Decoding the ISI factor in Al Qaeda's India wing

Has Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) played a master stroke with the al-Qaeda’s new move of launching its new wing to reinvigorate its presence in the Indian sub-continent?

It’s the million dollar question that the Indian strategic and security establishment needs to ask itself and obtain clear answers. Significantly, Pakistan does not figure in the list of targeted geographical entities announced in the al-Qaeda video.

My suspicion is that the answer to this question is in the affirmative. Here’s why.

Both al Qaeda and ISI desperately need diversionary tactics because of their respective strategic compulsions. The move of announcing a new force called “Qaedat al-Jihad” to take jihad to India, Bangladesh and Myanmar is convenient for both entities.

The al Qaeda has been badly overshadowed by the Islamic State (IS) over the past several months. IS had announced the creation of a caliphate a couple of months ago and did what no other jihadist outfit had ever dared to do – ask the al Qaeda to fall in line and announce its subservience to IS. Of course, al Qaeda never obliged.

However, keeping mum has backfired on al Qaeda and proved to be a bad strategy. There were reports of Muslim youths from various parts of the world, including India, joining the IS.

The brutal beheading of two American journalists by the IS within a fortnight gave the new outfit what it needed most – international publicity. The al Qaeda move of starting jihadist operations in the Indian sub-continent is clearly borne out of the compelling and urgent need to stem the IS tide.

The Af-Pak region is al-Qaeda’s home turf. IS did not have a presence in this region when it burst on the international scene about four months ago. But in the past few weeks the situation has changed and the IS has made steady inroads into al Qaeda’s turf.

At the same time, al-Qaeda’s latest 55-minute video announcing the formation of its offshoot for the Indian sub-continent seems to be a hurried, overly ambitious and confused move given that it has failed to come up with any big ticket terror attack even in the region where it is perceived to be strongest – the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt.

The confusion is also evident by the fact that al-Zawahiri while speaking about the newly-announced Qaedat al-Jihad said: “This entity was not established today but is the fruit of a blessed effort of more than two years to gather the mujaheddin in the Indian sub-continent into a single entity… It is an entity that was formed to promulgate the call of the reviving imam, Sheikh Osama bin Laden, may Allah have mercy upon him.”

If that is the case, what tangible actions al Qaeda can boast off in past three years since bin Laden was killed in an American commando raid in Pakistan in May 2011?

The answer is: none. Whatever terror threats Pakistani security forces have been battling since bin Laden’s killing are largely from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is a separate outfit, though it shares many ideological similarities with al Qaeda.

According to Zawahiri’s new video statement, the new offshoot will be active in “in Burma, Bangladesh, Assam, Gujarat, Ahmedabad, and Kashmir”. This only conveys a highly confused sense of geography by the al Qaeda chief.

This brings us to the ISI factor in the jigsaw puzzle. The ISI must be mighty pleased with the latest al Qaeda move because nobody gains more from it than the anti-India powerful element in the military establishment of Pakistan.

This can be a subtle diversionary tactic from Rawalpindi. Pakistan has been in a snake pit for weeks and needed to divert the attention of the world and of its own people from the ongoing political upheaval.

Since Pakistan cannot afford to turn the heat on India militarily, especially when Narendra Modi is at the helm of India, it can only do what it has done best for last three decades – open yet another proxy war front. This suits Pakistan’s interest without having to fire a single shot – either at the borders or through its sleeper cells in India.

The give-away of the ISI’s involvement, as stated before, is that Pakistan does not figure in the list of targeted geographical entities of the “Qaedat al-Jihad”.

Needless to say, India cannot take the latest al Qaeda threat lightly and it hasn’t. The Indian home ministry has already sounded a nation-wide alert and several states, including the ones mentioned in the al Qaeda video, have been put on high alert.

The writer is FirstPost Consulting Editor and a strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha.