There was a moment, somewhere in the middle of 2023, when the argument changed. For two years, the killing of wanted militants on Pakistani soil had been treated as a curiosity, a string of unconnected local crimes, a coincidence that respectable analysts were reluctant to name. By the autumn of that year, the argument was no longer about whether a pattern existed. It was about what the pattern meant, who was running it, and how far it would go. The shift did not happen because anyone confessed. It happened because the arithmetic became impossible to ignore. This is the story of the year that forced the question into the open. Between the first weeks of 2023 and its final days, a sequence of designated terrorists, infiltration coordinators, financiers, and movement chiefs died across five Pakistani cities and one Canadian suburb. Some were shot at point-blank range inside mosques. Some were...
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There was a moment, somewhere in the middle of 2023, when the argument changed. For two years, the killing of wanted militants on Pakistani soil had been treated as a curiosity, a string of unconnected local crimes, a coincidence that respectable analysts were reluctant to name. By the autumn of that year, the argument was no longer about whether a pattern existed. It was about what the pattern meant, who was running it, and how far it would go. The shift did not happen because anyone confessed. It happened because the arithmetic became impossible to ignore.
This is the story of the year that forced the question into the open. Between the first weeks of 2023 and its final days, a sequence of designated terrorists, infiltration coordinators, financiers, and movement chiefs died across five Pakistani cities and one Canadian suburb. Some were shot at point-blank range inside mosques. Some were gunned down on morning walks. One was beheaded near the Line of Control. One died in a road accident that nobody quite believed. Taken individually, each death could be explained away as a sectarian feud, a property dispute, a robbery, an internal purge. Taken together, across twelve months, the deaths formed a cadence too regular to be random, a geographic spread too wide to be a single local vendetta, and an organisational range too diverse to be one outfit settling its own scores. That cadence is what made 2023 the year the shadow war stopped being a theory.
The pattern had been building for a while. Readers who have followed the campaign that launched in 2021 and 2022 will know that the killings did not begin in 2023. What began in 2023 was the recognition. A campaign can exist for years before it becomes visible, because visibility depends not on the campaign’s intensity but on the observer’s willingness to connect the dots. Through 2021 and 2022 the dots were few enough, and far enough apart, that an observer could decline the connection without embarrassment. By the close of 2023 the dots were so numerous, and the lines between them so straight, that declining the connection required a kind of deliberate blindness. That is the transformation this account traces, and it is why this single year occupies its own link in the twenty-six-year chain that runs from a hijacked aircraft in 1999 to a tourist meadow in 2025.
The Preceding Link
To understand why 2023 mattered, it helps to remember how thin the evidence looked at the start of it. The campaign’s opening phase had been quiet by design. Its founding events were spread across two calendar years and three different methods, which is precisely what kept them deniable.
The first of those founding events was a car bomb. In June 2021 an explosive-laden vehicle detonated in the Johar Town locality of Lahore, a short distance from the residence of the Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed. Pakistani authorities treated it as a terrorist incident and arrested suspects, and the explosion killed bystanders rather than the figure it appeared to threaten. A car bomb is a blunt instrument. It is loud, it is indiscriminate, and it is the opposite of the surgical method that would later define the campaign. For that reason the Johar Town blast sat awkwardly in any theory that tried to bundle it with what followed. It announced that someone could reach deep into Lahore and strike near the most protected man in Pakistani militancy, but it did not establish a signature.
The signature arrived in 2022. In March of that year, Zahoor Mistry, one of the men who had hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC-814 to Kandahar in 1999, was shot dead in Karachi’s Akhtar Colony by two assailants on a motorcycle. Mistry, who had taken the alias Zahoor Ibrahim, was living under a new name and a degree of protection, and senior figures of Jaish-e-Mohammed were reported to have attended his funeral. His death was the first that carried the full grammar of what was coming, the motorcycle, the close-quarters shooting, the disappearance of the gunmen, the absence of any claim of responsibility. A reader can trace that grammar through the full chronological record of targeted killings and watch it repeat with almost ritual consistency.
Yet even Mistry’s killing, dramatic as it was, did not settle the question in 2022. One signature killing is an anecdote. The Pakistani state could and did treat it as an isolated act, possibly the result of a dispute within militant ranks, possibly the work of a criminal gang. International coverage was sparse. Indian officials said nothing that could be quoted. Through the rest of 2022 the tempo stayed low enough that a careful analyst, asked whether a coordinated elimination programme was under way, could honestly answer that the evidence did not yet support the claim. The campaign in its first phase had achieved something subtle. It had begun without becoming a story.
It is worth being precise about what deniability required, because the concept is often used loosely. A deniable operation is not merely one that the sponsoring state declines to acknowledge. It is one that an honest outside observer, looking at the available facts without prejudice, genuinely cannot attribute with confidence. The opening phase met that stricter standard. The Johar Town blast had been claimed by no one and could be folded into the country’s own long history of internal bombings. The Mistry shooting in Karachi looked, on its surface, like the kind of violence that the city’s crowded militant underworld produces on its own. Neither incident left behind a captured operative, a recovered communication, or a traceable weapon that pointed anywhere in particular. The planners of the early operations had, in effect, purchased deniability by accepting a slow tempo. Each strike could be absorbed by the background noise of a country that is genuinely violent, and as long as the strikes stayed rare, the noise was loud enough to hide them.
That arithmetic of concealment is the key to understanding why the year that followed was different. Concealment by background noise works only while the signal stays beneath the noise. A campaign that strikes twice across two years sits comfortably underneath the ordinary murder rate of a large country. A campaign that strikes a dozen times across twelve months, and selects its victims with visible discrimination from a single specialised population, rises above the noise no matter how quiet each individual operation is. The planners of the opening phase appear to have understood the first half of this principle very well. What 2023 revealed was that they had either accepted, or been instructed to accept, the consequences of the second half. Acceleration and concealment exist in tension, and the year of eliminations was the moment that tension was resolved in favour of acceleration.
A further point about the opening phase deserves attention, because it bears directly on how the surge should be read. Building the kind of network that the campaign would later rely upon is not only slow but also fragile. Human assets inside a hostile country can be compromised, can lose their nerve, can be turned by the other side. A sponsoring service that has invested years in cultivating such a network faces a constant temptation to use it before it degrades, because an idle network is a wasting asset whose value declines with every month it sits exposed. The relative quiet of the first phase suggests a service willing to resist that temptation, to keep its powder dry while it confirmed that the network functioned. The shift in tempo can be read, in part, as the moment that calculation reversed, when the judgement became that the network was now more valuable used than preserved. That is a subtle but important reframing. The surge was not necessarily a sudden arrival of new capability. It may have been the decision to spend a capability that had been deliberately husbanded.
The constitutional backdrop matters here. India’s revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in August 2019 had reorganised the strategic landscape, hardening New Delhi’s posture and removing a set of political constraints that had previously shaped how aggressively the state pursued its enemies abroad. Whatever capability had been under construction in the years before, it reached operational readiness in the window that followed. The opening phase of 2021 and 2022 should be read as that capability testing itself, confirming that assets could be placed, that targets could be located, and that operations could be concluded without exposure. By the end of 2022 the proof of concept was complete. What had not yet happened was scale.
Scale is the difference between a capability and a campaign. A capability can strike once and retreat. A campaign strikes repeatedly, absorbs the resulting attention, and continues striking anyway. The transition from one to the other is the single most consequential thing that happened in this story between the Kandahar tarmac and Operation Sindoor, and it happened in 2023. The preceding link, then, is a phase of deliberate quiet. The link that follows is the phase in which quiet was abandoned, not through any announcement, but through sheer accumulation.
It is worth holding the two phases side by side for a moment, because the contrast clarifies what kind of decision the surge represented. The opening phase had a particular virtue, which was that it kept its options open. A campaign that has struck only twice in two years has not committed itself to anything. It can continue, or it can quietly lapse, and either choice remains available because neither has been foreclosed by a visible pattern. The moment a campaign accelerates into a recognisable rhythm, that flexibility is spent. A dozen killings in a year is a commitment, an act that cannot be walked back into deniability, because the pattern, once visible, stays visible. The shift from the opening phase to the surge year was therefore not only a shift in tempo. It was the surrender of a strategic option, the option of pretending nothing was happening. Whoever authorised the acceleration was choosing to convert a reversible experiment into an irreversible programme, and that is a heavier decision than a simple change of pace. The preceding link is the last moment at which the campaign could still have dissolved without anyone being sure it had ever existed. After 2023 that exit was closed.
