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http://www.propublica.org/article/terro ... -brightest
Sebastian Rotella
Imagine a terrorist group that recruits tens of thousands of young men from the same neighborhoods and social networks as the Pakistani military. A group whose well-educated recruits defy the idea that poverty and ignorance breed extremism. A group whose fighters include relatives of a politician, a senior Army officer and a director of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission.
That is the disconcerting reality of Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the world's most dangerous militant organizations, according to a study released today by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. The report helps explain why Pakistan has resisted international pressure to crack down on Lashkar after it killed 166 people in Mumbai — six U.S. citizens included — and came close to sparking conflict between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India.
The findings, which draw on 917 biographies of Lashkar fighters killed in combat, illuminate "Lashkar's integration into Pakistani society, how embedded they are," said co-author Don Rassler, the director of a research program at the center that studies primary source materials. "They have become an institution."
The group's vast training camps have churned out fighters at an alarming rate. The study gives an estimate of between 100,000 and 300,000 total trainees. By comparison, a U.S. counterterror official told ProPublica he has seen figures as high as 200,000, though he put the number in the tens of thousands.
Most recruits examined in the study joined at about age 17 and died at about 21, generally in India or Afghanistan. Their backgrounds contradict "a lingering belief in the policy community that Islamist terrorists are the product of low or no education or are produced in Pakistan's madrassas," the report says.
In fact, the fighters had higher levels of secular education compared to the generally low average for Pakistani men, the report says. Relatively few studied at religious schools known as madrasas. They joined Lashkar — which spews anti-Western, anti-Semitic and anti-Indian rhetoric — because they wanted more meaningful lives, admired its anticorruption image and felt an obligation to help fellow Muslims, the study says.
"These are some of Pakistan's best and brightest and they are not being used in the labor market, they are being deployed in the militant market," Fair said. "It's a myth that poverty and madrasas create terrorism, and that we can buy our way out of it with U.S. aid."
The report is here:
http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/the-fight ... -and-death
The Fighters of Lashkar-e-Taiba: Recruitment, Training, Deployment and Death
Apr 04, 2013
Authors: Anirban Ghosh, Arif Jamal, Christine Fair, Don Rassler, Nadia Shoeb
From the martyr biographies, we know the location of the
hometowns of the militants, as well as the districts and provinces in which they resided.
This field is one of the most well‐populated in our dataset, with nearly 70 percent of the
917 biographies’ hometown districts being identified. We are thus able to provide
detailed information on areas that produce large numbers of militants. As illustrated by
Figure 5, our data confirms that most LeT militants are recruited from Pakistan’s Punjab
province. In our data, 89 percent of the militants are from Punjab, with 5 percent from
Sindh, and about 3 percent from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A smaller number of militants
originate from Azad Kashmir (about 0.5 percent), while Indian Kashmir, Gilgit‐Baltistan
and Baluchistan together produced about 1.1 percent of the militants in our sample.
Three militants had hometowns in Afghanistan, two came from Saudi Arabia and one
from Europe.
Let us commend the Indian Armed Forces and paramilitaries for the following bolded portion
The mean age when a militant joins LeT is 16.95 years, with the median age being 16.5.35
The youngest recruit in our data joined at the age of 11.5, while the oldest recruit was
30. Ninety percent of the militants joined LeT before they were 22 years old. The mean
age of a new LeT enlistee corresponds to the age Pakistani students typically are about
to finish their matric program (tenth grade).36
Militants’ mean age at the time of their death in our data is 21 years, while the median
age of death is 20 years.37 The youngest militant whose death is recorded in our data is
14 years, while the oldest is 43 years. These findings are very similar to those found by
one of our authors from a survey she conducted of 141 militant households in
Pakistan.38
While our data sample is limited to only those fighters who died and whose death was
highlighted by LeT, our data appear to show that militants do not live long after they
have been recruited by the group. In our sample, the mean number of years between an
LeT militant’s entry and death is 5.14 years, and the median is 4.0 years.
.