Dealing with Mumbai

The horror of the Mumbai terror attacks is at long last over. According to the Calcutta News Net current totals after sixty hours of combat are 183 dead, including 20 police and 22 foreigners, and 327 injured. Two things are still unclear: who was responsible and what their objective was. Another critical imponderable concerns what India and other governments will now do.

Among the theories now current the Times of India reports American and Indian signals intercepts link the terrorists to a group known as Lashkar-e-Taiba, sometimes spelled Lashkar-e-Toiba, a Pakistani-based group dedicated to opposing Indian sovereignty over the disputed region of Kashmir.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, literally "army of the pure," is one of a number of groups established with the aid of Pakistani military intelligence in the 1980s. The nation's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) was active with the American CIA in working to organize resistance groups fighting against the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. One of these became al-Qaeda. In many cases it is now clear that these efforts succeeded in spawning a set of hateful violent Islamic fundamentalist groups.

If the Mumbai attacks were indeed this group or another spawned in or abetted in Pakistan as seems likely, the next question is what will India do. Its government has announced it can no longer tolerate the existence of safe havens for such groups in Pakistan. It is difficult to imagine any government in the world who had suffered such an attack saying anything else. The United States too has ratcheted up the pressure on Pakistan. The Bush Administration has stepped up Predator drone attacks within Pakistan and even sent in a commando raid against suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban targets across the Afghan border. As a candidate, Barack Obama stated his preference for drawing down in Iraq and building up in Afghanistan. He also announced support for the idea of striking unilaterally into Pakistan at al-Qaeda targets whenever the Pakistanis "could not or would not" do the job themselves.

Faced with this kind of pressure from both India and the Americans the Pakistani government will soon have a bitter quandary on its hands. To take on the extremists within its borders could invite something approaching civil war. At the very least, the terrorists' capabilities would now largely be directed against the government itself. But to do little would be to invite increasingly brazen violations of its sovereignty by the American superpower and by its longtime hated rival, India. We should soon see what course Pakistan will take. It will be tough politically for the Islamic state to crack down hard. Either path will be painful and result in much violence in the country.

India and the United States ought to be working together behind the scenes to coordinate a strategy and an approach to Pakistan on this. They need action but they also need to sustain the rule of law and organized authority in Pakistan. If that breaks down, if Pakistani society disintegrates into its various tribes or important factions within the government or military side with the extremists one need only remember that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. If ever there was a time for adroit diplomacy based on an acute understanding of a country and its problems now is that time.