What Happened
The year did not wait long to begin its work. Within seven weeks of January, two designated militants connected to the Kashmir insurgency were dead, and the geography of those two deaths already told a story that a single killing could never have told.
February opened with the death of Bashir Ahmad Peer, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander who used the alias Imtiyaz Alam. Peer was shot dead by unidentified men outside a shop in Rawalpindi on the twentieth of February. The location is worth dwelling on. Rawalpindi is not an ordinary Pakistani city. It is the garrison town that hosts the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, the institutional centre of gravity for the country’s security establishment. A wanted militant being killed there, in daylight, by men who then vanished, carried a message that no spokesman needed to articulate. Peer himself was a serious figure rather than a foot soldier. He hailed from the Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir, had lived in Pakistan for more than fifteen years, and functioned as what Indian agencies called the launching chief, the man responsible for organising infiltration routes and pushing recruits, weapons, and ammunition across the Line of Control. He had been formally designated a terrorist by the Indian government months earlier, and within two weeks of his death the National Investigation Agency moved to attach his property in Kupwara. The biography and the operational role are laid out in detail in the profile of the Hizbul Mujahideen launching chief killed in Rawalpindi.
Days later, and in a city more than a thousand kilometres away, the campaign struck again. Syed Khalid Raza, a former commander of the Pakistan-based outfit Al-Badr, was shot dead outside his residence in Karachi. Raza occupied an unusual position in the militant ecosystem. His career had bridged two organisations, Al-Badr and Hizbul Mujahideen, and he maintained ties to the Hizbul supreme commander Syed Salahuddin along with a history connected to infiltration through the Kupwara sector. Eliminating him therefore damaged two structures at once. The full account of his dual affiliation appears in the profile of the former Al-Badr commander killed in Karachi. What the proximity of the two February deaths established was something the campaign’s opening phase had never demonstrated. Peer died in the garrison city of the north. Raza died in the commercial megacity of the south. The two killings were separated by roughly a week and by the entire length of the country. No local feud operates on that scale. No criminal gang has that reach. The February pairing was the year’s first statement, and the statement was about geography.
The operational logic behind the February pairing rewards a closer look. Peer and Raza were not symbolic targets chosen for their fame. They were chosen, the evidence suggests, for their function. An infiltration coordinator is among the highest-value targets in any counter-insurgency, because he is a node through which many other operations must pass. He recruits, he equips, he arranges the crossing of the Line of Control, and he maintains the relationships with the handlers who make all of that possible. Remove him and the damage is not confined to his own death. Every recruit he would have launched, every weapon he would have moved, every route he would have kept open is now in question. Raza’s value was structured similarly, with the added feature that his career straddled two organisations, so that his removal degraded both at once. A campaign that opens its surge year by killing two infiltration-linked coordinators rather than two famous figureheads is announcing, through its choice of targets, that its objective is the supply line and not the publicity.
There is a second message embedded in the February pairing, and it concerns timing within the militant calendar. Infiltration across the Line of Control is seasonal. The high passes that funnel men and weapons into the Kashmir valley are most usable in the warmer months, which means the planning and preparation for a season’s infiltration happens in the colder ones. Striking two infiltration coordinators in February, before the season opened, was therefore a strike at the preparatory phase, at the moment when routes were being readied and recruits were being staged. A campaign that kills its infiltration-linked targets in winter is not merely removing individuals. It is attempting to disrupt a season’s worth of cross-border movement before that season begins. Whether or not the February timing was deliberate in this sense, the effect was to insert the campaign into the militant planning cycle at its most vulnerable point.
March extended the map further still. On the third of that month, Syed Noor Shalobar, an operative linked to the Islamic State Khorasan Province and described in Indian assessments as a recruiter who worked at the direction of Pakistani intelligence, was shot dead by an unidentified gunman in the Bara area of the Khyber district. This death moved the campaign’s footprint into the tribal belt along the Afghan frontier, terrain that is rugged, lightly governed, and supposedly hostile to outsiders. Shalobar’s role had been to channel young men toward militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, and his elimination in such difficult country suggested that the campaign’s reach was not confined to the urban centres where surveillance is comparatively simple. By the end of the first quarter, three militants were dead across three provinces, and the outfits affected already spanned the Kashmir-focused groups and the wider jihadist landscape.
The Shalobar killing carried a particular significance because of where it occurred and what it implied about the campaign’s reach. The tribal districts along the Afghan frontier had long been imagined, by militants and by analysts alike, as terrain where outside intelligence services struggled to operate. The country is rugged, the social structures are tight and resistant to strangers, and the writ of the central state is thin. A militant who relocated to such country could reasonably believe that he had traded the conveniences of a city for a meaningful gain in security. The death of Shalobar in the Bara area of the Khyber district undercut that belief. It suggested that the campaign’s networks were not confined to the surveillance-friendly streets of Karachi and Lahore but extended into precisely the country that militants had treated as a refuge. For a wanted man weighing whether to flee the cities for the hills, the March killing was an unwelcome data point.
May produced the killing that, more than any other single event of the year, broke the campaign into mainstream international view. On the morning of the sixth, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, the long-standing chief of the Khalistan Commando Force, was shot dead while walking near his residence in the Jauhar Town area of Lahore. Panjwar, who also went by the name Malik Sardar Singh, had been a defining figure of the Khalistan movement during its violent peak in Punjab in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and his outfit had been proscribed by India under anti-terror law in 2018. He had spent years operating from Pakistani soil, organising the supply of arms and the infiltration of operatives. The manner of his death matched the now-familiar grammar with eerie precision. Two assailants, a morning walk, shots to the head, a bodyguard who later died of his injuries, and gunmen who were never identified. Pakistani agencies, including the premier intelligence service, the military’s intelligence wing, and the counter-terrorism department, cordoned off the scene and kept journalists at a distance, and no findings from any investigation were ever made public. The pattern recognition truly accelerated here, because Panjwar’s profile was high enough that wire services and foreign newspapers could not treat his death as a back-page item. His killing is examined at length in the profile of the Khalistan Commando Force chief gunned down in Lahore.
Panjwar’s history gives the May killing a weight that extends well beyond the campaign itself. The Khalistan Commando Force had emerged in 1986 as one of the first organised militant groups of the Punjab insurgency, and across the violent years that followed it was associated with some of the period’s most consequential attacks. Panjwar had risen to lead one of its factions after the group fractured, and he had then spent decades sustaining its activity from across the border, organising the movement of arms and operatives long after the insurgency inside Punjab had been largely suppressed. His death therefore closed a chapter that had remained open for more than thirty years. For an Indian security establishment that had watched the Khalistan networks regenerate abroad even as they were dismantled at home, the killing of a man who personified that regeneration carried a significance that the bare facts of a Lahore morning could not capture. The history of the outfit he led is set out in the complete account of the Khalistan Commando Force.
The Panjwar killing also did something to the public conversation that the earlier deaths had not. It introduced a vocabulary. Once a figure of his stature had been killed in the now-recognisable manner, commentators and headline writers needed a shorthand for the phenomenon, and the phrase that settled into use was the language of unidentified or unknown gunmen. That phrase, repeated after each subsequent killing, became a kind of refrain, and the refrain itself accelerated the pattern recognition. Every time a wanted militant died and the report described unknown gunmen on a motorcycle, the phrase summoned the memory of every previous killing described the same way. Language did some of the work of connecting the dots, and the Panjwar killing in May is when that language locked into place.
Perhaps the most internationally explosive moment of the year occurred not in Pakistan at all. On the eighteenth of June, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, associated with the Khalistan Tiger Force and designated a terrorist by India, was shot dead by two men on the premises of a gurdwara in Surrey, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Nijjar’s death belonged to the same broad phenomenon as the Pakistani killings in the sense that it removed a wanted figure on foreign soil, but it differed in a way that would prove enormously consequential. Pakistan, for all its grievances, lacked the institutional standing to turn its complaints into a global diplomatic crisis. Canada did not. The killing in Surrey set in motion a confrontation between New Delhi and Ottawa that would dominate headlines and reshape how Western governments discussed the entire question of extraterritorial elimination. The profile of the Khalistan Tiger Force figure killed in Canada traces both the man and the diplomatic earthquake his death produced. For the purposes of the 2023 calendar, the Surrey killing matters because it demonstrated that the year’s pattern was not bounded by a single country. The map had widened from Pakistani cities to a Canadian suburb.
