Masood Azhar built Jaish-e-Mohammed from a prison cell’s promise into Pakistan’s most operationally lethal terror organization, but the network he spent two decades constructing is now being disassembled with surgical precision, one commander at a time, across cities and provinces he once considered impregnable sanctuaries.

The campaign against Azhar’s network stands apart from every other thread in India’s shadow war against terror. Where the operations targeting Lashkar-e-Taiba’s hierarchy have been opportunistic, climbing the organizational ladder as access permitted, the campaign against Jaish-e-Mohammed follows a different logic entirely. It is methodical. It is sequential. And it is personal. Starting with the IC-814 hijacker Zahoor Mistry in Karachi and progressing through operational commanders, factional allies, and now Azhar’s own elder brother, the elimination sequence reads less like a target list being checked off and more like a noose being tightened around a single man. The circle contracts, and every killing brings the perimeter closer to Azhar himself.

What makes the Azhar network siege analytically distinct from the broader shadow war is the visibility of the cascade effect. In counter-terrorism scholarship, the debate over leadership decapitation centers on whether eliminating individual leaders degrades an organization or simply triggers replacement. Ashley Tellis at the Carnegie Endowment has argued that sustained leadership attrition, when applied across multiple tiers of an organization simultaneously, can degrade capability faster than the organization can regenerate it. Paul Staniland at the University of Chicago has countered that armed groups with deep social roots and institutional support, precisely the profile of JeM in Pakistan, demonstrate resilience that outlasts even intensive targeting campaigns. The Azhar network siege is a real-time test of both theories, and the evidence, measured by JeM’s operational output since the campaign began, is accumulating in favor of degradation over resilience.

This article reconstructs the campaign against Azhar’s network chronologically, analyzes each elimination through the lens of the network cascade it produced, presents a before-and-after assessment of JeM’s command structure comparing the organization’s posture in early 2021 to its condition today, and adjudicates the central question that the siege raises: has the campaign against Masood Azhar’s inner circle genuinely degraded Jaish-e-Mohammed, or has the organization simply adapted and endured?

The Pattern Emerges

The first indication that Jaish-e-Mohammed’s leadership structure was being specifically and systematically targeted came in March 2022, when Zahoor Mistry was killed in Karachi. Mistry’s death initially appeared to be an isolated incident, one more name on a slowly growing list of militants killed by unknown assailants in Pakistani cities. His significance only became clear in retrospect. Mistry was not simply a JeM operative; he was an IC-814 hijacker, one of the men India had tracked since the December 1999 hostage exchange that freed Masood Azhar from an Indian prison. Killing him was not just eliminating a terrorist. It was settling a debt that was over two decades old, and it sent a message directed at Azhar personally: the men who carried out the hijacking that created your organization are not beyond reach.

Mistry had been living under the alias Zahid Akhund in Karachi’s Baldia Town for years. He had constructed what he believed was an impenetrable cover identity, operating a small business and avoiding the public associations with JeM that would have marked him for surveillance. Two motorcycle-borne assailants found him regardless. They shot him during his morning routine, a time of day and method of approach that would become the campaign’s signature against JeM targets. Pakistani police registered the case as a criminal homicide. No group claimed responsibility. The pattern that had begun with Lashkar-e-Taiba targets in 2021 had now extended into JeM’s most protected layer: the men with direct personal connections to Azhar’s origin story.

The operational choice of Karachi for the first JeM-targeted killing reflected more than target availability. Karachi is the city where JeM’s logistical infrastructure overlaps most densely with Pakistan’s commercial and criminal networks. The port city has historically served as JeM’s primary conduit for financial transfers, procurement of communications equipment, and coordination with sympathetic elements within Karachi’s law enforcement establishment. Striking JeM’s Karachi presence first disrupted the logistical base that supported operations elsewhere in Pakistan, a sequencing decision consistent with doctrinal approaches that prioritize logistics over leadership in organizational targeting.

The Mistry killing also carried a weight that purely operational analysis cannot capture. The IC-814 hijacking is the wound that never healed in India’s counter-terrorism consciousness. The December 1999 images of India’s Foreign Minister personally escorting Masood Azhar to freedom at Kandahar Airport represent, for an entire generation of Indian intelligence professionals, the failure that defined their careers. NIA charge sheets filed in subsequent years have treated the IC-814 participants as an open file, maintaining surveillance records and intelligence updates on every hijacker and facilitator identified during the crisis. Mistry’s killing addressed that open file with finality.

The Mistry killing unlocked information that intelligence services could use to map JeM’s Karachi infrastructure. According to Indian intelligence assessments referenced in NIA filings, Mistry’s elimination exposed communication channels, safe houses, and logistical nodes that connected JeM’s Karachi cell to the organization’s central command. The cascade had begun. When a network node is eliminated, the surviving nodes must reorganize, and reorganization creates new communication patterns that surveillance systems can detect. Mistry’s death forced JeM operatives who had been dormant for years to activate communication protocols, contact handlers, and update chain-of-command arrangements, all of which left intelligence signatures.

By October 2023, the campaign against JeM’s network had intensified dramatically. Shahid Latif, the Pathankot airbase attack mastermind, was shot dead inside a mosque in Sialkot on October 29. Latif’s killing represented a qualitative escalation. While Mistry was a historical figure whose operational relevance had diminished, Latif was an active JeM commander with direct operational responsibility for one of the most audacious terror attacks against India in the previous decade. The January 2016 Pathankot airbase assault killed seven Indian security personnel and triggered a diplomatic crisis that destroyed the nascent Narendra Modi-Nawaz Sharif peace process. Latif had planned the infiltration routes, coordinated the four-man suicide squad, and maintained contact with JeM’s central command throughout the operation. His elimination seven years later closed a loop that began with Indian soldiers dying on their own airbase.

Latif’s killers entered the mosque during prayer time, a pattern that had been established in previous shadow war operations against other organizations. The choice of a mosque as an operational venue was not random or convenient; it represented the exploitation of the one daily routine that is both predictable and socially undisruptable. A target who changes his residence can be lost. A target who alters his commute can be lost. But a target who attends the same mosque for the same prayers at the same times, surrounded by a community that expects and enforces his presence, cannot change that pattern without abandoning his social identity entirely. Latif went to the Al-Khidmat mosque in Sialkot because he always went to the Al-Khidmat mosque in Sialkot. The attackers knew this because they had watched him do it for weeks.

November 2023 brought an acceleration that stunned even seasoned observers of the campaign. Within fourteen days, three militants connected to JeM and allied organizations were killed across three Pakistani cities. Khwaja Shahid fell on November 5. Akram Khan followed on November 9. Raheem Ullah Tariq, a close Masood Azhar associate, was shot dead in Karachi on November 13. The cluster proved that the campaign could execute rapid sequential operations across geographically dispersed locations, a capability that requires either multiple independent teams operating in different cities or a single command with logistical reach that spans Pakistan’s urban geography.

Tariq’s killing was the most significant of the three for the Azhar network specifically. He was not a peripheral associate or a mid-level functionary. Tariq maintained direct personal connections to Azhar and had served JeM in operational roles that placed him at the center of the organization’s Karachi infrastructure. His death, combined with Mistry’s earlier elimination in the same city, effectively decapitated JeM’s Karachi cell, the logistical hub through which the organization had historically managed financial transfers, communications routing, and operational coordination for cross-border operations.

The killing of Dawood Malik in North Waziristan extended the campaign into territory where even the Pakistan Army treads with caution. Waziristan’s tribal belt is the most complex operational environment in Pakistan, a region where multiple armed groups, including remnants of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, al-Qaeda affiliates, and JeM splinter factions like Lashkar-e-Jabbar, maintain overlapping territorial control. Malik operated as Azhar’s link to Lashkar-e-Jabbar, the JeM affiliate that functions as the organization’s reach into the tribal areas. His elimination required either locally embedded assets capable of operating in an environment where outsiders are identified and neutralized within hours, or intelligence so precise that the operation could be planned and executed before Waziristan’s informal security networks detected foreign presence.

Then came the death that changed the character of the campaign entirely. Muhammad Tahir Anwar, Masood Azhar’s own elder brother, died under what Pakistani reports described only as mysterious circumstances. The details remain contested. Unlike the other JeM targets, Tahir Anwar was not gunned down by motorcycle-borne assailants in a recognizable pattern. The ambiguity of his death raises legitimate questions about whether it belongs in the campaign at all, and this article will address that uncertainty directly in a later section. But the timing is striking. Tahir Anwar died after Mistry, after Latif, after Malik, after Tariq. He died while Azhar’s operational commanders were being systematically eliminated across Pakistan. And he died as a man who held significant organizational responsibilities within JeM’s command structure, not a civilian bystander with a famous surname.

If the campaign began by targeting Azhar’s outer rings, the men who had carried out his founding operation and his subsequent attacks, the progression through operational commanders and affiliate leaders to a blood relative represents a geometric contraction. The distance between the campaign’s latest target and Azhar himself has collapsed from organizational degrees of separation to family bonds.

Case-by-Case Breakdown

Zahoor Mistry: The First Concentric Ring Breached

Zahoor Mistry’s significance within the Azhar network transcended his operational role at the time of his killing. He was a founding-era figure, one of the men whose actions on the tarmac at Kandahar Airport in December 1999 directly produced Masood Azhar’s freedom and, consequently, the existence of Jaish-e-Mohammed itself. The IC-814 hijacking remains the pivotal event in JeM’s organizational history, the moment that transformed Azhar from a jailed ideologue into a free operational commander. Mistry was one of the men who made that transformation possible. His elimination in March 2022 was the first strike against the innermost historical layer of Azhar’s network.

