul took over the ISI in March 1987, he inherited both the Afghan pipeline’s operational infrastructure and its ideological momentum. Gul, whom former RAW director A.S. Dulat called “the most dangerous and infamous ISI chief in Indian eyes,” did not merely continue the Afghan jihad; he replicated it. The ISI’s experience in organizing guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and terrorism against a superpower in Afghanistan was now applied wholesale to Indian-administered Kashmir.

The transition happened with remarkable speed. The rigged Jammu and Kashmir state election of 1987 had produced genuine political anger in the Kashmir Valley, and the ISI identified this discontent as an opportunity. By 1988, the ISI had already begun training Kashmiri militants, operating approximately fifty units comprising some ten thousand fighters. The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front served as the initial vehicle for the insurgency, but the ISI treated the secular, independence-oriented JKLF as a temporary expedient. The agency’s long-term strategy required organizations that advocated Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan, not independence, and that could be controlled through ideological and financial dependence on Islamabad. The ISI systematically defunded the JKLF by 1991, handed its training camps in Azad Kashmir to more compliant organizations, and elevated groups whose loyalty to the Pakistani state was guaranteed by design.

The creation of Hizbul Mujahideen in September 1989 marked the ISI’s first purpose-built Kashmiri proxy. Formed in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir with the direct support of the ISI and the political infrastructure of Jamaat-e-Islami, Hizbul was designed from inception to serve Pakistani strategic objectives. The ISI and Jamaat-e-Islami of Azad Kashmir worked in tandem, sending commanders like Masood Sarfraz to consolidate fragmented Islamist militant groups under a single organizational banner. By the time consolidation was complete, Hizbul claimed over ten thousand armed cadres, the majority of whom had been trained in Pakistan and some in Afghanistan. Syed Salahuddin, installed as the organization’s supreme commander, managed Hizbul’s relationship with the ISI from Azad Kashmir, a role he continues to perform from Rawalpindi even as the organization’s operational capacity has been devastated by targeted killings.

The 1990s saw the ISI multiply its proxy portfolio with calculated precision. Lashkar-e-Taiba was established in 1990 by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Zafar Iqbal, operating from a massive compound in Muridke near Lahore. The ISI’s fingerprints on LeT’s creation are unmistakable: Gul himself has been identified as a godfather figure for the organization, and his close association with Hafiz Saeed provided the political cover necessary for LeT to build what amounted to a parallel state within Pakistan, complete with schools, hospitals, a media arm, and a military wing. LeT became, in the words of analysts who have tracked the relationship, the ISI’s most capable client, the organization trusted with the most complex and internationally consequential operations.

Jaish-e-Mohammed’s founding in January 2000 followed a different but equally ISI-directed trajectory. When Maulana Masood Azhar was released from Indian prison as part of the IC-814 hijacking deal negotiated at Kandahar, the ISI escorted him to Pakistan and, according to multiple accounts, paraded him on a triumphal tour across the country to raise funds for his new organization. Azhar’s seminary training at Jamia Uloom-ul-Islamia in Karachi alongside Taliban founder Mullah Omar, his Afghanistan combat experience, his connections to Osama bin Laden, and his reputation for operational audacity made him the ideal candidate to lead a new, more aggressive proxy group. The ISI reportedly provided heavy initial funding, supplemented by contributions from the Taliban and other Sunni organizations. JeM became the ISI’s most lethal client, the organization tasked with the most provocative attacks against Indian military and political targets, including the December 2001 assault on the Indian Parliament.

In November 1994, the ISI formalized its control over the proliferating jihadi landscape by creating the Muttahida Jihad Council, an alliance of thirteen (later expanded to sixteen) leading militant outfits operating in Kashmir. Chaired by Syed Salahuddin of Hizbul Mujahideen, the MJC streamlined the distribution of resources: arms, ammunition, propaganda materials, and communications equipment. The MJC’s existence revealed the ISI’s managerial approach to terrorism. The agency was not merely sponsoring individual groups; it was administering an ecosystem, allocating targets, coordinating infiltration routes, preventing inter-group conflicts over territory, and ensuring that the collective output of the jihadi infrastructure served Pakistan’s strategic objectives in Kashmir.

The ISI’s creation of Al-Badr Mujahideen in the 1990s followed the pattern established with Hizbul. Al-Badr, which split from the broader Hizbul Mujahideen movement in 1998, served a specific ISI purpose: providing a secondary Kashmiri proxy that could absorb fighters who did not fit within Hizbul’s Jamaat-e-Islami political structure. The Al-Badr’s role as a supplementary force in the ISI’s Kashmir portfolio demonstrates the agency’s approach to redundancy. Rather than concentrating all resources in a single proxy, the ISI built a diversified portfolio of organizations, each serving a distinct function within the broader campaign. This diversification ensured that international pressure on any single group would not disable the proxy infrastructure as a whole.

The Khalistan front added geographic diversity to the ISI’s proxy portfolio. During the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s, the ISI provided training, weapons, and logistical support to Sikh separatist groups, including the Khalistan Commando Force. Hamid Gul’s ISI trained both “Muslim and Sikh terrorists,” as described by the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel, viewing the Khalistan movement as a second front that would stretch Indian security forces beyond the Kashmir theater. The Punjab front eventually collapsed as India’s internal counter-insurgency operations, led by Director General of Police K.P.S. Gill, dismantled the armed separatist infrastructure within Indian Punjab. The ISI’s Pakistani-based Khalistan infrastructure, however, was never fully dismantled. It lay dormant for decades before being reactivated in connection with diaspora-based Khalistan activities in Canada, the UK, and Australia.

By the late 1990s, the ISI had assembled the most extensive state-sponsored proxy infrastructure in the post-Cold War world. The ecosystem encompassed multiple organizations with distinct ideological orientations (Salafi, Deobandi, Barelvi, Sikh separatist), different geographic focuses (Kashmir, Indian interior, Punjab, Afghanistan), varying operational specializations (guerrilla warfare, urban terrorism, diaspora mobilization), and calibrated relationships with the sponsoring state. The system’s architectural sophistication reflected decades of institutional learning, from the Afghan jihad through the Kashmir insurgency through the 2001 Parliament attack to the 2008 Mumbai assault. Each iteration produced lessons that the ISI incorporated into its proxy management methodology. The result was not a crude state-terror relationship of the type associated with Libya or Syria, but a complex, multi-layered, institutionally embedded system that resisted every international effort to dismantle it.

Ideology and Strategic Objectives

The ISI’s relationship with terrorism is not driven by religious ideology in the way that the groups it sponsors claim to be motivated. The agency’s strategic calculus is fundamentally military and geopolitical, rooted in what Pakistani strategists call the “war of a thousand cuts,” a doctrine designed to offset India’s overwhelming conventional military superiority by imposing continuous low-intensity costs through proxy warfare. Sponsoring militancy in Kashmir and elsewhere is regarded within Pakistan’s military establishment as a relatively cheap and effective means of creating strategic depth, tying down Indian security forces, internationalizing the Kashmir dispute, and maintaining a bulwark of instability along a vulnerable border.

The ideological dimension enters the equation not at the ISI’s institutional level but at the recruitment and operational level. The ISI needs fighters who are willing to die. Religious indoctrination, administered through the madrassa network that functions as a recruitment pipeline, provides the motivational infrastructure that converts impoverished rural boys into ideologically committed combatants. The ISI does not need to believe in jihad; it needs jihad to produce soldiers. This instrumental relationship between secular strategic objectives and religious operational motivation is the fundamental architecture of the ISI-terror nexus.

Hamid Gul articulated this vision explicitly, albeit in more grandiose terms than most ISI chiefs would prefer. Gul called for a Pakistan-led Islamic coalition against India, describing it as “a strategic depth concept that links Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan in an alliance” that would serve as “a jeweled Mughal dagger pointed at the Hindu heart.” Gul’s rhetoric was extreme even by ISI standards, but the strategic logic he expressed, that Pakistan could compensate for its conventional military inferiority by leveraging non-state actors across multiple fronts, became the institutional orthodoxy of the Pakistani military establishment.

The objectives of the ISI-terror nexus have evolved across three distinct phases. During the first phase, from 1989 through 2001, the primary objective was the “liberation” of Kashmir through armed insurgency, with the ISI channeling Afghan jihad veterans and locally recruited Kashmiri fighters across the Line of Control to wage guerrilla warfare against Indian security forces. The second phase, from 2001 through 2019, was characterized by adaptation to the post-September 11 international environment: the ISI maintained its proxy infrastructure while adding layers of deniability, creating front organizations like Jamaat-ud-Dawa (LeT’s political arm) and Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation (LeT’s charitable front) to circumvent international bans and sanctions. The third phase, from 2019 to the present, has been defined by the ISI’s declining ability to protect its clients from the targeted elimination campaign now penetrating Pakistan’s cities, forcing a strategic recalibration whose contours remain unclear.