The Surrey killing also exposed a fault line in how the campaign would be received in different parts of the world. A killing in Karachi could be discussed, in Western capitals, as a distant matter between South Asian rivals, regrettable but not implicating anyone in the room. A killing on Canadian soil could not be discussed that way, because it raised the question of whether a foreign government had directed lethal action inside a democracy that prized its own sovereignty. The Nijjar case forced governments that had been content to ignore the Pakistani killings to articulate a position, and the positions they articulated were not uniform. That divergence, between how the West treated killings in Pakistan and how it treated a killing in Canada, would become one of the defining tensions of the campaign’s later years, and the year of eliminations is where the tension first became visible.
The Nijjar killing also complicates any tidy account of the year. The Pakistani killings shared a setting, a host state with a documented history of sheltering anti-India militants and a security apparatus that responded to the deaths with conspicuous quiet. Canada is a different kind of host. It is a liberal democracy with an independent press, an independent judiciary, and a political culture in which a killing of this kind becomes a sustained public controversy rather than a matter to be cordoned off and forgotten. The same act produced radically different consequences depending on the soil it occurred on. That contrast is part of what makes the Surrey killing such an instructive entry in the year’s record. It shows that the campaign’s planners, if they were indeed responsible across both theatres, were willing to accept very different risk profiles, and it shows that the international cost of an operation depends less on the operation itself than on where it is carried out.
August returned the action to Pakistan and to a quieter register. Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain, associated with the Jamaat-ud-Dawa apparatus that functions as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, was shot dead in the Nawabshah area of Sindh province. Arain’s role had centred on a madrassa network, the seminary infrastructure through which a militant outfit recruits, indoctrinates, and sustains itself. His death drew less coverage than Panjwar’s, partly because Nawabshah is not a marquee city and partly because Arain himself was not a household name. That comparative obscurity is itself analytically useful. A campaign that targets only celebrities is making a political point. A campaign that also reaches into provincial towns to remove mid-tier organisers is doing structural work, attacking not just the symbols of an outfit but the machinery that keeps it functioning.
The Arain killing illustrates a feature of the year that the high-profile cases can obscure. The seminary infrastructure that a figure like Arain managed is the slow-burning engine of a militant outfit. It is where ideology is transmitted, where young men are sorted and assessed, where the next cohort of operatives is identified before it is ever armed. Damage to a seminary network does not register immediately in the way that the death of a famous commander does, because its effects unfold over years rather than days. But it is precisely the kind of damage that degrades an outfit’s capacity to reproduce itself. By reaching into Sindh to remove a madrassa-network organiser, the campaign signalled in August that it was thinking on the timescale of an outfit’s regeneration, not merely the timescale of its current operations.
September delivered two more deaths, and both of them reinforced the campaign’s signature rather than varying it. Ziaur Rahman, an operative of Lashkar-e-Taiba, was shot dead in Karachi while on his daily evening walk, killed by gunmen who arrived and departed on a motorcycle, firing multiple rounds into him before vanishing. The choreography was almost identical to Panjwar’s killing four months earlier, the only differences being the city, the time of day, and the identity of the man on the ground. That same month, Riyaz Ahmad, who used the alias Abu Qasim and commanded a Lashkar-e-Taiba unit, was shot in the head at point-blank range inside the Al-Qudus mosque in Rawalakot, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. He had travelled from Kotli to offer prayers when he was killed. Abu Qasim was identified as one of the principal conspirators behind the Dhangri attack of the first of January 2023, an assault on a village in the Rajouri district in which roughly seven civilians died. His elimination created a grim symmetry, a man who had helped plan a New Year’s Day massacre being killed before the year was out, and his profile is set out in the account of the Lashkar commander shot inside a mosque in Rawalakot. The mosque setting also confirmed something about the campaign’s targeting logic. Prayer times concentrate a target in a predictable place at a predictable hour, and a campaign willing to strike inside a place of worship has decided that no location confers immunity.
The Dhangri connection in the Abu Qasim case deserves to be stated plainly, because it illustrates the campaign’s internal logic with unusual clarity. The Dhangri attack had opened the year, on the first of January, with the killing of civilians in a village of the Rajouri district, followed by an explosive device that claimed further lives the next day. A man identified as one of its principal planners was dead, inside a mosque, before the year that his attack had opened was finished. Whether or not that symmetry was intended, it communicated a message about timeframes. The message was that the distance between planning an atrocity and answering for it had collapsed, that a man could no longer assume the years of safety that the slow machinery of international justice had once effectively guaranteed. A campaign that closes the loop between an attack and a death inside a single calendar year has changed the arithmetic of deterrence, and the September killings were where that change became legible.
The near-identical choreography of the Ziaur Rahman killing also rewards attention, because repetition of method is not an accident in covert work. An intelligence service that has found an approach that succeeds, the motorcycle, the predictable routine, the close-quarters fire, the clean departure, faces a genuine choice about whether to vary it. Variation reduces the chance that investigators can build a profile of the operators. Repetition reduces the chance that an operation fails, because the operators are executing a procedure they have already proven. The campaign’s evident preference for repetition over variation in 2023 suggests a judgement that reliability mattered more than concealment of method, which in turn suggests a campaign confident that its operators would not be caught regardless of how recognisable their technique became. That confidence is itself a fact about the year, and the September killings, by reproducing the May template so faithfully, put it on display.
November was the month that removed any remaining room for doubt. In a span of roughly eight days, three militants connected to the Kashmir theatre died in three separate operations. On the fifth, Khwaja Shahid, who used the name Mian Mujahid and was associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, was abducted and later found beheaded near the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Shahid had been identified as one of the masterminds of the 2018 assault on the Indian Army camp at Sunjuwan, an attack in which seven people were killed. On the ninth, Akram Khan, who used the alias Akram Ghazi and belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, was shot dead in the Bajaur tribal district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. On the thirteenth, Raheem Ullah Tariq, a Jaish-e-Mohammed operative described as a close associate of the outfit’s founder, was shot dead by unidentified men in Karachi. Three killings in eight days, in three different locations, affecting two organisations, with three different methods. One was a beheading near the frontier, one was a shooting in the tribal belt, and one was a shooting in the southern megacity. The compression of that timeline is the single most striking fact in the year’s record, and the profile of the Jaish operative killed in Karachi treats the November cluster as a window into operational capacity. Whether the three deaths were a deliberately coordinated burst or a coincidental convergence of independently planned operations is a question worth holding for the analysis that follows, but the bare fact of three eliminations inside a fortnight is what made the campaign feel, by late November, less like a series of incidents and more like a process running on a schedule.
The November cluster also exposed something about the campaign’s relationship to risk. Running three operations inside eight days, in three widely separated locations, is not a low-risk undertaking. Each operation requires its own assets, its own surveillance, its own plan of approach and extraction, and concentrating them in a narrow window increases the chance that one failure will compromise the others. A campaign that chooses to accept that concentrated risk is signalling either confidence or urgency, and possibly both. The confidence reading holds that the campaign had by November accumulated enough successful operations to trust its methods under pressure. The urgency reading holds that the targets were beginning to adapt, that windows of opportunity were closing, and that operations had to be executed quickly before the targets changed their routines. Either way, the cluster marks a point at which the campaign was willing to trade caution for tempo, and that willingness is itself a measure of how far the year had travelled from the patient quiet of the opening phase.
The variation of method within the November cluster carries its own meaning. The campaign’s signature, established through the year, had been the close-quarters shooting. Yet the cluster included a beheading near the Line of Control, a method utterly unlike the urban shootings. Two readings are possible. One is that the beheading was carried out by a different actor entirely, and that the campaign account should not absorb every militant death in 2023 indiscriminately. The other is that the campaign had access to more than one capability, an urban shooting capability in the cities and a different capability operating near the frontier, and that it used whichever fit the location. The honest position is that the beheading is the most uncertain of the November deaths, the one a careful analyst should flag rather than fold smoothly into the pattern. Its inclusion in the year’s tally is reasonable, given the victim’s profile as an attack planner wanted by India, but its method is a genuine outlier, and a rigorous account names that rather than smoothing it over.
