A Shooting in Pakistan Reveals Fraying Alliance

Late in January, Raymond A. Davis — a covert security officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and onetime Green Beret — unloaded a Glock pistol into two armed Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore, according to a Pakistani police report. His case was to move forward in court as early as this week.The shooting complicated American attempts to portray Mr. Davis as a paper-shuffling diplomat who stamped visas as a day job; generated an extraordinary swirl of recriminations and for many Pakistanis confirmed suspicions that America has deployed a secret army of spies and contractors inside the country.

It has also called unwelcome attention to a bigger, more dangerous game in which Mr. Davis appears to have played just a supporting role.

The C.I.A. team Mr. Davis worked with, according to American officials, had among its assignments the task of secretly gathering intelligence about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant “Army of the Pure.” Pakistan’s security establishment has nurtured Lashkar for years as a proxy force to attack targets and enemies in India and in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. These and other American officials, all of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity, are now convinced that Lashkar is no longer satisfied being the shadowy foot soldiers in Pakistan’s simmering border conflict with India. It goals have broadened, these officials say, and Lashkar is committed to a campaign of jihad against the United States and Europe, and against American troops in Afghanistan.

During a visit to Islamabad last July, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared Lashkar a “global threat,” a statement that no doubt rankled his Pakistani hosts.

And so a group that Pakistan has seen for years as an essential component of its own national security, and that American counterterrorism officials could once dismiss as a regional problem, has emerged as a threat that Washington feels it can no longer ignore.

Given such a fundamental collision of interests, it was perhaps inevitable that Lashkar would one day provoke tensions between Pakistani and American security officials, and the collision itself would come into full public view. Rather than being a cause of the problem, Mr. Davis was merely an all-too-visible symptom.

As Mr. Davis discovered, the regularly accepted rules of the spy game don’t apply here. There was little chance of quickly brokering a quiet deal, allowing Mr. Davis to be spirited out of Pakistan without anyone making a fuss. Because Lashkar has long been nurtured by Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, American espionage operations against the group are freighted with grave risks, and are not viewed kindly by Pakistani spies.

C. Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert and Georgetown University professor who closely studies Lashkar’s operations, said that the group was founded by Pakistan’s government in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war that that ISI fought in close alliance with the C.I.A. As that war wound down, Professor Fair said, then President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan began redeploying Lashkar fighters to Kashmir because he feared that Kashmiri independence groups might create a separate state in the mountainous region now controlled by India, rather than weld it to Pakistan. The ISI continued to nurture Lashkar, along with others, as a counterweight to the separatist groups.

Officially, Lashkar was banned by President Pervez Musharraf’s government in 2002, and declared a terrorist organization three years later by the United Nations. But it hardly operates like a group in hiding.

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Lashkar’s charismatic leader, gives regular sermons in Lahore on Fridays, denouncing what he calls the imperialism of the United States, Israel and India while flanked by guards. A stocky man with a wild beard, Mr. Saeed has been placed under house arrest at various times in the past 10 years, but in 2009 the Lahore High Court quashed all charges against him and set him free.

That same court has now been assigned to determine Mr. Davis’s fate.

Lashkar’s sprawling headquarters in Muridke, a Lahore suburb situated along the famed Grand Trunk Road, contains not only a radical madrassa and housing for the school’s faculty members, but also a market, a hospital and a fish farm.