Across all three phases, the ISI’s core strategic objective has remained constant: maintaining Pakistan’s leverage over the Kashmir dispute without provoking an Indian military response that Pakistan’s conventional forces cannot withstand. The Kargil crisis of 1999, the 2001-2002 military standoff following the Parliament attack, and Operation Sindoor have each tested this balance. The ISI’s calculation has always been that proxy warfare falls below the threshold of conventional retaliation, a calculation that the shadow war and Operation Sindoor have now decisively invalidated.

Organizational Structure of the ISI’s Terror Management

The ISI’s management of terrorist proxy groups is not an ad hoc arrangement run by rogue officers. It is an institutionalized function embedded within the agency’s formal organizational structure. Several specific directorates and sub-units are responsible for different aspects of the terror nexus, and understanding their roles is essential to grasping how the system operates.

The S Wing (also referred to as the Covert Action Division) handles all external covert operations. Officers from this division received training from the CIA during the Afghan jihad, and many CIA covert action specialists were attached to the ISI during that period to guide operations against Soviet forces. The expertise transferred during those years was subsequently redirected toward India. The S Wing’s operational portfolio includes the planning, coordination, and execution of proxy operations in Kashmir, Afghanistan, and other theaters where Pakistan uses non-state actors as instruments of policy.

Joint Intelligence North (JIN) is the sub-directorate specifically responsible for Jammu and Kashmir operations. JIN manages infiltration and exfiltration across the Line of Control, propaganda operations targeting the Kashmiri population, and other clandestine activities in the Kashmir theater. The Joint Signal Intelligence Bureau (JSIB) provides communications support, operating a chain of signals intelligence collection stations along the Indian border and supplying secure communications to militant groups operating inside Indian territory. The Joint Counter Intelligence Bureau (JCIB) handles field surveillance of Pakistani diplomats abroad and conducts intelligence operations across the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. The Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous (JIM) directorate conducts espionage in foreign countries and manages specialized offensive intelligence operations.

The Pakistan Army’s institutional relationship with these ISI directorates creates a command-and-control architecture in which the military chief, the ISI Director General, and the relevant directorate heads collectively manage the proxy portfolio. The ISI Director General reports directly to the Prime Minister in theory, but in practice, the agency has operated with such autonomy that multiple analysts have described it as “a state within a state, answerable neither to the leadership of the army, nor to the President or the Prime Minister.” This institutional independence means that the ISI’s terror management function continues regardless of which political party holds power in Islamabad. Benazir Bhutto could not stop it. Nawaz Sharif could not stop it. Musharraf channeled it. No civilian government has ever exercised genuine oversight over the ISI’s proxy operations.

The ISI’s management of individual terror groups operates through a differentiated relationship model. Not all groups are managed identically; the agency calibrates its relationship with each organization based on the group’s operational utility, reliability, international profile, and capacity for independent action. This differential management is the critical analytical insight that generic accounts of the ISI-terror nexus consistently miss.

With Lashkar-e-Taiba, the relationship has historically been the closest and most comprehensive. The ISI was involved in LeT’s creation, provided sustained funding, offered training through both ISI instructors and seconded military officers, directed major operations (including, according to testimony from captured operatives, the 2008 Mumbai attacks), and maintained protective custody over LeT’s senior leadership. US intelligence officials confirmed as early as 2008 that the ISI provided intelligence assistance and protection to LeT. The relationship was so tight that LeT has been described as the ISI’s most reliable proxy against India, the organization that the military establishment considers indispensable for maintaining leverage.

With Jaish-e-Mohammed, the relationship has been more volatile. The ISI funded JeM’s creation and directed its early operations, but the organization’s internal dynamics proved harder to control. After Musharraf joined the US-led war on terror and banned JeM in 2002, a significant faction of the organization’s rank and file turned against the Pakistani state. Between March and September 2002, JeM rebels carried out suicide attacks against Pakistani government targets in Islamabad, Karachi, Murree, Taxila, and Bahawalpur. The ISI demanded that Masood Azhar rein in his followers, exposing the tension between ISI direction and organizational autonomy that defines the “Frankenstein’s monster” debate. Azhar complied, but at the cost of losing majority support in JeM’s Supreme Council. The organization splintered into Khuddam ul-Islam (under Azhar) and Jamaat ul-Furqan (under Abdul Jabbar), with the ISI maintaining its relationship with Azhar’s faction while the breakaway elements gravitated toward al-Qaeda.

With Hizbul Mujahideen, the ISI’s relationship is the oldest and most politically layered. Hizbul’s creation was a joint ISI-Jamaat-e-Islami project, and the organization’s dual political-military character has made it both a reliable proxy and a complicated partner. The ISI’s control over Hizbul is exercised primarily through Salahuddin’s dependence on the agency for funding, safe haven, and political legitimacy. As Hizbul’s operational capacity inside Kashmir has declined precipitously since the 1990s, the relationship has become increasingly one-directional: the ISI provides resources and protection, but Hizbul delivers diminishing operational returns.

With Al-Badr Mujahideen, the often-overlooked Kashmir group that split from Hizbul in 1998, the relationship is more transactional. Al-Badr receives training and some financial support but operates with less ISI direction than the three primary clients.

With the Khalistan-focused groups, Khalistan Commando Force and Khalistan Tiger Force, the ISI’s relationship is more recent and opportunistic. The ISI saw the Khalistan movement as a second front against India, useful for diversifying the pressure beyond Kashmir. KCF’s operations during the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s received ISI support in training and logistics, while KTF’s more recent diaspora-driven activities have involved ISI coordination through Pakistan-based Khalistan infrastructure.

This differentiated relationship model is the ISI-terror nexus’s defining structural feature. The agency does not operate a single command hierarchy across all groups. It manages a portfolio of clients with varying degrees of control, investment, and strategic utility. The shadow war’s targeting pattern reflects this hierarchy: the campaign has concentrated its highest-priority strikes against LeT and JeM operatives, the organizations with the deepest ISI relationships and the greatest operational capacity.

Funding and Recruitment Infrastructure

The ISI’s funding of terrorist proxy groups flows through multiple channels, each designed to provide both resources and deniability. The total annual expenditure on proxy operations has been estimated by Indian intelligence at between 125 million and 250 million US dollars, though the true figure is difficult to verify given the opacity of the system. These funds cover salaries for fighters (typically between 5,000 and 10,000 Pakistani rupees per month during the 1990s peak), support payments to families of killed or captured operatives, cash incentives for high-risk operations, and retainers for guides, porters, and informers who facilitate infiltration across the Line of Control.

The ISI’s funding streams include direct state allocations (channeled through the defense budget’s classified sections), facilitation of foreign donations (primarily from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and the Pakistani diaspora in the United Kingdom and Middle East), management of front organizations that collect charitable contributions under the guise of humanitarian work, and, most controversially, laundering of narcotics profits. The Afghan heroin trade, which the ISI facilitated during the 1980s as a revenue source for the mujahideen and as a tool against Soviet forces, continued to generate funds for the proxy infrastructure long after the Soviet withdrawal. Drug money was used to finance not only the Afghanistan campaign but also the proxy war against India in Punjab and Kashmir.

Front organizations represent the most sophisticated element of the ISI’s funding architecture. Jamaat-ud-Dawa, LeT’s political wing, operates a nationwide network of charitable institutions that collect donations from Pakistani citizens and the diaspora community under the banner of humanitarian work, disaster relief, and education. JuD’s charitable operations are genuine in the narrow sense that they do provide flood relief, earthquake assistance, and educational services; this legitimacy is precisely what makes them effective fundraising vehicles for an organization whose military wing remains one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups. The Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation, another LeT front, was created specifically to circumvent the ban on JuD, demonstrating the ISI’s pattern of generating new organizational labels when international pressure renders old ones untenable.

JeM’s funding operates through a similar but smaller-scale model. Masood Azhar received initial heavy funding from the ISI, the Taliban, and Sunni groups to establish the organization. JeM’s fundraising draws on the Deobandi madrassa network, particularly the influential Jamia Uloom-ul-Islamia seminary in Karachi where Azhar studied. The organization operates like a family enterprise, with Azhar’s relatives holding key leadership positions and managing financial flows. International efforts to choke JeM’s financing have been consistently undermined by Pakistan’s refusal to enforce sanctions against the organization’s assets.

The recruitment pipeline that feeds fighters into the ISI’s proxy groups is inseparable from Pakistan’s madrassa network. The ISI does not recruit fighters directly; it contracts the recruitment function to the organizations it sponsors, which in turn draw from the madrassa pipeline. The madrassa-to-militant conversion process takes in boys from impoverished rural families, provides them with food, shelter, religious education, and a sense of identity and purpose, and outputs ideologically committed recruits prepared for military training. JuD alone operates thousands of seminaries whose curriculum is designed to produce not scholars but fighters. The ISI’s contribution to this pipeline is institutional: it provides the training camps, the weapons, the operational direction, and the safe haven that transform seminary graduates into armed combatants.