December closed the year with two deaths that arrived almost back to back and that broadened the campaign’s apparent toolkit. On the twenty-first, Haji Ulmar Gul, described as a significant financier for Lashkar-e-Taiba, was shot dead in Tank along with two associates. Gul’s role had been financial, the extraction of money to fund operations, and his removal targeted the outfit’s economic plumbing rather than its operational command. On the twenty-second, Abdullah Shaheen, identified as a senior trainer for Lashkar-e-Taiba, died in what was reported as a road accident. The trainer’s death sat in a different category from the shootings, because a road accident is exactly the kind of event that resists attribution. It could have been precisely what it appeared to be. It could also have been a killing engineered to look like misfortune. The uncertainty is the point. By December the campaign had so thoroughly conditioned observers to expect the elimination of wanted figures that even an ambiguous death was instinctively folded into the pattern, which tells us as much about the year’s psychological effect as about the death itself.
The two December deaths, taken together, also rounded out the year’s portrait of what the campaign considered a target. Across the twelve months the dead had included commanders, infiltration coordinators, a recruiter, an attack planner, and now, at the year’s end, a financier and a trainer. That full span is the portrait of an organisation seen as a system rather than a roster of villains. A militant outfit needs money to operate and instructors to reproduce itself, and a campaign that reaches the financier and the trainer as readily as it reaches the commander has declared that every load-bearing element of the system is in scope. The financier funds the next operation. The trainer produces the next generation of operatives. Removing them does not generate the headlines that the death of a famous commander generates, but it does more durable structural damage, and the fact that the year ended on exactly those two categories of target is a fitting summary of what the campaign had revealed itself to be.
The Shaheen case also deserves a final, careful word, because it sits at the boundary of what the campaign account can responsibly claim. A road accident is, statistically, an ordinary event in any country, and Pakistan’s roads are genuinely dangerous. To assert with confidence that Shaheen was killed by the campaign would be to overreach. To exclude the possibility entirely would be to ignore the timing, the victim’s profile, and the campaign’s demonstrated interest in exactly his category of target. The defensible position is the uncomfortable one, that the death is plausibly but not certainly part of the pattern, and that its ambiguity is not a flaw in the analysis but a feature of how a covert campaign operates. A campaign that can make some of its work look like accidents has acquired a deniability that pure shootings cannot provide, and whether or not Shaheen’s death was such a case, the mere fact that it could be is part of the year’s lesson.
Set out as a calendar, the year reads as a steady accumulation rather than a single spasm. February produced two deaths, March one, May one, June one, August one, September two, November three, and December two. The cadence is not perfectly even, and it is heavier in the autumn than in the spring, but at no point after February did three consecutive months pass without a killing. A reader who plots the months and counts the names will notice something that no single headline could convey. The campaign did not peak and subside. It sustained. Sustaining is harder than spiking, and it is the quality that distinguishes an operation with institutional backing from a one-off act of revenge. The 2023 calendar, more than any speech or document, is the artifact that made the argument.
The power of the calendar as evidence lies precisely in its boringness. A single spectacular killing invites a single spectacular explanation, and spectacular explanations are easy to dispute. A list of dates and places, by contrast, is not spectacular at all. It is dull, mechanical, and almost impossible to argue with, because each entry on it is independently documented and the pattern emerges only when the entries are read together. An adversary can contest the interpretation of one dramatic death. An adversary cannot easily contest a calendar, because to contest a calendar is to contest arithmetic. This is why the year’s record functioned as it did. It did not persuade through drama. It persuaded through accumulation, through the simple weight of one verified entry added to another until the column was too long to dismiss. The men who built the campaign may not have set out to produce a calendar, but a calendar is what the year produced, and the calendar is what the argument finally rested on. A reader who wants to see the same logic extended across the whole arc of the campaign can consult the full chronological record of targeted killings, where the dull power of a dated list does the same work on a larger canvas.
Why It Happened
A calendar establishes that something occurred. It does not explain why it occurred in that particular year, at that particular tempo. To understand the acceleration of 2023, three causal threads need to be separated and then woven back together, because the honest answer is that no single thread explains the year on its own.
The first thread is capability maturation. Intelligence assets are not summoned into existence on demand. A network capable of locating a wanted man in a Pakistani city, confirming his identity, tracking his routine, positioning a shooter, and extracting that shooter cleanly is built slowly, over years, through patient recruitment and cultivation. The opening phase of 2021 and 2022 should be read partly as the period in which such networks were proven in the field. Once an asset network exists and has demonstrated that it works, it does not sit idle. It generates opportunities. Every confirmed location of a target, every mapped routine, every recruited local contact becomes a potential operation. The 2023 acceleration is consistent with a network that crossed a maturity threshold, at which point the constraint on the campaign was no longer capability but the supply of targets and the appetite for risk. On this reading the year accelerated because the machinery was finally ready to run at speed.
Maturation of a network is also a maturation of tradecraft, and the distinction matters. Early operations in any covert campaign tend to be expensive in a particular sense. They consume assets, because each operation risks exposing the people and relationships used to carry it out, and they generate lessons that have not yet been absorbed. As a campaign continues, the cost per operation tends to fall. Routes of approach that worked once are used again. Local contacts who proved reliable are retained. Methods of surveillance and extraction that succeeded are standardised. The signature consistency of the year’s killings, the recurring use of motorcycles, of predictable routines, of close-quarters fire, is itself evidence of this falling cost. A campaign that has found a method that works will repeat it, and repetition lowers the expense of each new strike. By the surge year the campaign appears to have reached the point where an operation was no longer a bespoke, costly undertaking but something closer to a repeatable procedure, and that shift alone would tend to raise the tempo even without any change in strategic intent.
The second thread is strategic intent. Capability maturing is a necessary condition for acceleration, but it is not a sufficient one. A mature network can still be held back. Someone, somewhere in a decision-making structure, has to decide that the campaign should run rather than pause. The political environment after the 2019 constitutional change had hardened the posture of the Indian state and reduced the tolerance for restraint that had characterised earlier decades. There is also a logic of momentum at work. A campaign that has begun and has not been punished for beginning faces a recurring choice about whether to continue, and the absence of consequences makes continuation the easier decision each time it is faced. On this reading the year accelerated because a decision-making structure chose acceleration, having concluded that the strategic returns justified the operational exposure.
Strategic intent should not be imagined as a single dramatic decision taken in a single room. It is better understood as a posture, a settled disposition that makes some choices feel natural and others feel unthinkable. The posture of the Indian state in the years after the 2019 constitutional reorganisation had hardened in ways that made an aggressive campaign feel consistent with the broader direction of policy rather than a departure from it. In that environment the relevant decision is rarely a positive instruction to escalate. It is more often the repeated absence of an instruction to pause. A campaign embedded in a hardened posture continues by default, and the year of eliminations is best read as a campaign continuing by default within a posture that had stopped supplying reasons to stop. That is a quieter and less cinematic account than a single order to accelerate, but it fits the evidence of an uneven, opportunistic cadence better than any image of a master schedule being executed month by month.
The third thread is the target environment itself. The men killed during the year were, for the most part, individuals who had lived in Pakistan for years or decades under a presumption of safety. That presumption shaped their behaviour. They kept residences that were known. They walked at predictable times. They prayed at predictable mosques. They had not yet fully internalised the danger, because the danger was still new. A campaign in its surge year benefits from targets who have not yet adapted. The same man who walks openly in the spring might, two years later, have changed his residence, varied his routine, and surrounded himself with security. On this reading the year was productive partly because the targets were still soft, still living the lives they had built during the long era when Pakistani soil genuinely was a sanctuary.
Softness of the target environment was, in a sense, a wasting resource, and the campaign appears to have understood this. Every successful killing taught the survivors a lesson, and every lesson made the next killing harder. The men who walked openly in February were watched by men who would not walk openly by December. A campaign aware that its targets are adapting has an incentive to move quickly while they remain exposed, to convert the soft environment into results before it hardens. This dynamic helps explain why the year’s tempo, far from settling into a steady rhythm, grew heavier as the months passed. The autumn was busier than the spring not necessarily because capability had grown over the year, though it may have, but because the campaign was racing a closing window. The targets were learning, and the campaign was trying to outrun the lesson.
