In fashion, black has one invaluable quality: it goes with everything. And in Pakistan’s proxy wars, Islamic State Khorasan Province seems to have acquired much the same function: it goes with everything. It can be invoked in Afghanistan, deployed against the Baloch, attached to sectarian violence and also, according to recent reports, used to conceal future operations by Lashkar-e-Taiba in Jammu and Kashmir. Ideologically elastic, internationally recognisable and sufficiently terrifying to discourage too many questions, ISKP has become the new black of regional terrorism.

The allegation currently circulating among Indian security and open-source intelligence circles is that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence may be preparing to have Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives conduct attacks in Kashmir under an ISKP label. It remains of course an allegation, supported for the moment only by security leaks and social-media material rather than independently verifiable evidence. But as a strategy it would make considerable sense, because Lashkar has acquired a branding problem. For decades, LeT was among the Pakistani security establishment’s most reliable instruments. It possessed an ideological structure, a recruitment network, training facilities, charitable fronts, political connections and a disciplined leadership capable of calibrating violence according to strategic requirements. It was militant enough to bleed India but controlled enough not to attack the Pakistani state. It was the nearly perfect proxy: lethal abroad, domesticated at home and always available for public denial.

The problem is that the name has become unusable. Lashkar-e-Taiba is listed by the United Nations, the United States, Britain, the European Union and several other governments. Hafiz Saeed is internationally sanctioned. The organisation is linked to the 2008 Mumbai attacks and to a long catalogue of violence in India. Every appearance of a Lashkar commander now carries too much historical luggage, and even Islamabad’s traditional friends find the old label increasingly difficult to launder. The organisation itself, however, has not disappeared. It has merely learned to dress more discreetly.

The Resistance Front was the most successful of its recent costumes. Emerging after India revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status in 2019, TRF adopted the language of indigenous resistance rather than global jihad. Its name contained no Arabic religious vocabulary, no obvious Pakistani reference and none of the familiar ideological signatures of Lashkar. Its propaganda was designed to suggest a secular-looking Kashmiri insurgency born spontaneously from local grievances. The fighters could remain the same, the handlers could remain where they were and the strategic objective could remain unchanged. Only the packaging required modernisation.

Pahalgam damaged that arrangement. TRF initially claimed responsibility for the April 2025 attack, in which 26 people, most of them Hindu tourists, were killed, and then attempted to retreat from the claim after the political consequences became clear. The United States subsequently designated TRF as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and explicitly identified it as a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba. India later charged LeT, TRF, Hafiz Saeed and several individuals in connection with the massacre. A front organisation ceases to be particularly useful once everybody identifies the organisation standing behind it.

New names are therefore appearing. Kashmir Resistance Alliance, or KRA, has emerged in online propaganda and has already been identified by some Indian analysts as another possible LeT digital front. Other obscure labels have appeared in threatening posters and online lists targeting Kashmiri Pandits. Some may be genuine fronts, others temporary propaganda devices and others still fabrications introduced into an information war in which attribution has become almost as important as the attack itself.

The uncertainty is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. A proxy no longer needs a headquarters, an identifiable command structure or even a durable name. It requires a Telegram channel, a few graphics, a statement written in the correct idiom and enough amplification on X to enter the news cycle. The name can be abandoned once it becomes compromised and replaced before governments, journalists or international organisations have completed the paperwork required to identify it. Terrorism has discovered fast fashion.

Lashkar’s own public behaviour in Pakistan makes the disguise simultaneously necessary and absurd. On January 14 2026, a video attributed to senior LeT commander Abu Musa Kashmiri appeared on social media. In it, he reportedly declared that the Kashmir dispute could be resolved only through jihad and claimed to have communicated this position to Pakistan’s prime minister and senior ministers. In April, another video attributed to Abu Musa went further. He appeared to argue that the Pahalgam attack had enhanced Pakistan’s international standing and helped make Islamabad relevant to negotiations between the United States and Iran.

If authentic, the statement was remarkable: not because a Lashkar commander celebrated an attack on Indian civilians, but because he understood the attack as diplomatic capital. Violence was not presented as an emotional act of revenge or even simply as jihad. It was described as an instrument that improved Pakistan’s geopolitical utility.

That is the logic of the proxy state stripped of its diplomatic language. Pakistan acquires importance by helping manage crises to which its own policies have contributed. It supports or tolerates the architecture of jihad, denies responsibility for the consequences and then offers itself as an indispensable partner in controlling the danger. Islamabad maintains that Lashkar is defunct, its leaders are imprisoned and its infrastructure dismantled. Yet its clerics hold gatherings, its commanders make videos and its losses are commemorated in public. Pakistan can locate an opposition activist, abduct a Baloch student or prosecute a social-media user with impressive efficiency, but it becomes curiously helpless only when men belonging to internationally designated organisations climb onto stages and discuss jihad against India. State incapacity in Pakistan has always been remarkably selective.