Responsibility for managing the training infrastructure falls to the ISI’s Operations Branch, conducted through JIM and JIN. At least ninety-one insurgent training camps have been identified in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, the majority lying adjacent to the Indian districts of Kupwara, Baramulla, Poonch, Rajauri, and Jammu. Basic courses run three to four months, focusing on weapons handling, demolitions, and urban sabotage. Advanced training for more capable recruits emphasizes heavy arms, reconnaissance, and sniper operations. Islamist-oriented military officers periodically supplement ISI instructors by “moonlighting” from their regular duties to provide training in guerrilla warfare, jungle combat, and escape and evasion techniques.

The ISI also handles the logistics of infiltration. Cross-border infiltration across the Line of Control is managed through established corridors, with the ISI coordinating movement schedules, providing weather and terrain intelligence, arranging guides and porters, and ensuring that Pakistani border security forces facilitate rather than impede the crossing. The entire system, from madrassa enrollment to cross-border infiltration, operates as an integrated supply chain. Each stage feeds the next, and the ISI sits at the apex, directing the flow of human material from indoctrination through training through deployment.

The counterfeit currency operations that the ISI has been accused of running represent another dimension of the funding infrastructure. The circulation of fake Indian currency notes (FICN) serves a dual purpose: it finances operations inside India while simultaneously undermining the Indian economy. Indian intelligence agencies have documented the FICN pipeline originating from printing facilities in Pakistan, transiting through the ISI’s distribution networks, and entering India through both the Kashmir and Bangladesh borders.

Major Operations Directed or Facilitated by the ISI

The ISI’s operational record reads like a catalog of the most consequential terrorist attacks against India over three decades. While the agency has never publicly claimed responsibility for any specific attack, the evidentiary trail connecting the ISI to major operations against Indian targets is extensive, drawn from captured-operative testimony, intercepted communications, intelligence agency assessments from multiple countries, and the admissions of former Pakistani officials themselves.

The Kashmir insurgency of 1989 to 1990 was the ISI’s first major proxy campaign against India. The agency capitalized on genuine Kashmiri political grievances stemming from the rigged 1987 state elections, infiltrating experienced Afghan jihad veterans alongside locally recruited militants to transform a political protest movement into an armed insurgency. By 1995, according to Indian Joint Intelligence Committee reports, the ISI was spending approximately 2.4 crore rupees per month to sponsor activities in Jammu and Kashmir. The scale of the ISI’s involvement was industrial: arms, ammunition, propaganda materials, communications equipment, financial transfers, and trained fighters were all pumped into the Kashmir Valley through a supply chain that the Pakistani state controlled at every level.

The hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 in December 1999 represents one of the ISI’s most consequential operations, not because the ISI necessarily planned the hijacking itself, but because the outcome served the agency’s strategic interests perfectly. The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen operatives who hijacked the aircraft and diverted it to Taliban-controlled Kandahar demanded the release of Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar from Indian prisons. When India capitulated, the released prisoners were escorted to Pakistan by the ISI. Azhar was then chosen to head the new Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the ISI paraded him across Pakistan on a fundraising tour. The IC-814 hijacking decision created an organization whose attacks against India would include the 2001 Parliament assault, the 2016 Pathankot airbase infiltration, and the 2019 Pulwama convoy bombing.

The December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament was a JeM operation with, according to multiple intelligence assessments, ISI knowledge and coordination. Five JeM operatives penetrated the Parliament complex in New Delhi, killing nine people before being neutralized. Had any of the hundreds of parliamentarians present been killed, India would have been compelled to launch a military response. The attack triggered the largest Indian military mobilization in decades, with hundreds of thousands of troops deployed along the India-Pakistan border in what became a ten-month standoff. JeM initially claimed responsibility for the attack, then retracted the claim under ISI pressure, a pattern that would repeat itself in subsequent operations.

The November 2008 Mumbai attacks represent the ISI’s most internationally consequential operation. Ten LeT operatives launched a coordinated assault on multiple targets across Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi Trident Hotel, the Chabad House Jewish center, Cafe Leopold, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station. Over sixty hours of sustained combat killed 166 people and wounded hundreds more. The only surviving attacker, Ajmal Amir Kasab, confirmed under interrogation that the attacks were planned and executed by LeT. David Headley, a Pakistani-American who conducted reconnaissance for the attacks, provided testimony pointing to significant ISI involvement. Former RAW chief A.S. Dulat has stated that India’s assessment was that the 26/11 Mumbai attacks were carried out by the Pakistan Army “out of spite” because India had not responded to Musharraf’s peace overtures. US intelligence agencies concluded by 2008 that the ISI had provided intelligence assistance and protection to LeT, and the FBI, in its first open acknowledgment in 2011, stated in a US court that the ISI sponsors and oversees separatist militant groups in Kashmir.

The January 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, in which JeM operatives infiltrated one of India’s most sensitive military installations and killed seven security personnel, was masterminded by Shahid Latif, a JeM commander operating openly from Sialkot. JeM initially claimed responsibility, then withdrew the claim under what analysts assessed as ISI direction. Latif continued to operate freely in Sialkot for seven years after the Pathankot attack before being shot dead by unknown gunmen inside a mosque, an elimination that demonstrated how the shadow war was reaching operatives who had planned major attacks against India under ISI protection.

The February 2019 Pulwama attack, in which a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device killed forty Central Reserve Police Force personnel on the Jammu-Srinagar highway, was claimed by JeM. The attack triggered India’s retaliatory Balakot airstrike, the first time Indian Air Force jets crossed into Pakistani airspace since the 1971 war. The Pulwama attack and its aftermath demonstrated both the continued operational capacity of ISI-backed groups and the escalating consequences of that capacity.

The April 2025 Pahalgam massacre, in which twenty-six Indian tourists and one Nepali national were systematically murdered after being identified by religion, was claimed and then disowned by the Resistance Front, an organization Indian authorities identify as an LeT proxy. The attackers forced captives to recite Islamic prayers and subjected some to physical examinations to determine their religion before executing them in front of their families. The Pahalgam attack triggered Operation Sindoor, the first sustained conventional military engagement between India and Pakistan in decades, and permanently altered the dynamics of the India-Pakistan relationship.

Each of these operations followed the same structural pattern: ISI-backed groups plan and execute attacks against Indian targets; Pakistan officially denies involvement; evidence from captured operatives, intercepted communications, and international intelligence assessments points to ISI complicity; and the international community expresses concern without imposing consequences sufficient to alter Pakistan’s behavior. The pattern persisted for three decades. The shadow war represents the first sustained consequence that the ISI cannot deflect through diplomatic maneuvering.

State Sponsorship and the Military-Intelligence-Government Nexus

The ISI’s terror nexus cannot be understood in isolation from the broader Pakistani state structure that sustains it. The Pakistan Army’s relationship with terror group leadership is not a case of a rogue intelligence agency defying civilian authority. It is a case of a military establishment that has ruled Pakistan directly for roughly half its existence treating terrorism as a component of national security doctrine, with the ISI serving as the operational arm of a policy endorsed at the highest levels of the Pakistani state.

The Army Chief of Staff sits at the apex of this structure. The ISI Director General, always a serving three-star general appointed by the Army Chief, reports to the Prime Minister in constitutional theory but to the Army Chief in operational reality. Below the Director General, the relevant directorate heads manage relationships with specific groups. The system ensures institutional continuity: individual ISI chiefs come and go, but the proxy infrastructure persists because it is embedded in the organization’s standard operating procedures rather than dependent on any single officer’s initiative.

Pervez Musharraf’s admissions provide the most authoritative evidence of state-level sponsorship. Musharraf acknowledged that “from 1979 Pakistan was in favour of religious militancy,” that fighters like Hafiz Saeed and Lakhvi “were our heroes at that time,” and that Pakistan had “trained Taliban and sent them to fight against Soviet Union.” In a 2021 interview, he stated explicitly that in the 1990s, when the freedom struggle began in Kashmir, “Lashkar-e-Taiba and eleven or twelve other organizations were formed. We supported them and trained them as they were fighting in Kashmir at the cost of their lives.” The casual specificity of this admission, naming the organizations, quantifying their number, confirming training and support, is not a confession of rogue activity; it is a description of state policy implemented through institutional channels.

Former ISI chief Asad Durrani’s revelations, published in “The Spy Chronicles” alongside former RAW chief A.S. Dulat, further illuminate the nexus. Durrani, who headed the ISI in 1990 when the Kashmir insurgency exploded, acknowledged the agency’s role in managing the Kashmir conflict and its relationships with militant organizations. His candor triggered a Pakistani military court of inquiry and placed him on a no-fly list, demonstrating that the consequences of speaking about the nexus fall not on those who built it but on those who describe it publicly.

The relationship between Pakistan’s civilian governments and the terror nexus has been one of acquiescence rather than direction. No Pakistani Prime Minister has successfully challenged the ISI’s proxy operations. Benazir Bhutto attempted to exert civilian control over the ISI during her two terms as Prime Minister, but was thwarted by the agency’s institutional autonomy and its alliance with conservative political forces. Nawaz Sharif learned the limits of civilian authority during the Kargil crisis, when the military’s proxy war in Kashmir’s Kargil heights brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war without the Prime Minister’s knowledge or approval. Sharif’s subsequent order to withdraw, issued under American pressure, generated seething resentment within the Pakistan Army that contributed directly to Musharraf’s military coup months later.