The softness of the environment was not only a matter of physical routine. It was also a matter of belief. The men who had lived for years or decades on Pakistani soil had built more than predictable habits. They had built a settled conviction that the border protected them, and conviction of that kind is slow to dissolve even when the facts begin to contradict it. A man does not abandon a belief that has organised his life simply because a stranger was shot in another city. He tends, at first, to treat the early killings as exceptions, as the misfortune of others who must have been careless in ways he is not. That psychological lag worked in the campaign’s favour through much of the year. The early victims were killed while the belief in sanctuary was still largely intact, which meant they had taken few precautions. Only as the calendar lengthened did the belief itself begin to crack, and the cracking of a shared belief is slower than the changing of an individual routine. The campaign was therefore exploiting two wasting resources at once, the soft habits of its targets and the soft confidence of an entire population of wanted men, and both were being spent down as the year progressed.
What this article must adjudicate is whether the acceleration was, at its core, deliberate strategic intensification or the more or less mechanical result of matured assets producing opportunities at the same time. The deliberate-intensification reading points to the geographic and organisational spread of the year as evidence of central direction. It is hard to imagine a campaign that, by accident, distributes its operations so evenly across the Kashmir-focused groups, the Khalistan groups, and the Jaish network, and across the garrison north, the commercial south, the tribal belt, and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. That breadth looks designed. The opportunistic reading points instead to the uneven cadence, the heavier autumn, and the November cluster, arguing that operations occurred when intelligence happened to ripen rather than when a calendar dictated.
The most defensible adjudication is that the dichotomy is partly false. Strategic intent and opportunistic execution are not competitors. They are the two halves of how a covert campaign actually runs. A central authority sets an objective, the systematic degradation of a category of targets, and authorises operations within that objective. Field execution then proceeds as intelligence allows, which produces an uneven cadence even within a deliberate campaign. The November cluster illustrates the synthesis. Three operations compressed into eight days is too tight to be pure coincidence and too operationally complex, given three cities and three methods, to have been improvised in the moment. The likeliest explanation is that three operations matured at roughly the same time and were each authorised and executed as their windows opened, producing a cluster that was neither centrally choreographed to the day nor genuinely random. The campaign was directed in its aims and opportunistic in its timing. That combination, rather than either pure reading, is what produced the year. The same logic underlies the modus operandi that the unknown-gunmen pattern made recognisable, where consistency of method coexists with variability of timing.
One further causal point deserves emphasis. Acceleration in 2023 was self-reinforcing. Each killing that passed without serious consequence lowered the perceived cost of the next. Each operation that concluded without an arrest or an exposure validated the methods and the assets for the operation after it. A campaign in this condition does not need a fresh decision before each strike. It needs only the absence of a decision to stop. By the second half of 2023 the campaign had entered exactly that state, where continuation was the default and halting would have required a positive choice that nobody appeared inclined to make. The year accelerated, in the end, because nothing slowed it.
It is worth resisting one tempting but mistaken way of reading the three threads, which is to treat them as rival explanations competing for the same causal space. They are better understood as layers that had to align. Capability without intent produces a mature network sitting idle. Intent without capability produces a desire to act with no means of acting. Either of those, paired with a target environment that had already hardened, would have produced a far thinner year. What made 2023 the year it became was the simultaneous presence of all three conditions. The network had matured. The posture had hardened into something that supplied no reasons to pause. And the targets were still living the open lives of an era that had not yet ended. Remove any one of those layers and the calendar of the year looks different. The acceleration was not caused by a single factor that happened to peak in 2023. It was caused by the alignment of three factors that happened to peak together, and alignment, not any one ingredient, is the honest answer to why the surge came when it did.
There is a temporal point folded into that alignment that is easy to miss. The three conditions were not independent of one another. A hardened posture encourages investment in capability, so intent partly produced the network. A maturing network creates the opportunities that make a hardened posture feel vindicated, so capability partly reinforced the intent. And the soft target environment was itself a wasting asset that the other two conditions were racing to exploit before it disappeared. The threads, in other words, were not three separate weather systems that coincidentally arrived over the same city in the same year. They were a single interlocking process that reached a particular stage of development in 2023. Describing them separately is an analytical convenience. Understanding the year requires putting them back together and seeing that the surge was the natural output of a process that had been building, in all three of its dimensions at once, since well before the first killing.
The Immediate Consequences
The most telling immediate consequence of the 2023 killings was the response of the Pakistani state, and that response is most notable for what it did not contain. There was no sustained public investigation that produced named suspects and charges. There was no detailed official narrative explaining the deaths. In the Panjwar case, the security agencies cordoned the scene and kept the press away, and the results of whatever inquiry followed were never released. This pattern repeated across the year. Pakistani law enforcement would register cases, gesture at investigations, and then allow the matter to fade. For a state that has historically been quick to allege Indian interference, the relative quiet of 2023 was striking.
That quiet admits two interpretations, and both are uncomfortable for Islamabad. The first is incapacity. If the state genuinely could not identify the gunmen, could not trace the networks behind them, and could not prevent the next operation, then the killings exposed a security apparatus unable to protect even high-value residents in its own garrison city. The second is reluctance. If the state could identify the gunmen but chose not to publicise its findings, then it was making a calculation, perhaps that loud accusations without courtroom-grade proof would invite ridicule, perhaps that drawing attention to the campaign would highlight its own failure, perhaps that some of the men being killed were figures the state itself found inconvenient to defend. Whichever interpretation is correct, the consequence for the campaign was favourable. A loud, competent, transparent investigative response would have raised the cost of operations. A quiet, opaque response lowered it. Pakistan’s reaction in 2023, by being muted, effectively subsidised the year’s acceleration.
The dilemma facing the Pakistani security establishment was genuinely acute, and it is worth stating sympathetically even by an analysis unsympathetic to the militants. To investigate the killings vigorously and publicly would have meant drawing sustained attention to the presence, on Pakistani soil, of exactly the designated terrorists whose existence Islamabad had spent years denying or minimising. A loud investigation into the death of a man wanted by India for terrorism is also, unavoidably, a public confirmation that the man had been living in Pakistan under protection. The state was therefore trapped between two unattractive options. Silence made it look incapable of protecting residents in its own cities. Loud investigation made it look like the host of a militant infrastructure it had always claimed not to host. Choosing silence was choosing the less damaging of two admissions, but it remained an admission, and the campaign’s planners could rely on that trap closing the same way each time a new killing occurred.
There is a further layer to the Pakistani dilemma that the year exposed. Some of the men killed were figures whose relationship with the Pakistani state was itself complicated. An outfit that has served as an instrument of state policy can also become an embarrassment, a liability in front of international financial-monitoring bodies, or a faction with its own agenda. It is at least conceivable that the state’s quiet in some cases reflected not only incapacity or reluctance but a genuine ambivalence about the victim. This is not to suggest that Pakistan welcomed the killings. It is to note that the muted response across a dozen deaths may not have had a single uniform cause, and that the campaign benefited from a host state whose interests in protecting any given target were neither simple nor consistent. A campaign operating against such a backdrop enjoys a structural advantage, because the ground beneath its targets is less solid than those targets might assume.
A second immediate consequence concerned the militant organisations themselves. The year did not target one outfit. It reached Hizbul Mujahideen through Peer, Al-Badr through Raza, the Islamic State Khorasan strand through Shalobar, the Khalistan Commando Force through Panjwar, the Khalistan Tiger Force through Nijjar, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar apparatus through Arain, Lashkar-e-Taiba directly through Ziaur Rahman, Abu Qasim, Akram Khan, Gul, and Shaheen, and Jaish-e-Mohammed through Tariq. That distribution had a psychological effect across the entire militant landscape. No outfit could look at the year’s record and conclude that it was someone else’s problem. A Lashkar commander could not comfort himself that only Hizbul was being hit. A Khalistan organiser could not assume that only the Kashmir groups were exposed. The breadth of the targeting universalised the fear, and universalised fear changes behaviour. Detailed organisational consequences for one outfit are traced in the account of how the Hizbul Mujahideen leadership was decimated, but the broader point is that 2023 taught every militant structure in Pakistan that it was inside the target set.
The universalisation of fear had a practical effect on the militant ecosystem that went beyond individual anxiety. Outfits that believe themselves under existential threat begin to spend resources on protection rather than projection. Money that might have funded operations is diverted to security. Time that leaders might have spent planning is spent instead on managing their own movements. Trust within an organisation, always fragile in a clandestine structure, corrodes further when every member must consider that a colleague might be the source of the intelligence that locates him. A campaign that universalises fear is therefore not only frightening its targets. It is degrading the internal functioning of the organisations those targets belong to, turning each outfit’s energy inward, away from the attacks it exists to carry out. That inward turn is one of the least visible but most consequential effects of the year, and it is the kind of damage that does not register as a death on any calendar.
