Other Types of Attacks
This chapter describes the conditions under which LeT carries out terrorist attacks on holidays as well as attempted (but unsuccessful) attacks. The chapter discusses several TP-rules about these types of terror attacks that were derived automatically from the LeT data set used in this book.
Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-E-Taiba
On November 21, 2008, ten men boarded a boat in Karachi and hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, killing four of the vessel's crewmen and forcing its captain to sail toward India. Four miles off the coast of Mumbai, these men abandoned the trawler for inflatable speedboats, and within hours they began hitting multiple targets in Mumbai in a series of simultaneous and well-coordinated attacks. Over the course of three days, more than 170 people were killed and more than 300 injured. The victims included members of the Indian elite as well as Jews and Westerners. The Mumbai attacks placed Lashkar-e-Taiba high on the list of the world's most fearsome terrorist groups. A complex and powerful organization that rose to prominence with Pakistani state support, Lashkar has sent scores of fighters to Iraq and Afghanistan and provides them with essential strategic and tactical help. Lashkar was formed by men with years of training in the trenches of Kashmir, and its skill in executing efficient and effective insurgencies has made the organization extremely attractive to dissidents. Nevertheless, Lashkar is afraid to associate too closely with al-Qaeda, which is closely tied to Pakistan's government, and al-Qaeda is afraid to ally itself too intimately with Lashkar, which would jeopardize its partnership with the Pakistani state. Were the Mumbai attacks evidence of Lashkar's increasing infiltration of al-Qaeda's domain, or were they simply the latest in a series of attacks on Pakistan's historic rival? Stephen Tankel traces the development of Lashkar from a small resistance group to the largest, most feared organization operating in Kashmir, India, and Pakistan today. He considers the threat Lashkar now poses to Pakistan, India, and the West, and how this danger may evolve in coming decades.
Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents: A Case Study with Hezbollah
Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) have been proposed as a paradigm for reasoning about cultural groups, terror groups, and other socioeconomic- political-military organizations worldwide. In this paper, we describe a case study that shows how SOMA was used to model the behavior of the terrorist organization, Hezbollah. Our team, consisting of a mix of computer scientists, policy experts, and political scientists, were able to understand new facts about Hezbollah of which even seasoned Hezbollah experts may not have been aware. This paper briefly overviews SOMA rules, explains how more than 14,000 SOMA rules for Hezbollah were automatically derived, and then describes a few key findings about Hezbollah, enabled by this framework.