The Army’s residential cantonments, military hospitals, and intelligence installations share Pakistani cities with the safe houses, front-organization offices, and madrassa networks that constitute the terror infrastructure’s physical footprint. In Rawalpindi, the city that houses Army General Headquarters, ISI headquarters, and the military’s residential cantonment, designated terrorists have lived and operated openly. The proximity is not coincidental; it is functional. The safe haven network that protects wanted militants is administered through the same institutional channels that administer the military cantonments.

The evidence of ISI-directed operations comes from multiple independent sources converging on the same conclusion. Indian intelligence dossiers, compiled after the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2016 Pathankot assault, document specific ISI links to operational planning. US diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks, confirm that detainees at Guantanamo Bay told interrogators they had been aided by the ISI for attacks in Kashmir. The FBI’s 2011 courtroom acknowledgment that the ISI sponsors separatist militant groups provided the first formal US judicial confirmation of the nexus. Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeatedly accused the ISI of running bomb factories and training camps for the Taliban, charges supported by communications intercepts that led US intelligence agencies to conclude the ISI was behind the July 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. The Guardian’s 2024 investigation into India’s alleged targeted killings in Pakistan provided yet another layer of evidence, documenting the ISI-protected infrastructure that the shadow war is penetrating.

The ISI’s use of drug trafficking to finance proxy operations deserves particular scrutiny because it reveals the nexus’s criminalization. During the Afghan jihad, the heroin trade became an integral revenue stream for the ISI’s operations, and the agency’s relationship with narcotics trafficking continued long after the Soviet withdrawal. Former Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has documented how the ISI facilitated opium production in Afghanistan and controlled significant portions of the heroin supply chain passing through Pakistan. Drug money was laundered through legitimate businesses, real estate purchases, and the hawala system, an informal value-transfer network that operates outside the formal banking system and is virtually impossible for international regulators to monitor. The convergence of drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and state intelligence operations created a criminal-strategic nexus that generates its own institutional momentum. Officers and assets within the ISI who manage narcotics-linked financing develop personal financial interests in the continuation of proxy operations, adding a corruption dimension to the strategic rationale.

The ISI’s use of cricket diplomacy, back-channel talks, and periodic peace gestures as cover for continued proxy operations represents another dimension of the nexus’s sophistication. During the 2004 to 2006 composite dialogue between India and Pakistan, the ISI authorized a ceasefire along the Line of Control and reduced infiltration into Kashmir. Analysts like former RAW officer Amar Bhushan have noted that the reduction in infiltration was genuine but tactical rather than strategic: the ISI used the dialogue period to reorganize its proxy infrastructure, train new cadres, and prepare for a resumption of operations when the diplomatic window closed. The ceasefire demonstrated the ISI’s ability to modulate the tempo of proxy warfare in response to political requirements, confirming the “managed chaos” thesis for this specific period. When the composite dialogue collapsed following the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, the ISI resumed its proxy operations without missing a beat. The infrastructure had been maintained throughout the peace period, ready for reactivation on command.

International Designation, Sanctions, and Their Limits

The international community’s response to the ISI-terror nexus has been characterized by accurate diagnosis and inadequate treatment. Multiple governments, international organizations, and legal bodies have identified Pakistan’s state sponsorship of terrorism with considerable precision. The follow-through has been consistently insufficient to alter Pakistan’s behavior.

The US State Department’s report on Patterns of Global Terrorism, released in April 2001, specifically identified Islamabad as the chief sponsor of militant groups fighting in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. The report noted that the terrorist groups then active in Kashmir, including Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al-Badr, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, “all benefit from Pakistani support.” The Congressional Research Service has maintained detailed tracking of Pakistan-based terrorist organizations, categorizing them into five types: globally oriented, Afghanistan-oriented, India and Kashmir-oriented, domestically oriented, and sectarian. The typology itself reveals the scope of the ecosystem the ISI has built.

The United Nations has designated multiple ISI-backed organizations and their leaders. LeT was added to the UN sanctions list, and Hafiz Saeed was individually designated. JeM has been listed, and Masood Azhar was finally designated as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council in 2019, after China dropped its repeated vetoes that had blocked the designation for a decade. The UN designations carry mandatory asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes. Pakistan’s compliance with these obligations has been perfunctory at best.

The Financial Action Task Force placed Pakistan on its “grey list” of jurisdictions under increased monitoring in 2018, specifically citing deficiencies in Pakistan’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing framework. Pakistan was removed from the grey list in 2022 after implementing a series of reforms, but FATF warned that removal did not make Pakistan immune to continued monitoring. The grey listing imposed real economic costs, restricting Pakistan’s access to international financial markets and lending institutions. Analysts have noted, however, that ISI-backed groups adapted their financing mechanisms during the grey listing period, exploiting gaps in the FATF framework that the ISI identified and exploited with the same operational creativity it applies to proxy warfare.

The fundamental limitation of the international sanctions regime is that it targets organizations and individuals rather than the state apparatus that creates and protects them. Designating LeT does not constrain the ISI. Banning JeM does not prevent the ISI from creating successor organizations under new names. Freezing Hafiz Saeed’s assets does not freeze the ISI’s budget. The sanctions regime treats the proxies as independent actors when they are, in analytical reality, instruments of a state intelligence agency. Until the international community addresses the state apparatus itself, the sanctions regime functions as a pressure mechanism rather than a solution.

Pakistan’s response to international pressure has followed a consistent pattern: cosmetic compliance combined with substantive continuation. When an organization is banned, the ISI facilitates its rebranding under a new name. JeM, banned in 2002, splintered into Khuddam ul-Islam and Jamaat ul-Furqan. LeT’s activities were transferred to JuD and later to Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation. The personnel, infrastructure, and operational objectives remained identical; only the organizational labels changed. When individual leaders are detained, they are released quietly after international attention fades. When assets are frozen, alternative financial channels are activated. The pattern demonstrates institutional learning: the ISI has become expert at navigating the sanctions environment without fundamentally altering its proxy operations.

The Masood Azhar UN designation case illustrates the sanctions regime’s limitations with particular clarity. India first proposed Azhar’s listing as a global terrorist after the 2001 Parliament attack. China, acting as Pakistan’s diplomatic protector on the Security Council, vetoed the designation repeatedly for nearly two decades. When China finally withdrew its objection in 2019, following the Pulwama attack and the subsequent international outcry, the delay had rendered the designation largely symbolic. Azhar had spent eighteen years operating freely, building JeM’s infrastructure, planning attacks, and training operatives, all while the international community debated whether he should be formally designated as the terrorist he manifestly was. The gap between the attack that prompted the designation request (the 2001 Parliament assault) and the designation itself (2019) spans the entirety of JeM’s most operationally productive period.

The United States’ approach to Pakistan illustrates a different limitation of the sanctions framework. Despite maintaining detailed records of Pakistan’s state sponsorship of terrorism, the US has never placed Pakistan on its State Sponsors of Terrorism list, a designation that carries mandatory comprehensive sanctions. The reason is not lack of evidence but strategic calculation: Pakistan’s geographic position as a logistics corridor for US operations in Afghanistan, its nuclear arsenal’s security, and its role as an interlocutor with the Afghan Taliban have all been judged more important than holding Pakistan accountable for its terror sponsorship. The same calculus that makes Pakistan strategically valuable to the United States also makes it immune to the strongest sanctions tool available. This dynamic has taught the ISI a lasting lesson: strategic utility trumps accountability, and as long as Pakistan retains value as a regional player, the terror nexus will not face maximum international consequences.

India’s bilateral approach has shifted decisively since the Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor. Where previous Indian governments maintained diplomatic engagement with Pakistan even after major terrorist attacks (resuming dialogue after 26/11, engaging in back-channel talks after Pathankot), the post-Pahalgam doctrine has ended engagement entirely. The suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, the termination of bilateral trade, and the recall of diplomats represent a comprehensive severing of the bilateral relationship that previous Indian governments avoided precisely because they feared it would remove incentives for Pakistani restraint. The current Indian calculation appears to be that the incentives never worked, that Pakistan maintained its proxy infrastructure through every round of dialogue and every period of diplomatic engagement, and that the only effective response is to impose costs without offering the diplomatic re-engagement that the ISI treated as a reset button.

The Targeted Elimination Campaign Against ISI Clients

The ISI’s decades-long guarantee of safe haven for its clients has been systematically undermined by the campaign of targeted eliminations that has accelerated across Pakistani cities since 2021. The pattern is unmistakable: designated terrorists who operated for years under ISI protection in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sialkot, and other Pakistani cities are being killed by unidentified gunmen using a consistent modus operandi of motorcycle-borne assailants, close-range fire, and rapid escape through congested urban streets. The targets are not random; they are individuals on India’s most-wanted lists, operatives who planned, facilitated, or executed major attacks against Indian targets and subsequently received ISI-facilitated shelter in Pakistan.

