Washington: Pakistan-based LeT could only be
reined in by the concurrent Indo-US action and reduction in
American aid to Islamabad, says a new research based on the
computational analysis of terror attacks.
"The results do not imply that the US and India need to
coordinate actions - just that the actions need to occur over
an overlapping period of time that is sufficiently long to
convince both the Pakistani military and the LeT that
terrorist actions will not pay," says Indian-origin Computer
Science Professor V S Subrahmanian from Laboratory for
Computational Cultural Dynamics, University of Maryland, which
carried out the analysis.
In order to understand how terrorism from groups such as
LeT can be reduced, a team of researchers under Subrahmanian
developed a number of mathematical models, including
stochastic opponent modeling agents and multi-player game
theoretic models.
The research team studied five entities - the US, India,
Pakistani military (including the ISI), Pakistani civilian
government (not including the military or ISI), and
Lashkar-e-Toiba, the university said in a press release.
The researchers looked for Nash equilibria, named after
Nobel-prize winning economist John Nash, whose life was
immortalised in the Oscar-winning movie, A Beautiful Mind.
Intuitively, Nash equilibria specify situations where no
entity involved in the game theoretic model can "do better"
without upsetting another agency.
"We did not find a single Nash equilibrium in which LeT
exhibits good behaviour in which the US expands financial aid
to Pakistan," said Subrahmanian, who went on to remark that
this is consistent with the recent decision by the Obama
administration to cut USD 800 million in military aid to
Pakistan.
PTI
First Published: Saturday, July 16, 2011, 14:38