Dealing with Lashkar-e-Taiba: A Multi-player Game-Theoretic Perspective

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) is one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world. With over 100 attacks worldwide since 2004, LET has become a political force within Pakistan, a proxy fighting force for the Pakistani Army, and a terror group that can carry out complex, coordinated attacks such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic analysis of how to deal with LET using a 5-player game whose players include LET, India, the Pakistani military, the (civilian) Pakistani government, and the US. We use an expert on LET and Pakistan to develop a payoff matrix and compute pure and mixed Nash equilibria (NE) in this payoff matrix. We study several of these NEs in detail. Our analysis shows that: (i) there are 6 pure NEs in which LET eliminates its armed wing, (ii) increasing external financial/military support for Pakistan leads to no NEs where LET reduces violence, (iii) almost all NEs in which LET significantly reduces violence involve coordinated actions by both the US and India.