Mistry had been living in Karachi for years under the name Zahid Akhund, a cover identity that had held up against whatever surveillance was being conducted by Pakistani intelligence services, assuming such surveillance existed at all. Indian intelligence agencies had tracked Mistry since the IC-814 exchange, maintaining his file as an open case with periodic updates on his location and activities. The gap between tracking and action stretched for over two decades, a period during which diplomatic considerations, operational constraints, and shifting strategic priorities prevented the conversion of intelligence into kinetic action.

The operation against Mistry followed what would become recognizable as the JeM variant of the shadow war’s modus operandi. Two assailants on a motorcycle approached Mistry during his morning routine in Baldia Town. They fired multiple rounds at close range, ensuring lethality. They departed before bystanders could intervene or identify them. Pakistani police registered the FIR as a criminal case. The investigation, predictably, went nowhere.

What Mistry’s death revealed about the campaign’s intelligence architecture was more significant than the killing itself. To locate a man living under an assumed identity in one of the world’s most densely populated urban environments required human intelligence assets embedded within Karachi’s JeM-adjacent communities, signals intelligence capable of intercepting communications that Mistry believed were secure, or, most likely, a combination of both. The operational planners needed to confirm Mistry’s true identity behind the Zahid Akhund cover, establish his daily patterns, identify the time and location of maximum vulnerability, position the strike team, and execute the operation within a window narrow enough that Mistry could not be warned.

The intelligence yield from Mistry’s elimination, the cascade effect, became apparent in subsequent months. NIA assessments indicate that Mistry’s death triggered a reorganization within JeM’s Karachi cell that exposed previously unknown nodes. Operatives who had been dormant activated communication channels. Handlers attempted to verify whether other covers had been compromised. Financial channels were redirected. Every adjustment left a trace that informed the next operation in the sequence.

Shahid Latif: The Operational Core Exposed

If Mistry represented the historical foundation of Azhar’s network, Shahid Latif represented its operational present. Latif was the man Azhar trusted with JeM’s most consequential operation of the 2010s: the January 2016 assault on the Pathankot Indian Air Force Station. The Pathankot attack was conceived as a demonstration of JeM’s ability to strike hardened military targets deep inside India, and Latif was its architect.

Latif’s role extended beyond operational planning. He served as one of JeM’s cross-border handlers, the commanders who manage the infiltration of operatives from Pakistan-administered Kashmir into Indian territory. This function placed him at the intersection of JeM’s operational command, its logistical infrastructure, and its relationship with Pakistani military and intelligence services, since cross-border infiltration through heavily militarized terrain requires at minimum the passive acquiescence of border security forces.

His killing in Sialkot on October 29, 2023, at the Al-Khidmat mosque during prayers, demonstrated that the campaign had moved beyond historical targets and into the active operational command of JeM. Masked gunmen entered the mosque, identified Latif among the worshippers, and shot him at close range. The choice of Sialkot was itself significant. Sialkot sits near the Line of Control, the de facto border between Indian-administered and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It is a garrison city with significant Pakistan Army presence. Operating in Sialkot required navigating a security environment that is substantially more controlled than Karachi’s urban chaos.

The seven-year gap between the Pathankot attack and Latif’s elimination deserves analytical attention. India identified Latif as a key Pathankot conspirator within months of the January 2016 assault. The NIA charge sheet named him specifically. Diplomatic channels were used to demand his arrest and extradition, demands that Pakistan predictably ignored. For seven years, Latif lived freely in Sialkot, attending the same mosque, maintaining his role within JeM’s command structure, protected by the institutional architecture that has historically shielded JeM commanders from legal consequences in Pakistan.

The conversion of that seven-year intelligence file into a kinetic operation required a strategic decision that diplomatic patience had been exhausted and that covert action was the remaining recourse. Latif’s killing was not impulsive; it was the product of a calculation that waiting for Pakistan’s judicial system to deliver accountability was operationally equivalent to accepting permanent impunity.

Dawood Malik: The Reach Extends Into Ungoverned Space

Dawood Malik’s killing in North Waziristan represented the campaign’s most operationally demanding achievement. Waziristan is not Karachi, where foreign operatives can blend into a polyglot megacity of twenty million. It is not Sialkot, where military infrastructure creates at least a framework of organized authority. Waziristan’s tribal belt is terrain where armed groups control territory, where outsiders are immediately suspect, and where the Pakistan Army itself conducts operations only with significant force protection.

Malik served as Azhar’s connection to Lashkar-e-Jabbar, the JeM affiliate that operates in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Lashkar-e-Jabbar occupies a specific niche within JeM’s organizational structure: it provides JeM with access to tribal fighters, weapons supplies from the Afghan border region, and operational depth in territory that Pakistani security services cannot easily surveil. Malik was the node connecting JeM’s Punjab-based central command to this tribal infrastructure.

His elimination demonstrated that the campaign’s operational reach extended beyond Pakistan’s major cities into its most remote and contested regions. The implications for intelligence capability are significant. Operating in Waziristan requires either locally embedded assets with years of relationship-building within tribal communities or technological surveillance capable of tracking targets through terrain that actively resists electronic penetration. The mountainous geography, the absence of reliable cellular infrastructure outside major towns, and the armed-group presence that polices movement all make Waziristan the hardest operational environment in South Asia.

Sushant Sareen at the Observer Research Foundation has argued that Malik’s killing in Waziristan suggests the existence of local asset networks that predate the current campaign, relationships with tribal sources that were cultivated over years or decades for intelligence-gathering purposes and activated for kinetic operations only when the strategic calculus shifted. Anatol Lieven, whose work on Pakistan’s tribal dynamics in “Pakistan: A Hard Country” remains foundational, has observed that Waziristan’s complex militant ecosystem creates both challenges and opportunities for external operations: the same factional rivalries that complicate attribution also create potential recruitment pools for intelligence assets who have grievances against specific groups.

The possibility that Malik’s killing was a product of internal TTP-JeM factional conflict rather than the shadow war campaign cannot be dismissed entirely. Waziristan’s armed-group dynamics produce frequent inter-factional violence that predates and operates independently of any Indian-directed campaign. The key evidence for campaign attribution is Malik’s profile: he was an anti-India operative with direct connections to Masood Azhar, which places him squarely within the target set that the campaign has consistently pursued. The method, unknown gunmen with no claim of responsibility, matches the campaign’s established pattern even if the operational environment differs.

Raheem Ullah Tariq: The November Acceleration

Tariq’s killing on November 13, 2023, was the culmination of the most concentrated operational period the campaign had yet produced. Within the first fourteen days of November, three militants associated with JeM and LeT were eliminated in three different Pakistani cities. This cluster proved that the campaign possesses the logistical capacity to sustain rapid sequential operations across dispersed geographic locations, a capability that requires either multiple independent operational teams or a command-and-control architecture with extraordinary coordination efficiency.

Tariq himself was a close Masood Azhar associate whose operational portfolio within JeM centered on the organization’s Karachi infrastructure. His death, nineteen months after Zahoor Mistry’s killing in the same city, effectively eliminated the second-known JeM command node in Karachi. Where Mistry’s killing exposed the cell, Tariq’s killing degraded it. The sequence demonstrates the cascade logic: the first elimination produces intelligence; the intelligence enables the second elimination; the second elimination produces further intelligence; the cycle continues until the cell’s capacity is exhausted.

S. Hussain Zaidi, whose investigative work on Mumbai’s organized crime and terror networks in “Black Friday” provides context for Karachi’s parallel dynamics, has documented how terror organizations in Karachi maintain cellular structures specifically designed to resist cascade-style targeting. Cells are compartmentalized, with each cell knowing only its immediate contacts and not the broader organizational architecture. The fact that the campaign successfully targeted two JeM Karachi operatives, Mistry and Tariq, suggests that the compartmentalization either failed because intelligence penetrated the barriers between cells, or that the campaign possessed independent intelligence on each target that did not require one elimination to enable the next.

Manoj Joshi at the Observer Research Foundation has examined the November 2023 cluster as evidence of what he terms “operational surge capability,” the ability to concentrate kinetic activity within compressed timeframes to maximize disruptive effect. The three killings in fourteen days forced every surviving JeM, LeT, and allied operative in Pakistan to simultaneously reassess their security posture. Communication channels spiked with anxious queries. Movement patterns changed. Safe houses were abandoned. The psychological effect of concentrated operations exceeds the sum of individual killings because the tempo itself communicates a message: this is not sporadic; this is sustained and accelerating.

Muhammad Tahir Anwar: The Personal Perimeter Penetrated

The death of Masood Azhar’s elder brother under circumstances that Pakistani authorities described only as mysterious represents the most analytically complex case in the Azhar network siege. Every other case in this sequence shares a recognizable operational signature: motorcycle-borne assailants, firearms, targeted shooting, no claim of responsibility. Tahir Anwar’s death diverges from this pattern. The available reporting does not describe gunmen, does not specify a weapon, and does not provide the level of operational detail that characterizes the confirmed campaign kills.

This divergence demands honest treatment. The possibility that Tahir Anwar died of causes entirely unrelated to the shadow war cannot be excluded. “Mysterious circumstances” is not “shot by unknown gunmen on motorcycles.” The phrase leaves room for medical causes, personal disputes, internal factional rivalries, or simple misattribution by reporters working with incomplete information.

The case for inclusion in the campaign sequence rests on three factors. First, timing: Tahir Anwar died during the most intensive period of JeM-targeted operations, after Latif, Malik, and Tariq had all been killed within recent months. Second, profile: Tahir Anwar was not a civilian who happened to share a surname with a designated terrorist. He held organizational responsibilities within JeM and was a known figure within the Azhar family’s operational circle. Third, pattern: the campaign against other organizations, particularly Lashkar-e-Taiba, has demonstrated escalating target seniority, moving from mid-tier operatives to co-founders and family members. Targeting Azhar’s blood relative fits the escalation trajectory.