The elimination campaign’s targeting hierarchy mirrors the ISI’s own organizational priorities. LeT operatives, the ISI’s most capable clients, have been targeted with the highest frequency. JeM operatives, the ISI’s most lethal clients, have been targeted at the leadership level, with the elimination of key Masood Azhar associates systematically dismantling the founder’s inner circle. Hizbul Mujahideen commanders based in Pakistan have been targeted in strikes that demonstrate penetration of the ISI’s safe haven infrastructure in garrison cities. The campaign has reached as far as the KPK region where ISI collaborators like Syed Noor Shalobar operated recruitment pipelines feeding fighters into the Kashmir insurgency.

For the ISI, the elimination campaign represents an unprecedented strategic challenge. The agency’s entire proxy model depends on its ability to recruit, train, deploy, and protect operatives. If the ISI cannot guarantee protection to its clients on Pakistani soil, the recruitment pipeline collapses. Potential fighters who might once have been willing to undertake operations against India in exchange for safe haven and financial support must now calculate that the safe haven itself has become a threat. The shadow war is not merely killing individuals; it is destroying the credibility of the ISI’s protection guarantee, which is the foundation upon which the entire proxy model rests.

The ISI’s response to the elimination campaign has been markedly different from its response to international sanctions. Sanctions can be evaded through rebranding and bureaucratic maneuvering. Targeted killings cannot be evaded through organizational restructuring. The agency has attempted to enhance the security of its remaining high-value clients, relocating some to more secure locations, providing security details, and restricting the movement patterns that made earlier targets vulnerable. These measures have had limited success. The campaign has continued to find and reach its targets, suggesting either that the ISI’s protective measures are insufficient or that the intelligence driving the campaign has penetrated the ISI’s own operational security.

Pakistan’s official narrative attributes the killings to internal rivalries, criminal disputes, and inter-group feuds. This explanation collapses under scrutiny. The victims share a single distinguishing characteristic: they are on India’s most-wanted lists. The modus operandi is consistent across dozens of operations in different cities. No Pakistani group has claimed credit for any of the killings. The pattern is too consistent, too target-specific, and too organizationally coherent to be explained by internal Pakistani dynamics.

The ISI’s institutional response to the elimination campaign reveals an agency grappling with a threat it did not anticipate. Internal assessments, insofar as they can be inferred from behavioral changes, suggest the ISI has adopted a tiered protection strategy. The highest-value clients, the leaders whose loss would cripple organizational capacity, have been moved to more secure locations or placed under enhanced surveillance protection. Mid-tier operatives have been instructed to alter their movement patterns, change residences, and avoid predictable routines like mosque attendance at fixed times. Lower-tier members, the foot soldiers and facilitators, have been largely left to their own devices, a triage decision that reflects the ISI’s limited protective resources relative to the number of potential targets.

This tiered response has produced its own vulnerabilities. When mid-tier operatives alter their routines, they disrupt the organizational communication and coordination structures that the ISI built for operational efficiency. Safe houses that were previously shared are now abandoned. Communication channels that were previously used routinely are now suspected of compromise. The elimination campaign has forced the ISI’s client organizations into a security-operations tradeoff: measures that improve individual survival degrade collective operational capacity. The shadow war has, in effect, imposed a sustained operational cost on the ISI’s proxy infrastructure that parallels, in the intelligence domain, the economic costs that FATF grey-listing imposed in the financial domain.

The geographic expansion of the elimination campaign is particularly significant for the ISI’s strategic calculus. Early operations concentrated in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and the location most conducive to covert action due to its size, diversity, and chronic security challenges. Subsequent operations reached Lahore (LeT’s operational heartland), Rawalpindi (the garrison city housing Army and ISI headquarters), Sialkot (where JeM’s Shahid Latif operated), Nawabshah (where JuD’s madrassa network was exposed), and KPK (where ISI-linked recruiters operated). Each geographic expansion demonstrated deeper penetration of the ISI’s protective infrastructure. The reach into Rawalpindi was symbolically devastating: if wanted terrorists cannot survive in the city that houses GHQ and ISI headquarters, the safe haven’s credibility is fatally compromised.

The Managed Chaos Debate: Control Versus Autonomy

The central analytical question surrounding the ISI-terror nexus is whether the ISI retains operational control over its proxy groups or whether the groups have gained sufficient autonomy to operate independently. This debate, often framed as the “managed chaos” thesis versus the “Frankenstein’s monster” thesis, has profound implications for both counter-terrorism strategy and the trajectory of India-Pakistan relations.

The managed chaos thesis, argued by analysts like Christine Fair, holds that the ISI maintains a calibrated level of control over its proxy groups. Under this model, the ISI authorizes major operations, coordinates targeting decisions, manages inter-group relations, and retains the ability to activate or deactivate groups as strategic circumstances require. The evidence supporting this thesis includes the ISI’s demonstrated ability to enforce ceasefires when politically necessary (as during the 2004-2006 composite dialogue), to redirect group activities away from certain targets (as when JeM retracted its claim of responsibility for attacks under ISI pressure), and to manage the rebranding of designated organizations (which requires institutional coordination that autonomous groups could not achieve independently).

Shuja Nawaz, whose detailed institutional history “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within” provides the most thorough English-language examination of the Pakistan Army’s internal dynamics, argues that the relationship between the military establishment and militant proxies must be understood within the context of the Pakistan Army’s institutional culture. The Army’s officer corps is socialized to view India as an existential threat and proxy warfare as a legitimate response to asymmetric power dynamics. This socialization is so deeply embedded that it persists across generations of officers, ensuring continuity of the proxy doctrine even as individual commanders rotate through posts. Nawaz’s analysis suggests that the ISI’s management of proxy groups is not dependent on any single officer’s initiative but is sustained by an institutional culture that treats it as standard operational procedure.

Carlotta Gall, whose investigative work “The Wrong Enemy” documents the ISI’s operations in Afghanistan through extensive on-the-ground reporting, provides a complementary perspective focused on the Afghan theater. Gall’s reporting reveals how the ISI maintained operational direction over the Afghan Taliban through the Quetta Shura while simultaneously assuring American officials that Pakistan was cooperating in the war on terror. The duplicity was institutional rather than individual: the same officers who attended coordination meetings with US military officials oversaw operations that targeted US-allied Afghan forces. This compartmentalization, in which one arm of the ISI cooperates with the Americans while another arm sustains the very groups the Americans are fighting, demonstrates a level of organizational sophistication that the “rogue elements” explanation cannot account for.

The Frankenstein’s monster thesis holds that the ISI created organizations that have developed their own institutional interests, leadership dynamics, and operational agendas, and that the ISI’s control over these groups is significantly less complete than the managed chaos model suggests. The evidence supporting this thesis includes the JeM faction split of 2002, in which a majority of JeM’s Supreme Council rejected Masood Azhar’s compliance with ISI directives; the Red Mosque uprising of 2007, in which JeM members participated in an armed confrontation with the Pakistani state; and the emergence of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which grew from the same Islamist ecosystem the ISI cultivated but turned its weapons against the Pakistani state itself. Between 2003 and the peak of TTP violence, Pakistan suffered more terrorism-related fatalities than virtually any country on earth. The militants the ISI had created to bleed India began bleeding Pakistan.

The 2007 Red Mosque crisis in Islamabad offers a particularly instructive case study for this debate. Students and clerics at the Lal Masjid complex, many of them with connections to JeM and other ISI-linked organizations, launched an armed vigilante campaign to impose their interpretation of Islamic law on the capital city. The crisis escalated to a full military siege, Operation Silence, in which Special Service Group commandos stormed the complex. Over a hundred people were killed. The Red Mosque crisis demonstrated that the ideological fervor the ISI had cultivated as a recruitment tool could be directed against the Pakistani state itself when the state’s policies diverged from the militants’ expectations.

The analytical reality is more complex than either thesis allows. The ISI’s control varies by group, by time period, and by operation type. Over LeT, the ISI appears to maintain the highest degree of control; LeT has never turned against the Pakistani state, never publicly defied ISI directives, and has consistently operated within the strategic parameters set by the military establishment. Over JeM, control has been partial and contested; the ISI controls Azhar’s faction but has limited influence over splinter groups. Over Hizbul, control is maintained through Salahuddin’s personal dependence on the ISI but has weakened as Hizbul’s operational capacity has declined. Over the Khalistan-focused groups, control is looser and more transactional.

The managed chaos thesis is more accurate for describing the ISI’s relationship with LeT. The Frankenstein’s monster thesis is more accurate for describing the ISI’s relationship with the jihadist ecosystem as a whole, particularly the Deobandi organizations that spawned TTP and its affiliates. The ISI created a monster that it controls in some of its limbs and not in others. The shadow war is targeting the limbs the ISI still controls.

