The LeT's professed ideology goes beyond merely challenging India's sovereignty over the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The Lashkar's agenda, as outlined in a pamphlet titled "Why are we waging jihad", includes the restoration of Islamic rule over all parts of South Asia, Russia and even China. Further, the outfit is based on a sort of Islamist fundamentalism preached by its mentor, the JuD. It seeks to bring about a union of all Muslim majority regions in countries that surround Pakistan. In its history the organisation has shown scant respect for human life and has carried out terrorist activities of great brutality. Many of its objectives are inspired by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan. With the American presence and military pressure in Afghanistan, the ISI lost its protege organisation- The Taliban's strategic utility. Organisations like the LeT have been used to absorb the resilient remnants of The Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives in the region and to salvage the strategic objective of using the tool of terror for state purpose, particularly against neighbouring India, by the Pakistani state.

The outfit had claimed that it had assisted the Taliban militia and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan during November and December 2002 in their fight against the US-aided Northern Alliance.