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States and author of “Magnificent Delusions,” has documented the protected status that the Azhar family has historically enjoyed within Pakistan. Masood Azhar’s brothers, nephews, and extended family have occupied positions within JeM’s organizational structure for decades, benefiting from the ISI’s protective umbrella that extended to the organization’s entire senior leadership. If Tahir Anwar’s death was campaign-related, it demonstrates that the protective umbrella has holes, and that the campaign can reach into the family structures that Pakistan’s security establishment has historically guaranteed.

Sumit Ganguly at Indiana University has framed the targeting of family members, if confirmed, as a transition from counter-terrorism to psychological warfare. The analytical distinction matters. Counter-terrorism targets operatives for their operational roles; removing them degrades organizational capability. Psychological warfare targets individuals for their personal significance to leadership; removing them degrades the leader’s willingness to continue operating. If the campaign killed Tahir Anwar to send a message to Masood Azhar rather than to degrade JeM’s operational capacity, the nature of the campaign has evolved beyond organizational targeting into personal coercion.

The honest analytical position is that Tahir Anwar’s inclusion in the campaign sequence is probable but not certain. The evidence is circumstantial rather than operational. This article treats his death as likely campaign-related based on timing, profile, and escalation pattern, while acknowledging that the evidentiary standard is lower than for the other cases in the sequence.

Modus Operandi Analysis

The campaign against Azhar’s network employs methods that share the shadow war’s broader operational DNA while exhibiting JeM-specific adaptations. Understanding these adaptations requires examining the campaign through the lens of organizational damage, mapping what JeM looked like before the campaign began against what remains today.

JeM’s Pre-Campaign Command Architecture

In early 2021, before the first shadow war operations, Jaish-e-Mohammed maintained a command structure that had been refined over two decades. At the apex sat Masood Azhar himself, a figure whose operational involvement had diminished since the Balakot airstrikes of February 2019 but whose strategic authority remained absolute. Below Azhar, the organization operated through four functional tiers.

The first tier comprised Azhar’s immediate family and personal circle. His brothers, including Muhammad Tahir Anwar and Ibrahim Athar, held positions of trust that combined familial loyalty with organizational authority. This tier functioned as Azhar’s personal security layer and his most reliable channel for sensitive communications. Decisions that could not be entrusted to organizational subordinates, funding allocations, strategic target selection, liaison with ISI handlers, flowed through the family circle.

The second tier contained JeM’s senior operational commanders: the men who planned and directed specific attacks, managed cross-border infiltration routes, and maintained relationships with allied organizations. Shahid Latif occupied this tier as the Pathankot attack architect and cross-border handler. Other commanders at this level managed JeM’s operations in different geographic sectors, from the Line of Control infiltration points to the organization’s urban cells in Lahore, Karachi, and Rawalpindi.

The third tier held JeM’s mid-level operatives and affiliate leaders. Dawood Malik, connecting JeM to Lashkar-e-Jabbar in Waziristan, occupied this tier. Raheem Ullah Tariq, managing JeM’s Karachi logistics, operated here as well. These were the men who translated strategic directives into operational activity: arranging safe houses, managing weapons caches, facilitating communications, and coordinating the daily logistics that keep a clandestine organization functional.

The fourth tier comprised JeM’s foot soldiers, local facilitators, and sleeper agents, individuals whose operational significance was limited to specific tasks (surveillance, transportation, communication relay) but whose collective presence provided the organizational depth that enabled operations across Pakistan and, through infiltration, into Indian-administered Kashmir.

Below all four tiers, but essential to JeM’s sustainability, sat the organization’s institutional base: the madrassas, the recruitment pipeline managed through Jamiat-ul-Ansar and other front organizations, the charitable trusts that generated revenue, and the network of ideological sympathizers within Pakistan’s religious establishment who provided social camouflage and community support.

JeM’s Post-Campaign Damage Assessment

The campaign has penetrated three of JeM’s four functional tiers, and the damage at each level has produced cascading effects that compound the organizational impact beyond the loss of individual operatives.

At the first tier, the personal circle, Tahir Anwar’s death under mysterious circumstances has breached what should have been JeM’s most secure organizational layer. The Azhar family’s involvement in JeM was historically the organization’s greatest structural advantage: family members could be trusted absolutely in an environment where intelligence penetration was a constant threat. The death of one family member does not eliminate the family tier, but it transforms the psychological equation. If one brother can be reached, the others must assume they can be reached as well. The protective value of familial trust degrades when the family itself becomes a target set.

Ibrahim Athar, another Azhar brother with known JeM responsibilities, remains alive as of the most recent reporting. His continued activity, or the absence thereof, will serve as a barometer of how deeply the Tahir Anwar death has affected the family tier’s operational confidence. If Ibrahim Athar has withdrawn from active JeM responsibilities, the campaign has achieved psychological degradation of the family circle without requiring another kinetic operation. If he continues operating, the family tier retains some functional capacity, but under conditions of heightened threat awareness that constrain operational flexibility.

At the second tier, senior operational command, the Shahid Latif killing has created a vacancy that JeM cannot easily fill. Cross-border infiltration management requires years of relationship-building with border-area communities, deep knowledge of terrain and seasonal conditions along the Line of Control, established communication channels with handlers on both sides, and personal relationships with the Pakistani military units whose territory the infiltration routes cross. These are skills and relationships that cannot be transferred to a replacement commander through organizational directive. They must be rebuilt, and rebuilding takes time during which JeM’s cross-border operational capability is degraded.

The impact on JeM’s attack-planning capacity is harder to assess because JeM’s major attacks have historically been separated by years, not months. The gap between the 2001 Parliament attack and the 2016 Pathankot attack was fifteen years. The gap between Pathankot and the 2019 Pulwama bombing was three years. JeM’s operational tempo for large-scale attacks has always been low, which means that the absence of a major JeM attack since the campaign began could reflect degradation or simply the organization’s normal operational rhythm. What can be assessed with greater confidence is that the loss of Latif specifically has degraded JeM’s capability for cross-border infiltration operations, the type of attack that Pathankot represented, because his replacement would need to reconstruct the infiltration infrastructure that Latif had spent years building.

At the third tier, mid-level operations, the combined loss of Mistry, Tariq, and Malik has created multiple simultaneous vacancies across JeM’s geographic footprint. The Karachi cell has been hit twice, losing both Mistry and Tariq. The Waziristan connection has been severed with Malik’s death. These are not interchangeable positions; each required specific local knowledge, community relationships, and operational networks that were personally maintained by the individual who occupied the role.

The Karachi cell’s degradation deserves particular attention because Karachi served as JeM’s primary logistical hub for activities that required urban infrastructure: financial transfers through the hawala network, international communications, procurement of equipment, and coordination with criminal networks that provide operational support. With both Mistry and Tariq eliminated, JeM’s Karachi operations must either be rebuilt with new personnel, which requires identifying individuals who can be trusted and who possess the local knowledge to operate in Karachi’s complex environment, or must be relocated to another city, which requires replicating in a new location the logistical infrastructure that took years to establish in Karachi.

The fourth tier, foot soldiers and local facilitators, has been less directly affected by the campaign, but the second-order effects are significant. The elimination of mid-level commanders who managed these operatives has disrupted the chain of command through which tasks were assigned, resources were distributed, and operational security was maintained. Foot soldiers without functional handlers become liabilities: they possess operational knowledge but lack the supervision that prevents them from making security mistakes that expose the broader network.

The unmanaged foot-soldier problem is particularly acute for JeM because the organization’s recruitment pipeline continues to produce new entrants who require supervision, training, and integration into operational cells. Without the mid-level commanders who historically performed this integration function, new recruits accumulate at the organization’s periphery without being effectively absorbed into its operational structure. They represent potential capability, raw numbers of ideologically motivated individuals, but not actual capability, trained operatives embedded within functional cells under competent command. The gap between potential and actual capability widens with each month that the mid-level command vacuum persists.

There is also a security dimension to the unmanaged foot-soldier problem. JeM recruits who entered the organization through the madrassa pipeline and were assigned to cells managed by now-eliminated commanders find themselves in organizational limbo. They know aspects of JeM’s operations, safe house locations, communication methods, handler identities, but they are no longer receiving the operational security guidance that protected both them and the broader network. Some may attempt to continue operating independently, making decisions about security, communication, and movement without the institutional guidance that prevented exposure. Others may drift away from the organization entirely, carrying operational knowledge into civilian life where it becomes accessible to intelligence services through approaches, arrests, or inadvertent disclosure.

The cumulative effect across all four tiers describes an organization that retains its structural foundations, the madrassas, the financial infrastructure, the ISI relationship, but has lost significant operational capacity at every level above the foot-soldier tier. The before-and-after comparison is stark: in early 2021, JeM maintained a complete command hierarchy from Azhar’s family circle through senior and mid-level command to operational cells across multiple Pakistani cities and the tribal belt. Today, the family circle has been breached, the senior operational command has lost its most capable cross-border handler, the mid-level command has been simultaneously degraded across Karachi and Waziristan, and the operational cells are functioning without the managerial supervision that previously maintained their effectiveness and security.

Functional Degradation Across Organizational Capabilities

JeM’s organizational capability can be assessed across five functional dimensions: operations (planning and executing attacks), logistics (safe houses, weapons, transportation), finance (funding flows and asset management), recruitment (replenishing personnel losses), and communications (internal coordination and external liaison). The campaign’s impact varies significantly across these dimensions.

Operations have been degraded substantially. The loss of Latif as cross-border handler reduces JeM’s capacity for the type of complex cross-border infiltration attack that represented the organization’s highest-impact capability. The loss of planning expertise, target reconnaissance networks, and established infiltration routes cannot be replaced through organizational resilience alone; they require years of patient rebuilding. JeM retains the capability for simpler attacks, lone-wolf-style operations using locally recruited operatives, or vehicle-borne attacks that require less sophisticated logistical support. But the signature JeM operation, the multi-person cross-border assault on a high-value Indian target, is substantially harder to execute without the human infrastructure that the campaign has dismantled.