The ISI’s response to its own loss of control over parts of the jihadist ecosystem is itself revealing. Rather than dismantling the proxy infrastructure that had generated the TTP threat, the ISI chose to distinguish between “good militants” (those who attack India and Afghanistan) and “bad militants” (those who attack Pakistan). This categorization, acknowledged in private by Pakistani officials and documented by international journalists, confirms that the ISI’s commitment to proxy warfare is so deep that even the demonstrable blowback of domestic terrorism did not prompt a fundamental reconsideration of the strategy. The agency accepted the costs of TTP violence as collateral damage rather than as evidence that the proxy model itself was flawed.

Current Status and Future Trajectory

The ISI-terror nexus is under more sustained pressure than at any point in its four-decade history. The convergence of the targeted elimination campaign, Operation Sindoor, the Indus Waters Treaty suspension, and the comprehensive diplomatic freeze between India and Pakistan has created a strategic environment in which the ISI’s proxy model faces existential challenge from multiple directions simultaneously.

The agency’s client organizations are in varying states of distress. LeT’s operational capacity remains significant, but its leadership ranks have been thinned by targeted eliminations, and the organization’s ability to recruit freely has been constrained by both the shadow war’s deterrent effect and Pakistan’s occasional enforcement actions driven by FATF pressure. The Muridke compound near Lahore, which once operated as LeT’s openly functioning national headquarters complete with training facilities, schools, and propaganda operations, has been subjected to periodic restrictions that, while largely cosmetic, have forced the organization to disperse some of its functions. JeM’s founder Masood Azhar remains alive but his inner circle has been systematically dismantled, with key associates eliminated across Pakistani cities. Hizbul Mujahideen’s Pakistan-based command structure has been effectively destroyed; Salahuddin issues statements from Rawalpindi that no operative on the ground in Kashmir can implement. Al-Badr’s operational presence has been reduced to near-irrelevance.

The ISI’s strategic dilemma is structural. The agency built its proxy infrastructure on the assumption that Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent would prevent India from imposing conventional military consequences for proxy attacks. Operation Sindoor invalidated that assumption. India and Pakistan exchanged missiles, conducted aerial engagements, and deployed drones for four days while both possessed nuclear weapons capable of destroying each other’s cities. The nuclear umbrella, which the ISI had treated as an absolute guarantee that proxy warfare could be conducted below the threshold of conventional retaliation, proved to be a leaky roof rather than an impenetrable shield.

The agency assumed that international diplomatic pressure would be the maximum cost of proxy warfare. The targeted elimination campaign invalidated that assumption. The agency assumed that Pakistan’s domestic territory was inviolable, that the safe haven was safe. The shadow war invalidated that assumption. Each of the ISI’s strategic premises has been challenged, and the agency has not yet articulated a coherent response.

The 2025 India-Pakistan military confrontation added another dimension to the ISI’s strategic crisis. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri’s press briefing, in which he presented a photograph of a US-designated terrorist leading prayers at a funeral where individuals killed in Indian airstrikes were wrapped in Pakistan’s national flag and given state honors, crystallized the state-terror nexus in a single image. The photograph demonstrated what decades of intelligence reports had argued: that the Pakistani state does not merely tolerate designated terrorists; it celebrates them. The diplomatic consequences were immediate and have not been reversed. India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, ended all bilateral trade, recalled its diplomats, and adopted a posture of permanent confrontation that has no recent precedent in South Asian diplomacy.

For the ISI, this comprehensive Indian response has eliminated the strategic space in which proxy warfare was previously conducted. The agency’s model depended on the existence of a diplomatic relationship that could be damaged by proxy attacks but never fully severed. India’s post-Pahalgam posture has severed the relationship comprehensively, leaving the ISI with no diplomatic capital to protect and therefore no diplomatic cost to calculate when considering future proxy operations. This creates a paradox: the ISI’s model has been strategically defeated (in the sense that it has provoked a comprehensive Indian response that costs Pakistan far more than any proxy operation could benefit it), yet the agency’s institutional culture may interpret the comprehensive confrontation as evidence that more, not less, proxy warfare is needed.

Three scenarios describe the ISI’s possible trajectory. In the first scenario, the ISI doubles down on proxy warfare, accepting the costs of the shadow war and Operation Sindoor as tolerable and continuing to deploy what remains of its proxy infrastructure. This scenario requires the ISI to continuously replace eliminated operatives, which becomes progressively harder as the deterrent effect of the elimination campaign undermines recruitment. In the second scenario, the ISI recalibrates its proxy operations, reducing the tempo and visibility of attacks against India while maintaining the infrastructure for potential future activation. This scenario preserves the ISI’s strategic options while reducing the immediate costs. In the third scenario, genuine internal reform within the Pakistani military establishment leads to the dismantlement of the proxy infrastructure, a scenario that requires a fundamental change in Pakistan’s strategic culture and the military’s self-conception.

The third scenario is the least probable. The ISI’s terror nexus is not a policy choice that can be reversed by a political decision. It is an institutional culture embedded in the training, promotion, and socialization of a military establishment that has made proxy warfare central to its strategic identity. Dismantling the nexus would require dismantling the institutional incentives that sustain it, a transformation that would face resistance from every constituency within the military establishment that has built careers, accumulated power, and defined purpose through the management of proxy groups.

The shadow war’s significance for the ISI-terror nexus extends beyond the tactical level of individual eliminations. By demonstrating that ISI protection is no longer sufficient to guarantee the safety of wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil, the campaign has introduced a variable that the ISI’s strategic calculus never accounted for. The ISI planned for sanctions, for diplomatic pressure, for occasional surgical strikes. It did not plan for a sustained, systematic campaign that penetrates the safe haven itself and eliminates clients in their mosques, on their morning walks, and outside their shops. The shadow war is not attacking the ISI’s proxies. It is attacking the ISI’s model, the foundational assumption that proxy warfare carries costs that Pakistan can absorb while the benefits remain indefinite. That assumption is under interrogation, and the answer will determine the future of the ISI-terror nexus.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How did the ISI create terror groups against India?

The ISI’s creation of terrorist proxy groups against India followed a systematic process that began during the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989. The CIA designated the ISI as its primary conduit for channeling weapons and training to Afghan mujahideen, and the ISI diverted a substantial portion of these resources for future use against India. When the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 coincided with political unrest in Kashmir following rigged state elections in 1987, the ISI redirected the Afghan jihad’s infrastructure toward a new front. The agency first co-opted the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front to launch the insurgency, then systematically defunded the independence-oriented JKLF in favor of groups that advocated Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan and could be controlled through ideological and financial dependence. Hizbul Mujahideen was created in September 1989 as the ISI’s first purpose-built Kashmiri proxy. Lashkar-e-Taiba was established in 1990 with ISI patronage and quickly became the agency’s most capable client. Jaish-e-Mohammed was founded in 2000 after the ISI facilitated Masood Azhar’s release during the IC-814 hijacking crisis, escorted him to Pakistan, and provided heavy initial funding. Each organization was created to serve specific strategic objectives while maintaining enough organizational independence to provide the ISI with deniability.

Q: Does the ISI control Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed?

The ISI’s degree of control varies significantly between organizations. Over Lashkar-e-Taiba, the ISI appears to maintain the highest degree of control among all its proxy groups. LeT has never turned against the Pakistani state, has consistently operated within the strategic parameters set by the military establishment, and has complied with ISI directives even when those directives required unpopular compromises. US intelligence officials confirmed as early as 2008 that the ISI provided intelligence assistance and protection to LeT. Over Jaish-e-Mohammed, the ISI’s control has been more contested. When Musharraf joined the US-led war on terror and banned JeM in 2002, a majority faction of the organization rejected ISI directives and carried out attacks against Pakistani government targets. Masood Azhar retained control of a loyalist faction, but the episode demonstrated that ISI direction is not absolute. The analytical reality is that the ISI manages a portfolio of clients with varying degrees of control, calibrated by each group’s operational utility, reliability, and capacity for independent action.

Q: What is the ISI’s relationship with Hafiz Saeed?

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder and spiritual leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, has one of the longest and most consequential relationships with the ISI of any individual in the proxy ecosystem. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul has been identified as a godfather figure for LeT’s creation, and his close association with Saeed provided the political cover necessary for LeT to build its massive Muridke compound near Lahore, complete with schools, hospitals, and a military training infrastructure. The ISI’s relationship with Saeed survived multiple international crises, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks that Saeed’s organization masterminded. Pakistan detained Saeed periodically in response to international pressure but released him each time without substantive legal consequences. Saeed was eventually sentenced in connection with terror financing charges in 2020, a conviction that many analysts view as a response to FATF pressure rather than a genuine enforcement action. The ISI’s relationship with Saeed illustrates the agency’s approach to its most important clients: protection as long as possible, cosmetic concessions when international pressure becomes unbearable, and preservation of the underlying infrastructure regardless of what happens to the individual.

Q: Did the ISI direct the 26/11 Mumbai attacks?