The geographic consequence was equally significant. The deaths of the year occurred in Rawalpindi, Karachi, the Khyber district, Lahore, Surrey, Nawabshah, Rawalakot, Bajaur, and Tank. That list spans the garrison heartland of Punjab, the commercial sprawl of Sindh, the tribal frontier with Afghanistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and a suburb on the Pacific coast of Canada. The practical consequence for a wanted man was the collapse of the idea of a safe location. Before 2023 a militant might reasonably have believed that some places were riskier than others, that a deep-Punjab cantonment or a remote tribal valley offered more protection than an exposed urban neighbourhood. The year dismantled that belief. If Rawalpindi was not safe, no city was. If the Khyber tribal belt was not safe, no countryside was. The campaign’s geographic indiscriminacy in 2023 removed the option of relocation as a defence, because there was nowhere on the map that the year’s record had not already touched.
A subtler consequence concerned the behaviour of the targets who survived. The men killed in 2023 were, in many cases, living openly. The men who watched them die began, through the year, to live differently. Public appearances grew rarer. Routines became less predictable. Residences changed. Security details expanded. This adaptation is a consequence of 2023 even though it cannot be tallied as a death, because it represents a degradation of the very functionality that made these figures dangerous. An infiltration coordinator who can no longer move freely, communicate openly, or meet recruits without fear is a less effective coordinator. The campaign, in its acceleration year, was not only subtracting individuals. It was imposing a tax of caution on everyone who remained, and that tax compounded over time.
The tax of caution had a second-order effect that is worth drawing out, because it explains why the campaign’s damage extended well beyond its body count. A militant outfit depends on a degree of routine functioning. Recruits must be met, trained, equipped, and moved. Money must be collected and distributed. Plans must be discussed among people who trust one another enough to discuss them. Every one of those activities becomes slower, costlier, and more error-prone once the participants are forced into clandestinity by fear. A meeting that once happened openly now requires counter-surveillance. A message once passed in person now travels through cut-outs that introduce delay and the risk of distortion. A leader once accessible to his subordinates becomes a bottleneck because he can no longer be reached easily. The campaign of 2023, by frightening the survivors into these adaptations, effectively imposed a friction on the entire militant enterprise. Friction does not appear on any list of the dead, but it degrades output just as surely as a killing does, and it degrades it continuously rather than once. A year that taught an entire ecosystem to operate in fear had therefore done damage that would keep accruing long after the year itself had ended.
The international consequence ran chiefly through the Nijjar killing. The Surrey gurdwara was on Canadian soil, and Canada possessed the diplomatic weight to escalate. The confrontation that followed between New Delhi and Ottawa was the moment the campaign’s existence migrated from the Indian and Pakistani press into the chancelleries and front pages of the West. That migration is itself a consequence of 2023, because it ensured that the question of extraterritorial elimination would no longer be a regional curiosity. It would be a matter on which Western governments were forced to take positions, and the pressure that generated would shape everything that followed.
A final immediate consequence concerned the credibility of deterrence itself. For years the conventional understanding had been that a militant who reached Pakistani soil had effectively placed himself beyond the reach of Indian retaliation, and that understanding had functioned as a recruiting argument and a morale anchor for the outfits. A young man considering whether to join, or a mid-tier operative considering whether to stay, could be reassured that the worst consequences fell on those who operated inside India, while those who managed the apparatus from across the border were safe. The year of eliminations corroded that reassurance in a way that no speech or warning could have. The corrosion was evidentiary. It rested not on a threat but on a record, a documented sequence of deaths that anyone could count. Once the reassurance was gone, the entire incentive structure of the militant enterprise shifted. The promised safety of the rear had been one of the things the outfits were implicitly selling, and 2023 made that promise impossible to keep selling honestly. A campaign that degrades the recruiting pitch of its adversary is doing damage that compounds quietly across years, and the year of eliminations inflicted exactly that kind of damage.
The Long-Term Chain
The deepest legacy of 2023 is not any single death. It is the destruction of deniability. For two years it had been possible, without dishonesty, to decline to call the killings a campaign. After 2023 that option closed, and it closed because of arithmetic rather than confession.
Consider the structure of the argument that the year forced into the open. To deny that a campaign existed, a sceptic had to explain the year’s record some other way. The feud explanation, that the deaths were the result of internal militant rivalries, had to account for why feuds would distribute their victims so evenly across rival organisations that had no reason to be killing one another. The criminal explanation, that the deaths were ordinary violent crime, had to account for why ordinary crime would so consistently select designated terrorists on India’s most-wanted lists rather than the general population. The coincidence explanation had to account for a cadence that never let three consecutive months pass without a killing and that compressed three operations into eight days in November. Each explanation could be stretched to cover one or two deaths. None could be stretched to cover the dozen of 2023 without snapping. By the end of the year the simplest account, the one that required the fewest improbable assumptions, was that a single coordinated campaign was at work. Once the simplest account became the campaign account, denial stopped being scepticism and became its own form of faith.
This is what it means to say that 2023 made the shadow war undeniable. Undeniability is not the same as proof. No court convicted anyone. No government conceded anything. What changed was the burden. Before 2023 the burden lay on anyone claiming a campaign existed. After 2023 the burden shifted to anyone claiming one did not. That reversal is the year’s true monument, and it is more durable than any individual operation, because a single killing can be explained away forever while a year-long pattern, once recognised, cannot be un-recognised.
The undeniability of 2023 also reframed the years on either side of it. The opening phase of 2021 and 2022, which had looked like a scatter of unconnected incidents while it was happening, was retroactively reorganised into the campaign’s first chapter. The car bomb and the Mistry killing, once recognised as the prelude to a sustained programme, could no longer be read as isolated. And the years after 2023 were pre-interpreted by it. Every killing that followed would now be slotted, automatically and immediately, into the pattern that the acceleration year had established. The campaign would never again have to earn recognition. It had earned it once, in 2023, and the recognition was permanent. A reader who consults the overview of India’s shadow war against terror is reading a framework that only became statable because a single year supplied the evidence to state it.
The year also changed the vocabulary that analysts and journalists used, and a change in vocabulary is more consequential than it sounds. Before 2023 a writer describing one of these deaths reached for cautious, atomised language, an unexplained shooting, an unsolved killing, the death of a man with a militant past. Each phrase treated the event as self-contained. After 2023 the available vocabulary had expanded to include words that presupposed a pattern, words like campaign, like sequence, like the year of eliminations itself. Once those words were in circulation, they did interpretive work automatically. A journalist who described a later killing as the latest in a campaign was, simply by choosing that phrase, instructing the reader to connect it to everything before it. The year of eliminations supplied not only the evidence for the pattern but the language that made the pattern effortless to invoke. And language, once it settles, is difficult to unsettle. The campaign account became the default not only because the evidence supported it but because the words available for describing these deaths had been reshaped to assume it. That reshaping of vocabulary is one of the quieter and more durable things the year accomplished.
There is a strategic legacy as well. The 2023 record demonstrated that the campaign could absorb attention without slowing. The Panjwar killing generated international coverage. The Nijjar killing generated a diplomatic crisis. Neither produced a pause. The campaign continued through the autumn and into December as if the spotlight were irrelevant. That demonstration mattered, because it answered a question that the campaign’s planners might reasonably have worried about. The question was whether exposure would force restraint. The answer that 2023 supplied was that it would not. A campaign that has proven it can operate under scrutiny has acquired a kind of freedom, and that freedom is one of the year’s lasting bequests to the phase that followed.
The year also clarified the campaign’s character as something other than revenge. Revenge is finite. It identifies the people responsible for a specific wrong, removes them, and concludes. The 2023 targeting universe was too broad and too structural for that model. It included infiltration coordinators, financiers, trainers, recruiters, and movement chiefs across multiple organisations, which is the profile not of a vendetta but of an attempt to degrade an entire ecosystem. By reaching financiers and trainers as well as commanders, the year signalled that the objective was the functioning of the militant enterprise itself, not the punishment of named individuals. That structural ambition is what made the campaign permanent in character. A vendetta ends when its list is exhausted. A campaign against an ecosystem ends only when the ecosystem does, and ecosystems are not easily exhausted.