Logistics have been severely disrupted, particularly in Karachi and Waziristan. The Karachi cell managed financial flows and equipment procurement; the Waziristan connection provided weapons access and operational depth. Losing both simultaneously forces JeM to route logistical functions through fewer, more heavily burdened channels, which increases both the workload on surviving operatives and the intelligence exposure of the remaining logistics network. Every logistical function that was previously distributed across multiple nodes now concentrates through fewer nodes, creating bottlenecks that are both operationally limiting and intelligence-vulnerable.

Finance is the dimension least directly affected by the campaign, because JeM’s financial infrastructure operates substantially through front organizations, charitable trusts, and madrassa networks that exist independently of the operatives who have been targeted. JeM’s funding base, which draws on donations from sympathizers within Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora, real estate holdings managed through organizational fronts, and support from state-affiliated sponsors, remains largely intact. The campaign has not targeted JeM’s financial infrastructure directly, and this omission represents either a deliberate strategic choice to focus on operational capability rather than financial sustainability, or a limitation of the campaign’s intelligence and operational reach.

Recruitment is potentially the most resilient dimension. JeM’s madrassa pipeline, managed through Jamiat-ul-Ansar and similar front organizations, continues to produce radicalized youth willing to serve the organization. The pipeline operates independently of the senior command structure that the campaign has targeted, and its output is governed by demographic, ideological, and institutional factors that the elimination of individual commanders does not directly affect. JeM can replenish its fourth-tier foot soldiers through existing recruitment channels, but converting raw recruits into the experienced operatives who can fill second-tier and third-tier vacancies requires years of training, mentorship, and operational experience that the campaign is degrading faster than JeM can rebuild.

Communications represent the dimension where cascade effects are most visible. Every elimination forces surviving network members to alter communication protocols, abandon compromised channels, and establish new contact methods. Each adjustment creates a temporary vulnerability window during which new communication patterns are being established but have not yet been secured. The rapid sequence of JeM-targeted killings in 2023 produced multiple overlapping vulnerability windows, periods during which JeM’s internal communications were particularly exposed to interception. Whether the campaign exploited these windows to gather intelligence for subsequent operations is an open question, but the cascade logic predicts that it did, and the accelerating operational tempo supports this prediction.

The Intelligence Architecture

The campaign against Azhar’s network reveals an intelligence architecture of considerable sophistication, one that operates across multiple collection disciplines and geographic environments simultaneously. Reconstructing this architecture from open-source evidence requires working backward from observable outcomes to the capabilities that produced them.

The geographic diversity of the JeM-targeted operations establishes a minimum threshold for the intelligence network’s footprint. Operations in Karachi, Sialkot, and North Waziristan cannot be supported by a single source network concentrated in one location. Karachi requires urban intelligence assets capable of operating within the city’s Pashtun and Punjabi communities where JeM maintains presence. Sialkot requires access in a smaller, more socially transparent garrison city where foreign operatives would be quickly identified. Waziristan requires tribal connections that take years or decades to develop.

Three intelligence disciplines likely contributed to the campaign. Human intelligence, the recruitment and management of sources within or adjacent to JeM’s organizational structure, provides the foundational layer. Sources may include disillusioned JeM members, tribal figures with grievances against the organization, criminal associates who participate in JeM’s logistical operations without ideological commitment, or individuals within Pakistani security services who provide information through channels that bypass official inter-agency cooperation.

Signals intelligence, the interception and analysis of JeM’s communications, provides the technical layer. JeM has historically used a combination of satellite phones, encrypted messaging applications, courier networks, and in-person meetings for internal communication. The satellite phone network is vulnerable to interception by national-level intelligence agencies with technical collection capability. Encrypted messaging applications provide stronger protection but leave metadata traces, patterns of communication timing and contact frequency, that can reveal organizational relationships even when message content is inaccessible.

Open-source intelligence, the collection and analysis of publicly available information, provides the contextual layer. JeM operatives who maintain social media accounts, appear in news photography, or are referenced in media reporting generate data that can be combined with classified intelligence to refine target identification. Pakistani media reporting on the killings themselves generates information about JeM’s organizational response that informs subsequent operations.

The campaign’s ability to maintain operational tempo across multiple geographic locations suggests a command-and-control architecture that can coordinate intelligence from diverse sources, assess target viability, deploy strike teams, and execute operations within timeframes that prevent targets from being warned. The November 2023 cluster, three killings in fourteen days across three cities, represents the campaign’s demonstrated peak coordination capability. Sustaining this tempo requires not just intelligence collection but rapid analytical processing and operational decision-making, functions that demand institutional capacity rather than individual initiative.

The fusion challenge is perhaps the most underappreciated element of the intelligence architecture. Raw intelligence from human sources, signals intercepts, and open-source monitoring must be synthesized into actionable target packages that include positive identification, confirmed location, behavioral pattern analysis, risk assessment for collateral damage, extraction planning for the strike team, and contingency protocols. Each target package requires the integration of information from multiple collection disciplines, a function that demands analytical infrastructure, secure communication channels between intelligence collectors and operational planners, and decision-making authority that can authorize operations on compressed timelines.

The speed at which target packages are being generated and executed suggests that the intelligence architecture has matured significantly from its early operations. The gap between Mistry’s killing in March 2022 and the next confirmed JeM-targeted operation was approximately eighteen months. The gap between Latif’s killing in late October 2023 and the November cluster was measured in days. This acceleration could reflect improved intelligence collection, streamlined analytical processing, pre-positioned strike teams, or some combination of all three. Whatever the explanation, the operational tempo in late 2023 demonstrated an intelligence architecture operating at a level of efficiency that earlier operations had not achieved.

The question of whether the intelligence architecture includes technical surveillance capabilities specific to JeM’s communications infrastructure deserves attention. JeM’s internal communications have evolved in response to both Pakistani security service monitoring and the shadow war campaign itself. The organization historically relied on a combination of satellite phones for senior command communications, standard mobile phones with frequently changed SIM cards for mid-level coordination, and courier networks for the most sensitive messages. Each communication method has vulnerabilities that a technically capable adversary can exploit.

Satellite phones are the most intelligence-vulnerable communication method because their signals can be intercepted by national-level technical collection systems and because each satellite phone has a unique identifier that enables geolocation. If JeM commanders used satellite phones for coordination, their locations could be identified to within meters, providing the precise targeting data needed for kinetic operations. The fact that several JeM targets were killed at specific locations during predictable routines, mosques during prayer, residences during morning hours, suggests that their geolocation had been established through some combination of technical and human surveillance.

Mobile phone communications with frequently changed SIM cards provide better operational security than satellite phones because each new SIM creates a new identifier that must be separately tracked. The challenge for the intelligence architecture is correlating new SIM identifiers with known targets, a function that requires either human intelligence reporting on SIM changes or pattern-of-life analysis that matches new phone identifiers with known behavioral signatures. The speed at which JeM commanders were identified and tracked after changing phones, if phone-based tracking was a factor, would indicate sophisticated technical capabilities in the intelligence architecture.

The intelligence challenge is compounded by the operational security measures that JeM commanders have adopted in response to the campaign. Praveen Swami at the Indian Express has reported that surviving JeM operatives have altered their behavioral patterns since the campaign began, reducing public appearances, changing residences with greater frequency, limiting communications, and varying their daily routines. These adaptations impose costs on the intelligence architecture by degrading the reliability of previously established surveillance baselines. Targets who were predictable become unpredictable. Meeting locations that were known become unknown. Communication patterns that were monitored are replaced by new patterns that must be relearned.

The campaign’s continued effectiveness despite these adaptations suggests one of two possibilities. Either the intelligence architecture possesses sufficient depth and diversity that target adaptations can be overcome through alternative collection methods, or the adaptations have been less effective than intended because JeM operatives cannot fundamentally alter the organizational behaviors, attending meetings, coordinating operations, maintaining financial flows, that make them functionally visible to intelligence systems. A target can change his residence, but he cannot stop working with his organizational colleagues without ceasing to be an operative. The functional requirements of the job create irreducible exposure that no amount of personal security can eliminate entirely.

Geographic Intelligence Implications

The geographic progression of the campaign reveals the intelligence architecture’s expanding reach. The early operations concentrated in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most operationally permissive city for clandestine operations. Karachi’s enormous population, ethnic diversity, and chronic security challenges create an environment where external operatives can blend into the background and where intelligence sources can communicate with handlers without attracting attention.

The expansion to Sialkot represented a step into a more controlled environment. Sialkot is smaller, more ethnically homogeneous, and more heavily influenced by Pakistan Army presence due to its proximity to the Line of Control. Operating there required intelligence assets who could function in a community where strangers are noticed and where military security creates additional surveillance layers.

The expansion to North Waziristan represented the campaign’s most demanding intelligence achievement. Waziristan’s tribal governance structures, armed-group territorial control, and geographic isolation create an environment that actively resists intelligence penetration. The successful operation against Dawood Malik suggests either that the intelligence architecture maintains tribal connections in Waziristan that predate the current campaign, or that the architecture developed the capability to operate in tribal territory as the campaign expanded.

The geographic trajectory, from Pakistan’s most accessible city to its most inaccessible tribal region, describes an intelligence architecture that has either expanded its reach as the campaign progressed or that possessed latent capabilities in multiple locations that were activated sequentially as operational priorities dictated.