Multiple evidentiary strands point to ISI involvement in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, though the precise nature and degree of that involvement remain subjects of analytical debate. Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving attacker, confirmed that the assault was planned and executed by LeT. David Headley, who conducted pre-attack reconnaissance, provided testimony indicating ISI knowledge of the operation. Indian intelligence assessed that the attacks originated in Pakistan and that the attackers maintained communication with handlers in Pakistan during the assault. Former RAW chief A.S. Dulat stated that India’s assessment was that the Pakistan Army carried out 26/11 “out of spite” because India had not responded to Musharraf’s peace overtures. US intelligence concluded by 2008 that the ISI provided intelligence assistance and protection to LeT. The FBI acknowledged in a 2011 US court proceeding that the ISI sponsors separatist militant groups. The cumulative evidence strongly supports ISI complicity, though the question of whether the operation was specifically authorized at the Director General level or undertaken by sympathetic officers within the S Wing without explicit top-level approval remains unresolved.

Q: Has the ISI lost control of the groups it created?

The relationship between the ISI and its proxy groups exists on a spectrum between full control and complete autonomy, with different groups occupying different positions on that spectrum at different times. The ISI has demonstrably lost control of portions of the jihadist ecosystem it cultivated: the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which grew from the same Islamist networks the ISI sponsored during the Afghan jihad, turned its weapons against the Pakistani state itself, killing tens of thousands of Pakistani citizens and security personnel. The 2002 JeM faction split showed that even a group the ISI created could reject its directives. Conversely, LeT has remained consistently within ISI control, never attacking Pakistani state targets and consistently complying with ISI operational guidance. The honest assessment is that the ISI created a broader ecosystem whose aggregate effects exceed any single agency’s ability to control, while retaining meaningful direction over its most important individual client organizations.

Q: Why does Pakistan use terrorism as state policy?

Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy is rooted in a fundamental strategic asymmetry. India is a militarily, economically, and demographically superior state whose conventional forces Pakistan cannot match in a sustained conflict. Pakistani strategic doctrine, developed primarily by the military establishment, treats proxy warfare as the primary tool for offsetting this conventional disadvantage, what strategists describe as a “war of a thousand cuts.” By imposing continuous low-intensity costs on India through militant proxies in Kashmir and elsewhere, Pakistan aims to tie down Indian security forces, internationalize the Kashmir dispute, create strategic depth along a vulnerable border, and maintain leverage in any future negotiation over territorial disputes. Religious imperatives reinforce this strategic logic at the operational level, providing the motivational infrastructure needed to recruit fighters willing to undertake dangerous operations. The ISI does not need to believe in jihad ideologically; it needs jihad to produce the soldiers that the proxy strategy requires. This instrumental relationship between secular strategic objectives and religious operational motivation is the fundamental architecture of Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy.

Q: How does the ISI fund militant operations?

The ISI funds its proxy groups through multiple channels designed to provide both resources and deniability. These include direct allocations from Pakistan’s classified defense budget; facilitation of foreign donations from Saudi Arabia, Gulf states, and the Pakistani diaspora in the UK and Middle East; management of front organizations that collect charitable contributions under humanitarian pretexts; and, according to multiple intelligence assessments, laundering of narcotics profits from the Afghan heroin trade. Indian intelligence has estimated total annual ISI expenditure on proxy operations at between 125 million and 250 million US dollars. The ISI also facilitates the circulation of counterfeit Indian currency notes, which serve the dual purpose of financing operations inside India while undermining the Indian economy. Front organizations like Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation collect donations from Pakistani citizens and diaspora communities under the banner of charitable work, providing genuine humanitarian services that serve as cover for fundraising on behalf of LeT’s military wing.

Q: Has any Pakistani official admitted to ISI-terror links?

Several Pakistani officials have made admissions that confirm the ISI-terror nexus. Pervez Musharraf acknowledged in a 2015 interview that Pakistan had supported and trained groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba during the 1990s, stating that fighters like Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi “were our heroes at that time.” In a 2021 interview, Musharraf said explicitly that when the Kashmir insurgency began, “Lashkar-e-Taiba and eleven or twelve other organizations were formed. We supported them and trained them.” Former ISI chief Asad Durrani’s published conversations with former RAW chief A.S. Dulat in “The Spy Chronicles” acknowledged the ISI’s role in managing the Kashmir conflict, revelations that led to a Pakistani military court of inquiry against Durrani and his placement on a no-fly list. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul openly advocated jihad against India and acknowledged the ISI’s role in supporting militant groups during and after the Afghan jihad. These admissions are significant because they come from officials who were personally involved in building and operating the nexus, not from external observers offering speculation.

Q: What is the S Wing of the ISI?

The S Wing, also known as the Covert Action Division, is the ISI directorate responsible for all external covert operations. Officers from this division received training from the CIA during the Afghan jihad, when American covert action specialists were attached to the ISI to guide operations against Soviet forces. The expertise and operational methodology developed during that collaboration were subsequently redirected toward India and other regional targets. The S Wing manages the planning, coordination, and execution of proxy operations across all theaters where Pakistan deploys non-state actors. All external operations conducted by the ISI fall under the S Wing’s supervision, making it the organizational center of gravity for the terror nexus. Joint Intelligence North, Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous, and the Joint Signal Intelligence Bureau all operate under the S Wing’s umbrella, providing specialized capabilities in Kashmir operations, foreign espionage, and communications support for militant groups.

Q: How did the Afghan jihad lead to Kashmir terrorism?

The connection between the Afghan jihad and Kashmir terrorism is direct, institutional, and deliberate. During the Soviet-Afghan War, the ISI built a sophisticated infrastructure for managing proxy warfare: recruitment pipelines through madrassas, training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, weapons distribution networks, fundraising mechanisms, and operational command-and-control procedures. When Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, this infrastructure did not disband. ISI Director General Hamid Gul redirected the Afghan jihad’s organizational capacity toward Kashmir, where the rigged 1987 state elections had generated genuine political anger that could be exploited. The ISI diverted weapons stockpiled during the Afghan campaign to arm Kashmiri militants. Afghan jihad veterans were deployed as trainers and fighters in the Kashmir theater. The madrassa networks that had produced Afghan mujahideen were repurposed to produce Kashmir-focused militants. The transition was not opportunistic improvisation but deliberate institutional redirection, a case of an intelligence agency redeploying an existing capability toward a new target. The Afghan jihad provided the ISI with the know-how, the weapons, the trained personnel, and the ideological framework that made the Kashmir insurgency possible.

Q: What is the “Frankenstein’s monster” thesis about the ISI?

The “Frankenstein’s monster” thesis argues that the ISI created militant organizations that have developed their own institutional interests, leadership dynamics, and operational agendas to the point where the ISI can no longer fully control them. The thesis draws its most compelling evidence from the emergence of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, an organization that grew from the same Islamist ecosystem the ISI cultivated during the Afghan jihad but turned violently against the Pakistani state. Between 2003 and the peak of TTP violence, Pakistan suffered devastating terrorist attacks from the very type of organization the ISI had spent decades nurturing. The JeM faction split of 2002, the Red Mosque uprising of 2007, and periodic attacks on Pakistani military installations by groups with historical ISI links all support the thesis. The opposing “managed chaos” thesis argues that the ISI retains meaningful control over its core proxy groups and that the loss of control over peripheral elements does not negate the agency’s ability to direct its primary clients, particularly LeT. The evidence supports a synthesis: the ISI maintains strong control over LeT and the Azhar faction of JeM while having lost control of the broader jihadist ecosystem, creating a situation in which the agency simultaneously directs and is victimized by the forces it unleashed.

Q: Can a country be prosecuted for state-sponsored terrorism?

International law provides limited mechanisms for prosecuting state-sponsored terrorism. The International Court of Justice can adjudicate disputes between states, including allegations of state sponsorship of terrorism, but its jurisdiction requires the consent of both parties, and Pakistan has not consented to ICJ jurisdiction over India’s terrorism-related complaints. The UN Security Council can impose sanctions and authorize collective action, but China’s veto power has historically protected Pakistan from the most consequential Security Council measures, as demonstrated by Beijing’s decade-long blocking of Masood Azhar’s UN designation. Individual states can impose unilateral sanctions, as the United States has done through its State Sponsors of Terrorism list, but Pakistan has never been placed on this list despite meeting the statutory criteria, largely because of Pakistan’s strategic importance to the United States in the Afghan theater. The FATF grey-listing mechanism represents the most effective pressure tool deployed against Pakistan’s terror financing, but it targets financial systems rather than the intelligence apparatus itself. The practical reality is that the international legal framework is better suited to prosecuting individual terrorists than to holding state intelligence agencies accountable for sponsoring them. This enforcement gap is precisely what the ISI exploits.

Q: How does the ISI’s terror nexus compare to state-sponsored terrorism by other countries?