The killing of Bilal Arif Salafi last March exposed another part of this contradiction. The senior LeT figure was reportedly shot and stabbed inside the heavily protected Markaz Taiba complex at Muridke shortly after Eid prayers. His death joined a growing series of assassinations of militant figures by the proverbial “unknown gunmen” operating across Pakistan. In August, a video of LeT-linked operative Rizwan Hanif circulated online in which he claimed that more than 30 members of the organisation had been killed over the previous three or four years in Peshawar, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot. Hanif blamed Indian intelligence. India rejects such accusations, and the identity of those responsible remains unproven. What matters is that a Lashkar figure publicly acknowledged the scale and geography of the losses. The organisation that supposedly no longer exists has apparently lost more than 30 members in five different Pakistani or Pakistani-controlled cities and possesses enough of a public constituency to complain about it before an audience.

This is where ISKP becomes useful. Recent reports suggest that LeT and ISKP networks may already have cooperated in Balochistan. A photograph circulated in 2025 appeared to show Shafiq Mengal, described as an ISKP coordinator in the province, presenting a pistol to senior Lashkar commander Rana Mohammad Ashfaq. The image has been cited as evidence of an arrangement facilitated by the ISI, although the exact organisational relationship remains difficult to verify independently. The underlying convergence is nevertheless plausible. ISKP has intensified its propaganda against Baloch nationalist organisations, condemning them as secular, ethnic and opposed to Islamic rule. The Pakistani state, meanwhile, has attempted to erase the political character of the Baloch insurgency by officially renaming the armed groups “Fitna al-Hindustan”: the Indian conspiracy. One narrative portrays the Baloch as infidels who must be fought in the name of Islam; the other portrays them as Indian agents who must be eliminated in the name of national security. The vocabulary changes, but the intended target remains the same.

For Lashkar, participation in such a campaign would mark an expansion of function rather than a complete transformation. The organisation has long served domestic as well as external purposes. Its welfare networks helped build legitimacy, its ideological discipline countered anti-state jihadist movements and its cadres could be mobilised wherever the establishment required a reliable religious force. Employing LeT personnel under an ISKP umbrella against Baloch insurgents would allow Pakistan to outsource repression while obscuring both the perpetrators and the political nature of the conflict.

It would also create a conveniently reversible narrative. In Balochistan, ISKP can be presented as an independent extremist force fighting separatists. In Kashmir, the same label can be used to suggest that an attack belongs to the transnational Islamic State universe rather than to Pakistan’s traditional proxy infrastructure. If evidence of cooperation emerges, Islamabad can blame rogue militants, organisational crossover or the general chaos of the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. Every explanation produces another layer of distance between the operation and the state.

There are obvious risks. ISKP is not simply another obedient Pakistani creation. It has its own ideology, leadership and strategic objectives, and it has carried out devastating attacks inside Pakistan. Cooperation between individual commanders, local networks or state intermediaries does not establish complete institutional control. Pakistan’s security establishment has repeatedly mistaken temporary alignment for permanent command. The Taliban were once considered manageable. The TTP was once somebody else’s problem. Sectarian groups cultivated for external purposes eventually helped transform Pakistan itself into a battlefield.

But immediate utility has always carried more weight in Rawalpindi than eventual consequence. If ISKP can pressure the Taliban, attack Baloch nationalists, absorb expendable militants and provide a fresh label for violence in Kashmir, the temptation is obvious. Strategic policy in Pakistan has never been especially troubled by the fact that today’s useful proxy may become tomorrow’s existential threat. Tomorrow can always be blamed on India.

Lashkar-e-Taiba therefore remains important not because it is returning. It never went away. What is changing is the architecture surrounding it. The old organisation survives beneath a succession of charitable bodies, political parties, resistance fronts, digital alliances and potentially even rival jihadist brands. Its commanders can speak openly in Pakistan while its operations abroad acquire names designed to conceal precisely the freedom with which those commanders operate. The evolution from LeT to TRF, from TRF to smaller online labels and perhaps from those labels to ISKP attribution is not evidence of fragmentation alone. It is the adaptation of a state-proxy system under pressure. The objective is no longer merely to deny involvement. It is to make involvement impossible to prove before the next name appears.

Pakistan’s proxy wars have always depended on disguise. The difference is that the disguise is now changed with extraordinary speed. Lashkar provides the men, the history and the infrastructure. TRF provides a Kashmiri identity. ISKP provides global terror branding and an all-purpose explanation. In Balochistan, the militants can fight secular nationalists. In Kashmir, they can obscure the old road leading back to Muridke. And in Islamabad, officials can continue announcing that Lashkar-e-Taiba no longer exists. Strictly speaking, they may eventually be correct. The name may disappear. The machinery will remain.