The second interpretation carries profound implications for the broader shadow war. If the intelligence architecture maintained dormant asset networks across Pakistan’s geography that predated the current campaign, the infrastructure was being built during a period when India’s official policy precluded covert kinetic operations on Pakistani soil. The investment in asset development without immediate operational return suggests long-term strategic planning that anticipated the eventual policy shift toward covert action, building the capability years before the authorization to use it arrived.

This interpretation is consistent with the operational history of intelligence agencies that have conducted sustained targeted killing campaigns. Israel’s Mossad spent years building the asset networks in Europe and the Middle East that enabled Operation Wrath of God after the Munich Olympics massacre. The infrastructure that enabled the killings was in place before the political authorization to kill was granted. If India’s intelligence architecture followed a similar pattern, the shadow war campaign drew on capabilities that were developed during the diplomatic period when India relied on bilateral negotiations, UNSC resolutions, and international pressure to address the terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil. The failure of those diplomatic approaches provided the political authorization; the intelligence infrastructure provided the operational capability.

The relationship between the intelligence architecture and Pakistan’s own security services adds another layer of complexity. The shadow war operates on Pakistani soil without the cooperation of Pakistani security services, which means the intelligence architecture must account for Pakistani surveillance systems, military checkpoints, police patrols, and ISI counter-intelligence operations as adversarial factors. Operating against JeM targets while simultaneously evading detection by the security services that are nominally protecting those targets requires a level of operational sophistication that distinguishes the shadow war from cooperative counter-terrorism programs where host-country support is available. Every operation against a JeM target is simultaneously an intelligence penetration of Pakistan’s domestic security environment, a fact that carries escalatory implications that extend beyond the counter-terrorism dimension of the campaign.

Competing Theories

The central analytical question that the Azhar network siege raises is whether the campaign has genuinely degraded Jaish-e-Mohammed’s organizational capability or whether JeM possesses sufficient resilience to absorb the losses and regenerate its command structure. This is not an abstract debate; it determines whether the campaign’s trajectory leads to JeM’s functional collapse or to an indefinite cycle of elimination and replacement.

The Degradation Thesis

Ashley Tellis at the Carnegie Endowment has argued that sustained leadership attrition can degrade armed-group capability when three conditions are met simultaneously. First, the targeting must span multiple organizational tiers, preventing the organization from simply promoting replacements from an untouched subordinate level. Second, the operational tempo must exceed the organization’s regeneration rate, killing experienced operatives faster than the organization can train replacements. Third, the targeting must reach critical organizational functions, not just individual commanders, disrupting the institutional knowledge and relationship networks that enable operations.

The campaign against JeM meets all three conditions. It has targeted the family tier (Tahir Anwar), the senior operational tier (Latif), and the mid-level operational tier (Mistry, Tariq, Malik). It has maintained a tempo that accelerated from roughly one JeM target per year in 2022 to multiple targets within weeks in late 2023. And it has disrupted critical functions including cross-border infiltration management (Latif), logistics and communications (Mistry and Tariq), and tribal-area liaison (Malik).

The evidence from JeM’s operational output supports the degradation thesis. Since the campaign began in earnest in 2022, JeM has not conducted a major cross-border attack against India. The organization’s last high-profile operation was the February 2019 Pulwama bombing, which preceded the Balakot airstrikes that drove Masood Azhar into hiding and predated the shadow war campaign. The absence of major JeM attacks during a period of extreme India-Pakistan tension, including the post-Pahalgam crisis and Operation Sindoor, suggests that JeM’s operational capability has been degraded to the point where it cannot execute the complex operations that historically defined its threat profile.

Critics of the degradation thesis note that JeM’s low attack frequency was a feature of the organization’s operational pattern long before the campaign began. JeM has always operated in bursts, conducting a major attack and then retreating into dormancy for years before the next operation. The absence of attacks since 2019 could reflect the organization’s normal operational rhythm rather than campaign-induced degradation. This objection has merit but is weakened by the fact that the post-Pahalgam period, when India-Pakistan tensions reached their highest point since 2001, would have been precisely the moment when JeM’s ISI handlers would have activated the organization for an attack if the capability existed.

There is also a structural argument for degradation that extends beyond the count of eliminated commanders. Organizational capability is not merely a function of personnel numbers; it is a function of institutional knowledge, operational relationships, and the trust networks that enable clandestine activity. Shahid Latif did not merely hold a position within JeM; he embodied decades of accumulated knowledge about infiltration routes, border-area community dynamics, Pakistani military patrol patterns, and the personal relationships with local facilitators that enabled cross-border movement. This knowledge resided in Latif’s memory, not in JeM’s files. When he died in the Sialkot mosque, that knowledge died with him. His replacement inherits a title, not a capability.

The same logic applies to the Karachi cell. Mistry and Tariq maintained personal relationships with hawala brokers, equipment suppliers, safe house landlords, and the community members who provided early warning against police raids. These relationships were personal and trust-based; they could not be transferred to a replacement through organizational directive. The replacement operative would need to build these relationships independently, a process that takes years and that exposes the new operative to the very intelligence networks that identified and eliminated his predecessors.

The Waziristan connection presents the starkest case for institutional knowledge loss. Dawood Malik’s relationships with tribal leaders, his understanding of Waziristan’s complex armed-group dynamics, and his ability to navigate between TTP, al-Qaeda remnants, and JeM affiliate interests were products of years of embedding within the tribal social structure. No directive from JeM’s Punjab headquarters can recreate these relationships; they must be earned through personal presence and tribal protocols that outsiders cannot shortcut.

The Resilience Thesis

Paul Staniland at the University of Chicago has developed a theoretical framework for understanding armed-group resilience that is directly applicable to JeM. Staniland argues that armed groups with deep social roots, institutional support structures, and state patronage demonstrate resilience that outlasts even intensive targeting campaigns. JeM possesses all three: social roots in Punjab’s religious communities, institutional support through its madrassa network, and state patronage through the ISI.

The resilience thesis predicts that JeM will absorb the current campaign’s losses and regenerate its command structure through internal promotion and new recruitment. The organization’s madrassa pipeline continues to produce radicalized youth. Its financial infrastructure remains largely intact. Its institutional relationship with Pakistan’s security establishment, while strained by the post-Pulwama Balakot fallout, has not been severed. These structural factors, Staniland would argue, provide JeM with the organizational depth to survive a leadership-targeting campaign that might destroy a less deeply rooted group.

The strongest evidence for the resilience thesis is JeM’s historical track record. The organization survived India’s post-Parliament-attack military mobilization in 2001-2002 (Operation Parakram). It survived Pakistan’s own belated crackdowns after international pressure following major attacks. It survived the Balakot airstrikes. Each time, JeM demonstrated the capacity to absorb losses, reorganize, and eventually resurge with renewed operational capability. The shadow war campaign is more sustained and more operationally effective than any previous pressure on JeM, but the organization’s resilience track record demands respect.

There is a specific mechanism through which JeM’s resilience operates that deserves detailed examination. When the Pakistan state has historically pressured JeM through arrests or bans, the organization has responded by fragmenting into subsidiaries that operate under different names while maintaining functional unity under Azhar’s authority. Lashkar-e-Jabbar, the Afzal Guru Squad, and various regional offshoots have all served as organizational shells into which JeM activity can be redirected when the parent brand faces pressure. This fragmentation strategy creates confusion about organizational boundaries, making it difficult for external actors to assess whether a specific group is a genuine independent entity or a JeM subsidiary operating under alternative branding.

The fragmentation mechanism has limits, however. It depends on the organizational center, Azhar’s personal authority and the family-managed command structure, remaining intact to coordinate activity across the subsidiary network. The shadow war campaign has targeted precisely this coordinating center. If the subsidiaries were genuinely independent, they could survive the degradation of the parent organization’s central command. But if they depend on Azhar’s network for strategic direction, financial support, and operational authorization, the degradation of that network affects the subsidiaries as well. The campaign’s cascade logic extends beyond JeM’s formal boundaries into the subsidiary network that JeM’s resilience strategy created.

A further consideration is the ISI factor. Pakistan’s security establishment has historically provided JeM with two forms of support: protective cover (preventing arrest and prosecution) and operational enablement (facilitating cross-border operations and providing intelligence). The shadow war has demonstrated that protective cover is failing, JeM commanders are being killed despite presumed state protection. The question is whether operational enablement can compensate for the loss of experienced commanders. If the ISI provides JeM with target intelligence, infiltration route support, and operational logistics, the organization might be able to conduct attacks even with degraded internal capability, essentially outsourcing the functions that the eliminated commanders previously performed. This possibility represents the resilience thesis’s strongest argument: JeM’s state patron can compensate for organizational losses by increasing direct support.

Adjudicating the Debate

The evidence currently favors a nuanced position between pure degradation and pure resilience. JeM has been operationally degraded: its cross-border infiltration capability has been reduced, its logistical infrastructure disrupted, and its command structure thinned. These are real losses with real operational consequences. At the same time, JeM’s structural foundations, the madrassas, the financial infrastructure, the ISI relationship, remain substantially intact, providing the organizational base from which regeneration could eventually occur.

The critical variable is time. If the campaign continues at its current tempo, the degradation will outpace regeneration because experienced operatives are being eliminated faster than the madrassa pipeline can produce replacement commanders with comparable skills and relationships. But if the campaign slows, whether due to diplomatic pressure, operational constraints, or shifting strategic priorities, JeM’s structural resilience will have the opportunity to assert itself, and the organization could rebuild its operational command over a period of years.

There is a middle scenario that neither the degradation thesis nor the resilience thesis fully addresses: functional degradation with institutional survival. In this scenario, JeM persists as an organization, maintaining its madrassas, its brand identity, its community base, and its relationship with the ISI, but loses the operational capability to conduct the type of complex cross-border attacks that defined its historical threat profile. The organization survives but is transformed from an offensive capability into a dormant asset, maintained by the Pakistani state as a potential future instrument but unable to conduct independent operations without direct ISI logistical support that currently carries unacceptable escalation risks.