There is also a lesson in the year about the relationship between secrecy and effect. A covert campaign faces an apparent paradox. Its operations are designed to be unattributable, yet much of its strategic value depends on the target population understanding that the operations are happening and grasping who is behind them. A killing that nobody connects to a campaign deters nobody. The year of eliminations resolved that paradox without resolving the formal question of attribution. By the close of 2023 every wanted militant in Pakistan understood that a campaign was under way and understood, at the level of working assumption, where it originated. The campaign had achieved the deterrent benefit of being known while retaining the legal benefit of being unproven. That is a difficult equilibrium to reach, and the year is when the campaign reached it. The accumulation of killings communicated the message that no confession ever needed to communicate, and the absence of courtroom proof preserved the deniability that no spokesman ever needed to assert. Undeniability and deniability, which sound like opposites, turned out to be compatible, and the year of eliminations is the proof of their compatibility.
The year also altered the strategic calculation of every figure who might in future consider relocating to Pakistani soil. For decades the appeal of Pakistan as a base had rested on a simple promise, that distance from India bought safety from India. A militant who crossed the border was understood to have crossed out of reach. The 2023 record retired that promise. A man weighing whether to base himself in Pakistan after the year of eliminations had to factor in a documented pattern showing that designated militants on Pakistani soil were being located and killed at a steady rate, in every kind of city and countryside, regardless of their seniority or their proximity to the state’s protective institutions. The deterrent reach of the campaign therefore extended beyond the men it killed and beyond the men who survived it. It extended to the men who had not yet made the choice to become targets. A campaign that changes the cost-benefit calculation of future recruitment is doing work that no single killing can measure, and the year of eliminations, by establishing the pattern publicly, did exactly that.
A final structural legacy concerns duration. A campaign understood as revenge has a foreseeable end, the point at which the list of the guilty is exhausted. A campaign understood as the systematic degradation of an ecosystem has no such horizon, because an ecosystem regenerates. New commanders rise to replace the dead. New recruits enter the seminaries. New financiers take over the economic plumbing. A campaign aimed at a regenerating system must therefore be understood as indefinite by its own logic, a permanent feature of the strategic landscape rather than a finite operation with a completion date. The year of eliminations, by revealing the campaign’s structural character through the breadth of its targeting, also revealed its likely permanence. Anyone reading the 2023 record correctly would conclude not only that a campaign existed but that it was unlikely ever to formally conclude, because the thing it was attacking would never formally cease to exist. That recognition, the recognition of indefiniteness, is among the heaviest of the year’s bequests to everything that followed.
Finally, 2023 set the stage for a confrontation with the wider world that the campaign had so far avoided. As long as the killings were a regional matter, discussed mainly in South Asian media and denied or ignored by everyone else, the campaign enjoyed a kind of diplomatic shelter. The volume of the 2023 record, and above all the Nijjar killing on the soil of a Western democracy, ended that shelter. The campaign was about to become a subject of international investigation, and the year that made it undeniable at home was also the year that made it visible abroad.
The Next Link
The chain does not pause at the end of 2023. It tightens.
The most important thing the acceleration year did, beyond removing a dozen individuals, was to manufacture a story large enough for the international press to pursue. A regional pattern of killings, however striking, can be ignored by newsrooms in London and Washington. A year-long record of more than a dozen deaths, spanning multiple countries and including a killing inside a Canadian gurdwara, cannot. By making the campaign undeniable, 2023 also made it newsworthy on a global scale, and global newsworthiness invites global journalism.
That is precisely what followed. In the spring of the year after the acceleration, a major Western newspaper published an investigation that gathered the scattered killings into a single explicit narrative and attributed the campaign, on the basis of its own sourcing, to Indian intelligence. The investigation did not create the campaign, and it did not create the evidence. The evidence was the 2023 record itself, the calendar of deaths that this account has traced. What the investigation did was carry that record out of South Asian newspapers and into the global public sphere, transforming an open secret into a documented allegation. The fallout from that reporting, the diplomatic strain it produced, and the striking fact that exposure appeared to accelerate rather than restrain the campaign are the subject of the next link in the chain, the fallout from the Guardian investigation of 2024.
There is an irony in that sequence that deserves to be named directly, because it shapes everything the chain does next. The conventional expectation is that exposure restrains. A campaign dragged into the light, the reasoning goes, must either stop or moderate, because the political cost of continuing under scrutiny becomes prohibitive. The year of eliminations and the investigation that followed it falsified that expectation. The campaign did not stop when its pattern became undeniable at the end of 2023, and it did not stop when an international newspaper named it the following year. It continued. That continuation is the most important single fact about the link that comes next, because it tells the reader what kind of campaign this had become. A campaign that continues after exposure is a campaign that has decided exposure is a survivable cost rather than a fatal one. The year of eliminations produced the evidence that made exposure inevitable, and the campaign’s response to that exposure, which was to carry on, is what the next link in the chain has to explain.
The 2023 acceleration and the investigation that followed it form a single cause-and-effect sequence. The year supplied the pattern. The investigation named it. And the campaign, having been named, did not flinch. That is the shape of the chain as it runs forward, and it is why the year of eliminations occupies the link it does, the hinge between a campaign that operated in shadow and a campaign that operated in light and continued anyway.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many terrorists were killed in Pakistan in 2023?
The precise figure depends on the inclusion criteria, which is itself an important point. A conservative count, restricted to designated militants whose deaths most clearly fit the campaign’s signature, runs to roughly seven or eight names. A broader count, which adds figures whose deaths were ambiguous or less heavily reported, reaches into the low double digits. Documented cases through the year include Bashir Ahmad Peer in Rawalpindi in February, Syed Khalid Raza in Karachi in February, Syed Noor Shalobar in the Khyber district in March, Paramjit Singh Panjwar in Lahore in May, Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain in Nawabshah in August, Ziaur Rahman and Riyaz Ahmad in September, the November cluster of Khwaja Shahid, Akram Khan, and Raheem Ullah Tariq, and the December deaths of Haji Ulmar Gul and Abdullah Shaheen. The Hardeep Singh Nijjar killing occurred in Canada rather than Pakistan but belonged to the same year’s pattern. The honest answer is that the count is a range rather than a fixed number, and the existence of that range is part of how a covert campaign protects itself.
Why is 2023 called the year the shadow war became undeniable?
Because the volume and spread of that year’s killings made every alternative explanation collapse. A handful of deaths can be attributed to feuds, crime, or coincidence. A dozen deaths, distributed evenly across rival organisations, spread across the length of Pakistan and into Canada, sustained at a steady cadence for twelve months, cannot be explained that way without a chain of improbable assumptions. By the end of the year the campaign account had become the simplest account, and from that point denial required more faith than acceptance.
Which organisations lost members in 2023?
The year’s targeting reached a wide range of outfits. Hizbul Mujahideen lost Bashir Ahmad Peer. Al-Badr lost Syed Khalid Raza. The Islamic State Khorasan strand lost Syed Noor Shalobar. The Khalistan Commando Force lost Paramjit Singh Panjwar. The Khalistan Tiger Force lost Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar apparatus lost Mullah Sardar Hussain Arain. Lashkar-e-Taiba directly lost Ziaur Rahman, Riyaz Ahmad, Akram Khan, Haji Ulmar Gul, and Abdullah Shaheen. Jaish-e-Mohammed lost Raheem Ullah Tariq. No major militant structure operating from Pakistani soil emerged from the year untouched.
In which cities did the 2023 killings occur?
Those deaths spanned Rawalpindi, Karachi, the Bara area of the Khyber district, Lahore, Nawabshah in Sindh, Rawalakot in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the Bajaur tribal district, and Tank. The Nijjar killing occurred in Surrey, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. That geographic range, from the army’s garrison city to the Afghan frontier to a Pacific suburb, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that a single coordinated campaign rather than a set of local disputes was at work.
Was the 2023 acceleration planned or opportunistic?
The most defensible answer is that the question presents a false choice. The campaign appears to have been directed in its aims, a central objective of degrading the militant ecosystem, and opportunistic in its timing, with individual operations executed as intelligence ripened rather than on a fixed schedule. The even spread of targets across organisations and provinces points to central direction. The uneven monthly cadence and the November cluster point to opportunistic execution. Both were true at once, which is simply how a covert campaign functions in practice.
