south-asian-militant-groups-and-global-jihad-in-2015

QUILL IAM
PART 1
PROFILING OF MILITANT GROUPS
Nature o f t h re a t
The governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as the Coalition forces,
have generally succeeded in both fracturing and weakening the centralised
structures of principal Taliban groups. However, it is unclear whether or not
structural integrity is needed for either the survival of these groups’
ambitions, or their capacity for violence. This is the case because:
Multiple social networks permeate different jihadist groups.
Moreover, the new ‘wave’ of global jihadist enthusiasm (Part IV of
our longer report) has been energized by the success of IS, allowing
groups to latch onto its symbolic capital.
The groups that are profiled in the sections below have an unstable
and ambiguous central structure that makes them difficult to
defeat. This is what has made it unlikely that military action alone
will end jihadist violence; unaccountable military violence will
entrench support for the jihadist cause. Therefore, we recommend:
a) Fostering both local and regional civil society and grassroots
initiatives, and guaranteeing their safety, whilst also providing
them with financial support in order to provide effective counter
narratives to the Islamist ideology,
b) Monitoring the use of video and propaganda as a product of
influence. Prior to 2001, the Taliban declared suicide bombing un-
Islamic. However, it has become a regular component of their
attacks and propaganda over the last ten years 4 . As such, we
suggest that the media, the government, and the civil society
should be enlisted to build awareness on counter-extremism
responses within media outlets, and to prevent the circulation of
these videos and to stop them from garnering appeal.
Difficulties in isolating militant groups and determining the forces
they represent become clear in our profiles, which document webs
of complex relationships between fighters (see Figure 2). Judging
the “significance” of a group is equally difficult since there are
numerous criteria by which a group might present a security
threat. Furthermore, there are hundreds of armed groups across
our chosen areas of focus: Afghanistan, Pakistan, J&K, and India.
These groups fracture, merge, and change their names on a regular
basis, and can also seek out, or be courted by, globally oriented
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