This middle scenario may be the most strategically relevant outcome because it satisfies the campaign’s core objective, preventing JeM from conducting attacks against India, without requiring the organization’s complete destruction, which may be impossible given its structural roots in Pakistani society. From the campaign’s perspective, a JeM that exists but cannot attack is strategically equivalent to a JeM that has been destroyed, at least for the duration of the operational incapacity.

The analogy to other organizations that have experienced similar functional degradation is instructive. Al-Qaeda Central, the organization founded by Osama bin Laden, survived the US war on terror as an institutional entity but was degraded to the point where it could not replicate the September 11 attacks. The organization’s brand, ideology, and institutional legacy persist, but its operational capability has been reduced to a fraction of its pre-2001 capacity. If JeM follows a similar trajectory, the campaign against Azhar’s network will have achieved a strategic success comparable to the US campaign against al-Qaeda’s central leadership, without the enormous military expenditure and geopolitical disruption that accompanied the American effort.

The campaign’s designers appear to understand this dynamic. The accelerating operational tempo in 2023, culminating in the November cluster, suggests a deliberate strategy to maintain pressure that exceeds JeM’s regeneration capacity. The logic is attritional: every month that the campaign sustains high tempo widens the gap between JeM’s current capability and its pre-campaign capability, making full regeneration progressively harder even if the campaign eventually slows.

The ultimate measure of the campaign’s success will not be the number of JeM operatives eliminated, though that number is a relevant input. It will be the operational gap between what JeM could do before the campaign began and what it can do after the campaign has run its course. If that gap encompasses the loss of cross-border infiltration capability, the degradation of multi-city logistical coordination, and the psychological transformation of JeM’s surviving leadership from confident operators into hunted fugitives, the campaign will have achieved strategic success regardless of whether it reaches Masood Azhar himself.

Strategic Implications

The siege of Masood Azhar’s network carries implications that extend beyond JeM’s organizational health into the broader strategic landscape of India’s counter-terrorism doctrine and the shadow war’s evolution.

The Network-Cascade Doctrine

The campaign against JeM represents the clearest demonstration of what might be termed the network-cascade doctrine: the strategic approach of targeting connected nodes within a single organizational network sequentially, using the intelligence generated by each elimination to enable the next. This doctrine differs from both random attrition (killing targets of opportunity regardless of network position) and decapitation (killing organizational leadership while leaving subordinate structures intact). The cascade doctrine targets the connections between nodes rather than the nodes themselves, treating the organizational network as a system that can be degraded by disrupting the relationships that hold it together.

The theoretical foundation for the network-cascade approach draws on insights from network science that have been applied to counter-terrorism by scholars including Daniel Byman at Brookings and Audrey Kurth Cronin, author of “How Terrorism Ends.” Cronin’s research demonstrates that terrorist organizations are most vulnerable not when their leaders are removed in isolation but when the removal of individuals triggers secondary organizational effects: communication breakdowns, trust failures, factional disputes over succession, and the exposure of previously hidden network structures through the reorganization that follows each leadership loss. The cascade doctrine operationalizes Cronin’s insight by deliberately sequencing eliminations to maximize these secondary effects.

The Azhar network siege demonstrates the cascade doctrine at its most effective because JeM’s structure, concentrated around a single founding family with personal loyalty networks radiating outward, is particularly vulnerable to sequential targeting. Each elimination of an Azhar associate reduces the number of trusted channels through which the organization can operate, forcing surviving members to either trust less-vetted replacements (increasing the risk of intelligence penetration) or reduce operational activity (accepting capability degradation). Both responses favor the campaign’s objectives.

The contrast with alternative doctrinal approaches illuminates the cascade doctrine’s distinctive logic. A decapitation doctrine would prioritize targeting Masood Azhar himself, on the theory that removing the organizational leader would trigger systemic collapse. The cascade doctrine instead treats Azhar as the end point rather than the starting point, methodically removing the support structure that enables his leadership before reaching the leader himself. This sequencing has a practical advantage: even if Azhar proves inaccessible because of ISI protection or his health condition, the degradation of his network achieves significant strategic effect regardless of whether the campaign reaches its logical conclusion.

An attrition doctrine would target JeM members indiscriminately, accepting any available target regardless of network position or cascade potential. The attrition approach maximizes the number of eliminations but minimizes the secondary organizational effects because random targeting does not exploit the network connections between nodes. The cascade doctrine sacrifices numerical volume for strategic sequencing, accepting fewer total eliminations in exchange for greater organizational disruption per elimination.

The cascade doctrine’s relevance extends beyond JeM to other terror organizations targeted by the shadow war. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s leadership hierarchy has been subjected to a version of the same approach, though the LeT campaign’s targeting pattern has been more opportunistic and less sequential than the JeM campaign. The comparison suggests that the cascade doctrine is most effective against organizations with centralized command structures and personal loyalty networks, and less effective against organizations with more distributed authority and interchangeable personnel.

The Azhar Question

Every analysis of the campaign against Azhar’s network converges on a single question: is Masood Azhar himself a target? The progression of the campaign, from peripheral operatives to operational commanders to family members, describes a trajectory that points inward. If the circle continues to contract, Azhar occupies the center.

The question of Azhar’s current status complicates this analysis. Masood Azhar has not been reliably sighted since the Balakot airstrikes. Multiple theories circulate about his location and condition. He may be in ISI protective custody, sequestered in a secure facility to prevent the embarrassment of his public capture or killing. He may be in independent hiding, having recognized that neither the ISI’s protection nor his own organizational security can guarantee his safety. He may be dead from natural causes, a possibility given reports of his chronic health conditions, with his death concealed to prevent the organizational crisis that public confirmation would trigger.

Carlotta Gall’s reporting in “The Wrong Enemy” on the ISI’s management of strategic assets provides a framework for understanding Azhar’s possible custodial status. Gall documented how the ISI maintained dual-use relationships with figures like Osama bin Laden, providing sufficient protection to keep them functional while maintaining sufficient control to prevent them from taking actions that would trigger unacceptable diplomatic consequences. If Azhar is in ISI custody under a similar arrangement, his personal safety would be higher than if he were independently hiding, but his operational relevance to JeM would be correspondingly reduced because ISI control limits his ability to direct organizational activity.

The strategic calculation around targeting Azhar directly, if he is accessible, involves balancing the symbolic value of eliminating JeM’s founder against the risks of operational escalation. Killing Azhar would represent a qualitative escalation in the shadow war, crossing from the elimination of operational functionaries to the elimination of a figure who occupies a position in the India-Pakistan conflict comparable to that of Hafiz Saeed or Syed Salahuddin. The diplomatic consequences would be substantial: Pakistan could not plausibly attribute Azhar’s death to criminal violence or factional rivalry, and the political pressure for a visible response would be intense.

If Azhar is alive and accessible, the campaign’s trajectory suggests that he is a potential target whose elimination would represent the campaign’s logical conclusion. If Azhar is alive but in ISI custody, targeting him would require penetrating Pakistan’s state security apparatus, a qualitative escalation beyond killing operatives who live in civilian society. If Azhar is already dead, the campaign against his network may represent not an approach toward the target but a systematic demolition of the organization he built, conducted regardless of his personal status.

Implications for India-Pakistan Relations

The network-cascade campaign against JeM operates within the broader context of India-Pakistan relations that have deteriorated to their lowest point in decades. The 2025 India-Pakistan military confrontation, triggered by the Pahalgam attack and culminating in Operation Sindoor, created conditions under which covert operations against Pakistan-based terror groups intensified substantially. The diplomatic breakdown that accompanied the military confrontation removed whatever residual restraints had previously moderated the shadow war’s tempo.

The relationship between the shadow war and open military operations deserves careful examination because the two are not merely parallel activities; they are strategically interconnected. The shadow war degrades the proxy capabilities that Pakistan uses as instruments of foreign policy against India, which in turn reduces Pakistan’s ability to impose costs on India below the nuclear threshold. Operation Sindoor addressed the conventional military dimension of the same problem, demonstrating that India possessed the capability and willingness to strike Pakistani military infrastructure directly when provoked. Together, the shadow war and conventional military action create a strategic pincer that constrains Pakistan’s options on both the covert and overt dimensions of the conflict.

The specific significance of the JeM campaign within this strategic context relates to the Pahalgam attack that triggered the 2025 crisis. While attribution for the Pahalgam tourist massacre has been complex, with the Resistance Front (TRF) claiming responsibility and Indian investigators tracing connections to multiple organizations, JeM’s broader role in the India-Pakistan terror landscape provides context for the campaign’s intensification. The shadow war’s targeting of JeM operatives accelerated notably during the post-Pahalgam period, suggesting that the strategic environment created by the attack and its military consequences provided both motivation and operational latitude for intensified covert operations.

Pakistan’s response to the campaign has followed a predictable pattern: official denial of the killings’ significance, attribution to internal factional violence, occasional accusations directed at India without providing evidence, and no substantive investigation into the deaths. This pattern serves Pakistan’s interests by avoiding the acknowledgment that its territory is being used as an operational theater for targeted killings attributed to its principal adversary, an acknowledgment that would create domestic political pressure for a response that Pakistan may not be capable of executing without escalating the conflict further.

The institutional logic of Pakistan’s non-response deserves analysis because it reveals the structural constraints that the shadow war exploits. Pakistan cannot publicly acknowledge the killings as the product of Indian covert operations without simultaneously acknowledging that it failed to protect the designated terrorists it sheltered, that its intelligence services were outmaneuvered on Pakistani soil, and that its sovereignty was violated repeatedly without consequence. Each of these acknowledgments would carry domestic political costs that Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership prefer to avoid. The result is a tacit equilibrium: the shadow war continues, Pakistan does not officially recognize it, and both sides avoid the diplomatic escalation that formal acknowledgment would trigger.