The ISI’s terror nexus is distinctive in its scale, duration, institutional depth, and the degree to which it is integrated into the sponsoring state’s military and political structure. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have sponsored Hezbollah, Hamas, and Shia militias across the Middle East, but these relationships are largely confined to a single sectarian axis. Syria under the Assads sponsored Palestinian militant groups but with narrower geographic scope. Libya under Gaddafi financed terrorist organizations worldwide but without the institutional depth of the ISI’s management structure. The ISI’s proxy portfolio is unique in its diversity (spanning jihadist, ethno-nationalist, and diaspora-driven organizations), its geographic reach (Kashmir, Afghanistan, India’s interior, and increasingly the Western diaspora), and its institutional permanence (surviving changes of government, military coups, and dramatic shifts in Pakistan’s international alignment). The ISI has built the most extensive state-sponsored terror infrastructure in the post-Cold War era, a distinction that derives from the nexus being embedded in the military’s institutional culture rather than dependent on any single leader’s ideology.

Q: What is the ISI’s role in the Khalistan movement?

The ISI’s engagement with the Khalistan movement represents a strategic diversification of the proxy portfolio beyond Kashmir. During the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s, the ISI provided training, logistics, and safe haven to Khalistan Commando Force operatives and other Sikh separatist militants who conducted a campaign of terrorism in Indian Punjab. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul is credited with training both “Muslim and Sikh terrorists” during his tenure, viewing the Khalistan movement as a second front that would stretch Indian security forces across multiple theaters. More recently, the ISI has maintained connections to the Khalistan movement through Pakistan-based infrastructure that supports diaspora-driven organizations like the Khalistan Tiger Force. KTF’s activities in Canada, the UK, and other Western countries have involved coordination with Pakistan-based Khalistan operatives, creating the transnational network that triggered the India-Canada diplomatic crisis following the killing of KTF chief Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey in June 2023. The ISI’s Khalistan engagement is more opportunistic and less institutionalized than its Kashmir proxy operations, but it demonstrates the agency’s willingness to exploit any separatist movement that can impose costs on India.

Q: How does the shadow war threaten the ISI’s proxy model?

The targeted elimination campaign threatens the ISI’s proxy model at its most fundamental level by destroying the credibility of the protection guarantee on which the entire system depends. The ISI’s proxy model requires three elements to function: a supply of willing fighters, the operational infrastructure to train and deploy them, and the assurance that operatives who survive their missions will receive safe haven on Pakistani soil. The shadow war does not primarily target the first two elements; it targets the third. By demonstrating that ISI protection is insufficient to guarantee the safety of wanted terrorists in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sialkot, and other Pakistani cities, the campaign undermines the recruitment calculus that sustains the pipeline. Potential fighters who might have been willing to risk death on operations against India are now forced to calculate that survival and return to Pakistan offers no safety either. The elimination of multiple JeM associates close to Masood Azhar, the targeting of LeT operatives across Pakistan’s major cities, and the killing of Hizbul commanders in garrison cities have collectively demonstrated that the ISI’s safe haven is penetrable. This realization, if it becomes widespread among potential recruits, degrades the proxy model more effectively than any sanctions regime or diplomatic pressure campaign.

Q: What role does the Pakistan Army play in the ISI-terror nexus?

The Pakistan Army is not separate from the ISI-terror nexus; it is the institutional framework that sustains it. The ISI Director General is always a serving three-star general appointed by the Army Chief, ensuring that the ISI operates within the military’s command structure rather than independently. The Army Chief sits at the apex of the proxy management hierarchy, with the ISI Director General and relevant directorate heads reporting to him in operational practice regardless of the formal reporting line to the Prime Minister. The Army’s role extends beyond command authority to operational support: military officers periodically serve as trainers in militant camps, military cantonments provide proximity cover for safe houses, military hospitals provide medical care to wounded militants under false identities, and military-escorted movement corridors facilitate the transportation of wanted individuals. The Army’s residential cantonments and the terror infrastructure’s physical footprint share the same cities, a proximity that is functional rather than coincidental. The Army’s institutional culture treats proxy warfare as a core competency rather than an aberration, ensuring that the nexus persists across changes in military leadership.

Q: Is the ISI a “state within a state”?

Multiple analysts, including both Pakistani and international observers, have characterized the ISI as “a state within a state, answerable neither to the leadership of the army, nor to the President or the Prime Minister.” This characterization reflects the ISI’s demonstrated ability to conduct operations without civilian authorization or oversight, to undermine civilian governments that attempt to constrain its activities, and to pursue strategic objectives that civilian leaders have not endorsed. The ISI’s institutional autonomy derives from several structural factors: the agency’s budget is classified within the defense allocation and not subject to parliamentary scrutiny; its Director General, though formally reporting to the Prime Minister, is appointed by and operationally accountable to the Army Chief; its officers’ career progression depends on institutional approval rather than civilian evaluation; and its operational activities, particularly in the proxy warfare domain, are shielded from civilian oversight by national security classification. No Pakistani civilian government has successfully imposed genuine oversight on the ISI’s proxy operations. The agency has outlasted, outmaneuvered, or helped remove every civilian leader who has attempted to challenge its autonomy.

Q: What happens to the ISI-terror nexus if Pakistan’s economy collapses?

Pakistan’s economic vulnerability represents a potential constraint on the ISI-terror nexus, though not necessarily a decisive one. The ISI’s proxy operations consume a fraction of Pakistan’s defense budget, and the agency has demonstrated the ability to sustain operations through periods of severe economic distress. The FATF grey listing imposed real economic costs but did not force a fundamental change in the ISI’s proxy operations; the agency adapted its financing mechanisms while Pakistan’s civilian government implemented the minimum reforms necessary to secure removal from the list. A full economic collapse would constrain the ISI’s ability to fund proxy groups at current levels, but the madrassa infrastructure that provides free education, food, and shelter to impoverished recruits would likely benefit from economic deterioration, as more families send children to seminaries they cannot afford to educate elsewhere. Economic collapse could paradoxically strengthen the recruitment pipeline while weakening the operational infrastructure, producing a larger pool of ideologically committed but less well-trained and equipped fighters. The ISI has operated through multiple Pakistani economic crises and has never treated economic constraints as a reason to abandon proxy warfare.

Q: How many terrorist groups does the ISI support or control?

The US Congressional Research Service identifies fifteen major armed non-state groups operating in or from Pakistan, twelve of which are designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under US law. Of these, the ISI maintains direct operational relationships with at least six India and Kashmir-focused organizations: Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Al-Badr Mujahideen, and elements of the Khalistan-focused separatist infrastructure. The ISI also maintains relationships with Afghanistan-focused groups, particularly the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. The total ecosystem of organizations that have received ISI support, training, or protection at some point since the 1980s extends well beyond this core list, encompassing groups that have splintered, rebranded, merged, or dissolved over four decades of proxy warfare. The Muttahida Jihad Council, which the ISI created in 1994 to coordinate its Kashmir proxies, initially encompassed thirteen organizations and later expanded to sixteen. The ISI’s portfolio is not static; it evolves continuously as organizations are created, banned, rebranded, and replaced in response to strategic requirements and international pressure.

Q: Will the ISI ever dismantle its terror nexus?

The ISI’s terror nexus is unlikely to be dismantled voluntarily because it is embedded in the institutional culture and strategic identity of the Pakistani military establishment. Dismantlement would require a fundamental transformation of the military’s self-conception: from an institution that compensates for conventional military inferiority through proxy warfare to one that accepts conventional deterrence and diplomatic engagement as sufficient tools of national security. This transformation faces resistance from every institutional constituency that has built careers, accumulated power, and defined organizational purpose through the management of proxy groups. Historical precedent offers little basis for optimism: Pakistan has responded to every increase in external pressure by adapting its proxy operations rather than abandoning them. Cosmetic measures, organizational rebranding, and temporary detentions of individual leaders have served as pressure-relief valves that prevent the accumulation of sufficient pressure to force structural change. The most realistic path to dismantlement runs through sustained, multi-front pressure that simultaneously imposes military costs (as the shadow war and Operation Sindoor do), economic costs (as FATF grey-listing does), and diplomatic costs (as international isolation does). Whether the aggregate pressure can reach the threshold necessary to force institutional transformation remains the defining question of India-Pakistan relations.

Q: How does the ISI recruit fighters for operations against India?

The ISI does not recruit fighters directly for operations against India; it contracts the recruitment function to the organizations it sponsors, which draw from Pakistan’s madrassa network. The recruitment pipeline begins with enrollment in JuD, JeM, or other organization-affiliated madrassas, which provide free food, shelter, and religious education to boys from impoverished rural families who have no alternative educational options. The curriculum at these seminaries is designed to produce ideological commitment to jihad through religious instruction that frames the Kashmir conflict as a religious obligation. After indoctrination, promising recruits are selected for physical and military training at camps managed by the ISI’s Operations Branch through JIM and JIN sub-directorates. Basic training runs three to four months and covers weapons handling, demolitions, and urban sabotage. Advanced training for capable recruits covers heavy arms, reconnaissance, and sniper operations. Military officers periodically supplement ISI instructors to provide training in guerrilla warfare and escape and evasion techniques. After training, fighters are deployed across the Line of Control through ISI-managed infiltration corridors with the cooperation of Pakistani border security forces. The entire pipeline, from madrassa enrollment through cross-border infiltration, operates as an integrated supply chain with the ISI directing the flow at each stage.