What was the November 2023 cluster?
It was the compression of three eliminations into roughly eight days. Khwaja Shahid was found beheaded near the Line of Control on the fifth of November. Akram Khan was shot dead in the Bajaur tribal district on the ninth. Raheem Ullah Tariq was shot dead in Karachi on the thirteenth. Three operations, in three locations, affecting two organisations, with three different methods, inside a fortnight. The cluster was too tight to be coincidence and too operationally complex to have been improvised, and it is widely read as evidence of the campaign’s capacity to run multiple parallel operations.
How did Pakistan respond to the 2023 killings?
The response was notable for its restraint and opacity. Cases were registered and investigations were gestured at, but no transparent inquiry produced named suspects, and findings were generally not made public. In the Panjwar case, security agencies cordoned the scene and kept journalists away. This muted reaction admits two readings, genuine incapacity to identify the perpetrators or a deliberate choice not to publicise findings, and both are uncomfortable for the Pakistani state. Either way, the quiet lowered the cost of the campaign’s operations.
Did the 2023 pattern force international attention?
It did, chiefly through the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil in June. Pakistan lacked the diplomatic standing to convert its grievances into a global crisis, but Canada did not, and the Surrey killing produced a confrontation between New Delhi and Ottawa that carried the entire question of extraterritorial elimination into Western headlines. The year’s volume also made the campaign a viable subject for major international journalism, which followed soon afterward.
Who was the most significant figure killed in 2023?
That depends on the measure. By operational role, Bashir Ahmad Peer, the Hizbul launching chief responsible for organising infiltration into Jammu and Kashmir, was among the most consequential, because removing an infiltration coordinator damages the supply line itself. By international impact, the Nijjar killing was the most significant, because it triggered a diplomatic crisis. By symbolic weight, the killing of Paramjit Singh Panjwar, a defining figure of the Khalistan movement’s violent peak, carried the most historical resonance.
How does 2023 fit into the longer story from IC-814 to Pahalgam?
It is the hinge. The longer chain runs from the 1999 hijacking of flight IC-814, through the rise of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai assault, the surgical strikes, the Balakot airstrike, the 2019 constitutional change, and the launch of the covert campaign in 2021 and 2022. The acceleration year is the point at which that covert campaign stopped being a quiet experiment and became an undeniable, sustained programme. Everything after it, including the events that led to Operation Sindoor, unfolds against the recognition that 2023 made unavoidable.
Were all the 2023 deaths definitely part of one campaign?
No, and a careful account should say so. Some deaths fit the campaign’s signature with little ambiguity, the close-quarters shootings by assailants who vanished without claiming responsibility. Others are less certain. The death of Abdullah Shaheen, reported as a road accident, is exactly the kind of event that resists confident attribution. It could have been ordinary misfortune or an engineered killing. The responsible position is that the core of the year’s record is very strongly consistent with a single campaign, while a minority of cases remain genuinely uncertain.
What was the campaign’s signature method in 2023?
The recurring grammar involved a target with a known routine, often a walk at a predictable hour or attendance at a predictable mosque, approached at close range, frequently by assailants on a motorcycle, shot, and then left while the gunmen disappeared without being identified and without any organisation claiming the act. The Ziaur Rahman killing in Karachi and the Panjwar killing in Lahore are near-textbook examples. The year also showed variation, including a beheading near the Line of Control and an ambiguous road accident, which suggests a campaign with more than one method available to it.
Why were so many of the targets living openly?
Because the danger was still new. Most of the men killed in 2023 had spent years or decades on Pakistani soil under a genuine presumption of safety, and that presumption had shaped lives built around fixed residences and predictable routines. A campaign in its acceleration year benefits from targets who have not yet adapted. The killings of the year were themselves the lesson that taught the survivors to change their behaviour.
Did the 2023 killings target only senior commanders?
No. The year reached commanders such as Peer and Panjwar, but it also removed figures lower in the hierarchy, including a financier in Haji Ulmar Gul, a trainer in Abdullah Shaheen, and organisers connected to recruitment and seminary networks. That breadth is analytically important. A campaign aimed only at famous leaders is making a political statement. A campaign that also removes financiers and trainers is doing structural work against the machinery that keeps a militant outfit functioning.
Did exposure slow the campaign down in 2023?
It did not. The Panjwar killing drew international coverage and the Nijjar killing produced a diplomatic crisis, yet the campaign continued through the autumn and closed the year with the December deaths. That demonstration, that the programme could operate under scrutiny without pausing, was one of the year’s most consequential outcomes, because it indicated that publicity alone would not be enough to impose restraint.
What is the lasting legacy of the 2023 year of eliminations?
Its lasting legacy is the reversal of the burden of proof. Before that year, anyone claiming a coordinated campaign existed had to make the case. After it, anyone claiming no campaign existed had to explain away a year-long pattern, and that explanation could no longer be made without strain. The acceleration year did not produce a confession or a conviction, but it produced something almost as durable, a public understanding that could not afterward be reversed, and it set the stage for the international investigation that would carry the story to the wider world.
How did 2023 compare with the opening phase of the campaign?
The contrast is mainly one of tempo and visibility rather than method. The opening phase, spread across 2021 and 2022, consisted of a small number of widely separated events, including a car bomb in Lahore and the shooting of an IC-814 hijacker in Karachi. Those events were few enough and far enough apart that an honest observer could decline to call them a campaign. The acceleration year compressed roughly a dozen killings into twelve months and distributed them across the length of Pakistan and into Canada. The method, the close-quarters shooting by assailants who vanished, was largely continuous between the two phases. What changed was the volume, and the volume is what converted a deniable scatter of incidents into an undeniable pattern.
Why would a campaign target financiers and trainers rather than only commanders?
Because a militant outfit is a system, not merely a roster of leaders. A commander directs operations, but a financier supplies the money those operations require and a trainer produces the operatives who carry them out. A campaign that removes only commanders inflicts visible but recoverable damage, since a new commander can be appointed from within. A campaign that also reaches financiers and trainers attacks the outfit’s capacity to fund itself and to reproduce itself, which is slower to repair. The presence of a financier and a trainer among the year’s final victims indicated that the campaign was thinking about the militant enterprise structurally, aiming at the machinery that keeps an outfit alive rather than only at its public faces.
Does the Nijjar killing belong in the same campaign as the Pakistani killings?
It belongs to the same broad phenomenon, the removal of designated militants on foreign soil, but it sits in a distinct category because of where it occurred. The Pakistani killings shared a host state with a documented history of sheltering anti-India militants and a security apparatus that responded with conspicuous quiet. Canada is a liberal democracy with an independent press and judiciary, and a killing there became a sustained public controversy rather than a matter to be cordoned off. The Surrey killing is therefore best understood as part of the same year’s pattern in its target selection and timing, while differing sharply in its consequences. Its inclusion in the 2023 record is reasonable, and its difference from the Pakistani cases is part of what makes it analytically important.
What does the uneven monthly cadence of 2023 reveal about the campaign?
It reveals that the campaign was directed in its aims but opportunistic in its timing. A campaign executing a fixed schedule would produce an even cadence. A campaign that was pure coincidence would produce no discernible structure at all. The 2023 record shows neither. It shows a steady underlying pattern, with no three consecutive months passing without a killing after February, overlaid with an uneven rhythm that grew heavier in the autumn and compressed three operations into eight days in November. That combination is the signature of a campaign with central objectives whose individual operations were executed as intelligence ripened, rather than on a calendar. The unevenness is not evidence against a campaign. It is evidence of how a real covert campaign actually runs.
Why does an undeniable campaign still lack formal proof?
Because undeniability and proof are different standards. Proof, in the courtroom sense, requires attributable evidence, a captured operative, a traceable weapon, an intercepted instruction, that ties a specific act to a specific author. The campaign of 2023 produced almost none of that, by design, since the entire method was built around assailants who vanished and operations that left nothing traceable behind. Undeniability is a weaker but still powerful standard. It means that the pattern as a whole has become impossible to explain by any account other than a coordinated campaign, even though no single act within it can be formally attributed. A reader can be certain that a campaign existed while being unable to prove who ordered any particular killing. That gap between certainty about the pattern and proof of the parts is not a flaw in the analysis. It is the precise condition that a well-run covert campaign is engineered to produce, and the year of eliminations is the clearest demonstration of how that condition is reached.