This equilibrium is inherently unstable, however, because it depends on the campaign remaining within boundaries that Pakistan can plausibly ignore. The targeting of mid-level operatives and even senior commanders can be absorbed within the non-acknowledgment framework because Pakistan can attribute these deaths to criminal violence or factional rivalry. Targeting Masood Azhar himself, or a comparably prominent figure, would likely exceed the threshold of plausible non-acknowledgment, forcing Pakistan into a response that could include diplomatic retaliation, military escalation, or proxy activation against Indian interests.

The campaign also carries implications for Pakistan’s relationship with its own proxy forces. The ISI’s foundational bargain with organizations like JeM rested on an implicit guarantee: in exchange for operational service against India, the state would provide protection. The shadow war has revealed the limits of that guarantee. JeM commanders who relied on state protection, who lived openly in Pakistani cities and attended mosques without security precautions because they trusted the ISI’s umbrella, have been killed regardless. The protection guarantee has failed, and every surviving JeM operative knows it.

This failure has second-order strategic consequences. If Pakistan cannot protect its proxy assets, the cost-benefit calculation for future proxy operations shifts. Recruits who might have accepted the risks of anti-India militancy when those risks were moderated by state protection now face those risks unmitigated. The shadow war does not need to destroy JeM entirely to achieve strategic effect; it needs to make serving JeM dangerous enough that the organization’s recruitment, operational willingness, and strategic utility to the Pakistani state are all degraded.

The deterrence effect extends beyond JeM to Pakistan’s broader proxy infrastructure. Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders who have watched JeM’s inner circle be systematically eliminated are recalculating their own vulnerability. Hizbul Mujahideen operatives in Pakistan-administered Kashmir are adjusting their behavioral patterns. Even organizations that have not yet been directly targeted are responding to the demonstration effect of the campaign against JeM, because the campaign proves that the protective bargain that sustained Pakistan’s proxy ecosystem for decades is no longer reliable.

The Complete Timeline in Context

Viewed within the complete timeline of shadow war operations, the JeM campaign occupies a specific analytical position. The early shadow war operations in 2021 and 2022 were exploratory, establishing operational patterns and testing the campaign’s reach. The 2023 acceleration demonstrated sustained capability and expanded geographic reach. The JeM-specific campaign nested within this broader acceleration represents the shadow war’s most focused and methodical application: rather than targeting individuals from multiple organizations in a pattern that suggests opportunity-driven operations, the JeM campaign targeted a single organization’s network in a pattern that suggests deliberate strategy.

This distinction matters for understanding the shadow war’s evolution. If the campaign has developed from opportunistic targeting to strategic network disruption, the organizations that have thus far escaped concentrated attention, including Lashkar-e-Taiba’s senior leadership and the Khalistan-affiliated groups targeted through separate operational streams, may face similar systematic campaigns in the future. The Azhar network siege is not just a campaign; it may be a template.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How many Masood Azhar associates have been eliminated in the shadow war?

At least five individuals with confirmed or probable connections to Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammed network have been eliminated since the campaign began. These include Zahoor Mistry, the IC-814 hijacker killed in Karachi in March 2022; Shahid Latif, the Pathankot attack mastermind killed in Sialkot in October 2023; Dawood Malik, the Lashkar-e-Jabbar affiliate killed in North Waziristan; Raheem Ullah Tariq, the JeM Karachi operative killed in November 2023; and Muhammad Tahir Anwar, Azhar’s elder brother who died under mysterious circumstances. The total may be higher, as additional JeM-affiliated individuals killed by unknown assailants in Pakistan may not have been publicly identified as Azhar associates.

Q: Has JeM’s operational capability been degraded by the campaign?

The available evidence supports the assessment that JeM’s operational capability has been significantly degraded, particularly in the areas of cross-border infiltration management and logistical coordination. The loss of Shahid Latif eliminated JeM’s most experienced cross-border handler. The loss of Mistry and Tariq disrupted the organization’s Karachi logistical hub. JeM has not conducted a major cross-border attack against India since the Pulwama bombing of February 2019, and the absence of such an attack during the extreme India-Pakistan tensions of 2025 suggests that the capability to execute complex operations has been reduced.

Q: Can JeM replace its killed commanders with new leaders?

JeM can promote internal personnel to fill vacancies, but effective replacement requires more than organizational title transfer. Shahid Latif’s replacement would need to rebuild the cross-border infiltration network that Latif spent years constructing. Zahoor Mistry and Raheem Ullah Tariq’s replacements would need to reconstruct the Karachi cell’s logistical infrastructure. These are capabilities that require years of development, during which the organization operates at reduced capacity. JeM’s madrassa pipeline can produce new recruits, but converting recruits into experienced operational commanders requires time the campaign may not allow.

Q: Who remains in Masood Azhar’s inner circle?

JeM’s opacity makes a complete accounting impossible, but known surviving members of Azhar’s inner circle include Ibrahim Athar, another Azhar brother with organizational responsibilities, and several mid-level commanders who manage JeM’s operations in Punjab and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The extent to which these surviving members have altered their behavior in response to the campaign, reducing public appearances, enhancing personal security, limiting communications, is itself an indicator of the campaign’s psychological impact on the organization.

Q: Is Masood Azhar himself a target?

The campaign’s trajectory, progressing from peripheral operatives through operational commanders to Azhar’s own brother, describes a pattern that contracts toward Azhar as its logical center. Whether Azhar is an active target depends on his current status and location. If he is in independent hiding, he is theoretically accessible to the campaign. If he is in ISI protective custody, targeting him would require penetrating Pakistan’s state security infrastructure, a significant operational escalation. If he is already deceased from health complications, the campaign against his network may continue regardless of his personal fate as a strategy to dismantle the organization he built.

Q: What organizational functions has JeM lost through the campaign?

The campaign has degraded JeM’s cross-border infiltration management through the Latif killing, disrupted the Karachi logistical hub through the Mistry and Tariq killings, severed the connection to Lashkar-e-Jabbar in Waziristan through the Malik killing, and breached the family-tier security perimeter through the Tahir Anwar death. Functions that remain relatively intact include JeM’s financial infrastructure (managed through front organizations), its madrassa-based recruitment pipeline, and its institutional relationship with Pakistani state sponsors.

Q: How does JeM’s degradation compare to LeT’s losses?

JeM and LeT have experienced different types of campaign pressure. The campaign against LeT has targeted a broader range of individuals across the organization’s hierarchy, from mid-level operatives to co-founders, in a pattern that suggests opportunistic targeting. The campaign against JeM has been more concentrated and sequential, targeting a single leader’s network with a methodical escalation pattern. JeM’s losses appear proportionally more severe relative to the organization’s size because JeM is a smaller, more centralized organization than LeT, meaning each elimination removes a larger fraction of the organization’s institutional knowledge and capability.

Q: What is the strategic goal of targeting the Azhar network specifically?

The strategic goal appears to be twofold. First, degrading JeM’s capability to conduct cross-border attacks against India, particularly the type of complex multi-person infiltration operation that JeM executed at Pathankot and potentially directed at Pulwama. Second, sending a psychological message to Masood Azhar and to Pakistan’s security establishment that the consequences of the IC-814 deal, which freed Azhar and enabled JeM’s founding, are being imposed retroactively. The campaign against Azhar’s network is both counter-terrorism and historical reckoning.

Q: Why was Zahoor Mistry the first JeM target?

Mistry’s selection as the first JeM target carried symbolic weight that transcended his operational significance at the time of his killing. As an IC-814 hijacker, Mistry represented the founding act that created JeM. Killing him first established that the campaign was not merely pursuing active threats but was settling accounts that dated to the organization’s origins. The message to Azhar was specific: the men who hijacked a plane to free you are being found and killed.

Q: What is Lashkar-e-Jabbar and why does it matter?

Lashkar-e-Jabbar is a JeM affiliate operating primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, functioning as JeM’s connection to the weapons markets, tribal fighters, and operational depth that the Afghan-Pakistan border region provides. The organization occupies a niche that the JeM central command in Punjab cannot fill: access to ungoverned territory, relationships with tribal armed groups, and logistical channels that operate outside Pakistan’s urban surveillance infrastructure. Dawood Malik’s role as the link between JeM’s central command and Lashkar-e-Jabbar made his elimination strategically significant beyond his individual operational portfolio.

Q: Were the November 2023 JeM killings coordinated?

The compressed timeline of three JeM and allied organization killings within fourteen days in November 2023 strongly suggests coordination, though definitive proof of centralized planning is not available from open-source evidence. The alternative explanation, that the timing was coincidental and the killings were independently planned, is plausible but statistically improbable. The operational requirements for executing three kills in three different cities within two weeks, including intelligence confirmation, team deployment, execution, and extraction, point to a command-and-control architecture capable of managing simultaneous operations across Pakistan’s geography.

Q: Has Pakistan investigated the JeM killings?

Pakistani authorities have registered FIRs for the confirmed shooting deaths of JeM operatives, but no investigation has produced arrests, suspects, or publicly shared forensic findings. The investigations’ failure mirrors the broader pattern across all shadow war killings: cases are opened, minimal evidence is collected, no suspects are identified, and the cases are effectively shelved. Whether this reflects genuine investigative inability, deliberate non-investigation to avoid identifying the campaign’s operators, or institutional indifference to the deaths of designated terrorists whom Pakistan’s own policies sheltered is a question that each observer answers according to their assessment of Pakistani institutional capacity and intent.

Q: What does the campaign reveal about the ISI’s protective umbrella?

The campaign reveals that the ISI’s protective umbrella over JeM has significant gaps. Operatives who were living openly in Pakistani cities, attending mosques without security, and conducting JeM business under the assumption of state protection were killed regardless. This failure does not necessarily mean the ISI withdrew protection; it may mean the ISI’s protection was insufficient against an adversary with superior intelligence about specific targets. The result is the same from the perspective of JeM commanders: the protection guarantee that motivated their willingness to serve as state proxies has been exposed as unreliable.

Q: Could JeM’s losses be attributed to internal Pakistani operations?

Pakistan has periodically conducted operations against its own proxy groups when international pressure demanded visible action, particularly after major attacks that triggered diplomatic consequences. The possibility that some JeM-targeted killings were conducted by Pakistani security services, either independently or in coordination with the shadow war campaign, cannot be excluded. The pattern, however, is inconsistent with historical Pakistani counter-terror operations, which have typically involved arrests and public prosecutions rather than extrajudicial killings by unknown assailants on motorcycles.

Q: How has the campaign affected JeM’s recruitment?

JeM’s madrassa-based recruitment pipeline continues to operate, producing radicalized youth who enter the organization’s lower tiers. The campaign’s direct impact on recruitment is likely modest because the recruits who feed the pipeline are motivated by ideological conviction rather than rational cost-benefit analysis. Indirect effects may be more significant: the campaign’s visibility among JeM’s community of supporters could deter some potential recruits who recognize that the organization’s commanders are being systematically eliminated. The recruitment effect is difficult to measure because JeM does not publish enrollment figures and its recruitment operations occur within private institutional settings.

Q: What would Azhar’s elimination mean for JeM?

Azhar’s elimination, if it occurs, would represent both a symbolic culmination and an organizational inflection point. Symbolically, it would close the twenty-six-year arc that began with his release during the IC-814 hijacking, demonstrating that India’s patience for unresolved accounts has a limit. Organizationally, it would remove JeM’s founding authority, the figure whose personal charisma, strategic vision, and institutional relationships defined the organization’s identity and direction. Whether JeM could survive Azhar’s removal depends on whether the organization has developed institutional depth independent of its founder, a question that the campaign’s progressive dismantling of his personal network has already partially answered in the negative.

Q: Is the campaign against JeM a template for future operations?

The Azhar network siege’s methodical, sequential, network-cascade approach represents a model that could be applied to other organizations targeted by the shadow war. The key elements, sustained intelligence collection, sequential targeting that generates cascading intelligence, multi-tier operational reach, and tempo management that exceeds regeneration capacity, are transferable to any centralized terror organization with identifiable network structures. Whether this model will be applied to LeT’s senior leadership, Hizbul Mujahideen’s command structure, or other target sets depends on strategic priorities and intelligence capability, but the JeM campaign has established the proof of concept.

Q: What are the limits of the network-cascade approach?

The network-cascade approach has identifiable limitations. It is most effective against centralized organizations with personal loyalty networks, and less effective against distributed organizations with interchangeable personnel. It requires sustained intelligence access, which may be disrupted if targets adopt effective security countermeasures or if the campaign’s operational security is compromised. It depends on sustained political will and operational tempo, which may be affected by diplomatic developments, strategic priority shifts, or resource constraints. And it cannot address the structural factors, state patronage, madrassa recruitment, ideological motivation, that sustain terror organizations independently of their current leadership.

Q: How does the Azhar network siege connect to the broader India-Pakistan conflict?

The siege of Azhar’s network is one operational thread within a broader pattern of India-Pakistan conflict that encompasses diplomatic confrontation, military standoffs, economic pressure, and covert operations. The shadow war campaign against JeM operates alongside similar campaigns against LeT and Khalistan-affiliated groups, and within the context of open military operations including the Balakot airstrikes and Operation Sindoor. Each element of the conflict reinforces the others: the shadow war degrades the proxy capabilities that trigger military confrontation, while military confrontation creates the strategic environment in which the shadow war’s escalation becomes politically sustainable. The JeM campaign specifically connects to the broader conflict through its relationship to the Pathankot and Pulwama attacks, both of which triggered major diplomatic and military crises between India and Pakistan.

Q: What role does Pakistan’s madrassa network play in JeM’s sustainability?

Pakistan’s madrassa network serves as JeM’s primary recruitment pipeline, producing radicalized youth who enter the organization’s lowest tier as ideologically committed volunteers. JeM’s affiliated educational institutions, managed through front organizations like Jamiat-ul-Ansar, operate across Punjab province and provide a steady stream of recruits who have been socialized into the organization’s ideology from adolescence. The madrassa pipeline operates independently of JeM’s operational command structure, meaning that the elimination of senior and mid-level commanders does not directly affect recruitment intake. The pipeline’s limitation is that it produces ideological commitment rather than operational competence; converting madrassa graduates into effective operational commanders requires years of mentorship and field experience that the campaign is degrading faster than JeM can provide.

Q: How have surviving JeM operatives changed their behavior?

Open-source reporting and analyst assessments indicate that surviving JeM operatives have adopted several behavioral changes since the campaign intensified. These include reducing public appearances, changing residences with greater frequency, limiting use of electronic communications, varying daily routines to avoid establishing predictable patterns, and restricting attendance at organizational gatherings where multiple high-value targets might be present simultaneously. Some reports suggest that senior JeM figures have relocated from Pakistan’s major cities to smaller towns or rural areas where the campaign’s operational reach may be more limited. These adaptations impose significant operational costs on JeM because the same behaviors that enhance personal security also reduce the individual’s ability to perform organizational functions. A commander who stops attending planning meetings for personal safety is a commander who has effectively removed himself from the command structure.

Q: What does the campaign teach about counter-terrorism strategy more broadly?

The Azhar network siege offers several lessons for counter-terrorism strategy beyond the specific India-Pakistan context. First, sustained pressure that exceeds an organization’s regeneration capacity produces cumulative degradation that point-in-time operations do not. The shadow war campaign’s effectiveness derives from its sustained tempo, not from any single dramatic operation. Second, targeting network connections rather than isolated individuals produces cascade effects that amplify the strategic impact of each elimination. Third, the psychological dimension of a sustained campaign, the fear, behavioral restriction, and trust erosion that accumulate among surviving members, can degrade organizational capability independently of the physical elimination of personnel. Fourth, organizational resilience depends not just on structural factors (state sponsorship, recruitment pipelines, financial infrastructure) but on the availability of experienced human capital that cannot be replaced through institutional mechanisms alone. The loss of experienced commanders represents a capability gap that structural resilience cannot bridge on compressed timelines.

Q: How does JeM’s fragmentation into subsidiaries affect the campaign?

JeM has historically responded to pressure by fragmenting into subsidiary organizations that operate under different names while maintaining functional unity under Azhar’s authority. Lashkar-e-Jabbar, the Afzal Guru Squad, and various regional offshoots have served as organizational shells that absorb JeM activity when the parent brand faces pressure. The campaign’s targeting of Dawood Malik, who served as Azhar’s link to Lashkar-e-Jabbar, suggests that the operational planners understand JeM’s fragmentation strategy and are targeting the connecting nodes between the parent organization and its subsidiaries. If the campaign continues to target subsidiary leaders in addition to JeM core operatives, it would effectively close the organizational escape route that fragmentation has historically provided.

Q: What evidence exists that JeM conducted fewer operations since the campaign began?

JeM’s last confirmed high-profile attack against India was the Pulwama convoy bombing of February 2019, which killed forty CRPF personnel and triggered the Balakot airstrikes. Since the shadow war campaign against JeM’s network began in earnest with the Mistry killing in March 2022, no comparable JeM operation has been confirmed. The post-Pahalgam period in 2025, during which India-Pakistan tensions reached crisis levels, would have been the natural moment for JeM activation if the organization retained the capability for a major cross-border attack. The absence of such an attack during a period of maximum strategic motivation represents the strongest operational evidence for the degradation thesis. However, the caveat remains that JeM’s historical pattern includes long dormancy periods between major operations, making it difficult to distinguish campaign-induced incapacity from normal operational rhythm using the absence of attacks as the sole metric.

Q: How does the shadow war against JeM differ from operations against other organizations?

The campaign against JeM is distinguished from shadow war operations against other organizations by its sequential, network-cascade methodology. Operations against Lashkar-e-Taiba have followed a more opportunistic pattern, targeting individuals across the organizational hierarchy as intelligence and access permitted, without the visible sequential logic that characterizes the JeM campaign. Operations against Hizbul Mujahideen’s Pakistan-based leadership have been concentrated geographically, focused on the organization’s PoK infrastructure, rather than spanning multiple cities and regions. The JeM campaign’s distinctiveness lies in its deliberate progression through Azhar’s concentric circles, from founding-era operatives through active commanders to family members, which reveals a strategic intent to systematically dismantle a single leader’s network rather than to degrade the organization through undirected attrition. This methodological difference may reflect JeM’s centralized structure, which makes it more vulnerable to cascade-style targeting than the more distributed organizational architectures of LeT or Hizbul Mujahideen.

Q: What is the significance of targeting mosque prayer times?

The exploitation of mosque prayer routines as operational windows represents one of the shadow war’s most tactically effective and culturally provocative patterns. Prayer times at a specific mosque are the one daily routine that a devout individual cannot alter without abandoning a core element of his social identity. A target can change his residence, alter his commute, vary his shopping patterns, and restrict his social interactions, but he cannot stop attending his local mosque for daily prayers without attracting precisely the kind of community attention that would raise questions about his reasons for absence. The attackers exploit this irreducible predictability: they know where the target will be, at what time, and for how long. The mosque setting also provides cover for the approach, since worshippers converging on a mosque at prayer time are an expected sight that does not trigger suspicion. For JeM-targeted operations specifically, the mosque pattern was used in the Shahid Latif killing in Sialkot and has been observed in operations against other organizations, suggesting it is a standard tactical protocol rather than a target-specific adaptation.