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Almost a year has passed since Operation Sindoor, and developments from across the border tell a troubling story. The Pakistani security establishment has not dismantled the terror groups behind the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025. Instead, it has allowed their leadership to step out into open space, address rallies, sit on public stages, and threaten India with fresh violence. The crackdown that Islamabad promised the international community after the four-day military exchange in May 2025 never came. What is apparent now is the opposite. Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) have rebuilt their infrastructure, resumed recruitment, and placed their top operatives in front of cameras. Another attack on Indian soil is being prepared, and another military crisis between two nuclear-armed states has become a credible possibility.
The most striking evidence comes from the LeT operational commander Hafiz Abdul Rauf, a US-designated global terrorist. In a public speech delivered in January 2026 at the rebuilt Markaz-e-Taiba complex in Muridke, Rauf admitted that the Indian airstrikes of 6-7 May 2025 had reduced the LeT headquarters to rubble. He went further. He told his audience that Pakistan had given LeT “open freedom for jihad” and that recruitment and training of terrorists is easier in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world. He added that the state had taken this decision, which was why the outfit was free to operate. This is a sanctioned terrorist describing, on record, the institutional cover his outfit enjoys from the Pakistani state. The remark, captured on video and circulated widely, demolishes years of formal denials by Islamabad.
Rauf’s admission is not an isolated outburst. Saifullah Khalid Kasuri, the deputy chief of LeT and the operative identified by Indian agencies as the mastermind of the Pahalgam attack, has made several public appearances of his own. In an undated school event filmed in Kasur in Punjab and surfaced in January 2026, Kasuri told his audience that the Pakistan Army regularly invites him to lead funeral prayers for fallen soldiers and to attend military events. He declared, before a crowd of children, that India is afraid of him. The footage is chilling not only for its content but for its setting. A man wanted by India for the murder of 26 civilians is addressing Pakistani schoolchildren under the gaze of military patrons. Kasuri has also boasted that India erred in Operation Sindoor by limiting itself to terror infrastructure rather than escalating further. The signal he is sending to his own cadre and to the wider jihadist constituency is unambiguous.
JeM has followed the same trajectory. Masood Azhar, who had remained out of public view since 2003, surfaced last year with a long video address from a seminary in Bahawalpur. He called for renewed jihad in Kashmir and threatened to liberate the Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya. A subsequent audio clip earlier this year saw him invoking suicide bombers as a tool of war against India. Azhar’s reactivation, after two decades of silence, was not a personal decision. It reflected a policy choice by the Pakistani military leadership under Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir to deploy JeM once again as a strategic instrument against India, much as the outfit was used in the Parliament attack of 2001 and the Pulwama bombing of 2019.
The institutional fingerprints of the Pakistani state are visible at every step. The funerals of LeT terrorists killed during Operation Sindoor were attended by serving senior officers, including Lt Gen Fayyaz Hussain Shah, the Corps Commander Lahore, Major General Rao Imran Sartaj, and Inspector General of Police Punjab Usman Anwar. The chief minister of Punjab, Maryam Nawaz, sent a wreath. Coffins were draped in the Pakistani national flag and carried with full military honours. This was a state burial for proscribed terrorists, held in the open.
The state has also financed the rebuilding of LeT’s headquarters. Intelligence inputs first reported in September 2025 indicate that Islamabad allocated about PKR 4 crore from public funds for the reconstruction of Markaz-e-Taiba, with the total estimated cost running to PKR 15 crore. The site was reopened for a passing-out parade of fresh LeT recruits in January 2026, attended by Rauf, Hafiz Talha Saeed, the son of LeT founder Hafiz Saeed and the outfit'ssecond-in-command, and Kasuri himself. Within seven months of the Indian strikes, the facility that had been described as demolished was graduating new fighters.
Multiple reports since November 2025 confirm that LeT and JeM units have been crossing into the Indian side of the Line of Control with logistical support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and Special Services Group. Movements of the Border Action Team, a mixed unit of trained terrorists and retired SSG commandos, have been detected in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. Senior LeT leaders, including Talha Saeed, Kasuri, and Rauf, have been moving between Bahawalpur and Muridke, suggesting coordinated planning between the two groups. Drone activity along infiltration corridors from Kupwara to the Pir Panjal has risen sharply. The US Congressional Research Service brief of 25 March 2026 confirmed that 12 of the 15 militant outfits operating from Pakistan remain designated foreign terrorist organisations under US law.
The strategic significance for India is severe. Operation Sindoor altered the rules of engagement by demonstrating that terror infrastructure deep inside Pakistani Punjab and PoJK now sits within India’s revised counter-terror target set. New Delhi has stated that any future attack on the scale of Pahalgam will trigger the next phase of that operation. The Pakistani establishment, by allowing Rauf, Kasuri, and Azhar to resurface and to speak openly, is testing that threshold. If a high-casualty attack now occurs in Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, or outside the Union Territory, the Indian response will not begin from where it began in 2025. It will begin from where it ended.