Mumbai toll includes India-Pakistan thaw

by Frank James

It's possible the terrorists in Mumbai, India may have wanted to destroy tentative moves towards a better relationship between sworn enemies India and Pakistan, kind of like Hamas in the past launching attacks into Israel at times of progress between Israelis and the Palestinian Authrority.

As the New York Times reports:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The terrorist attacks in Mumbai occurred as India and Pakistan, two big, hostile and nuclear-armed nations, were delicately moving toward improved relations with the encouragement of the United States and in particular the incoming Obama administration.

But no matter who turns out to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks, their scale and the choice of international targets will make the agenda of the new American administration harder.

Reconciliation between India and Pakistan has emerged as a basic tenet in the approaches to foreign policy of President-elect Barack Obama, and the new leader of Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The point is to persuade Pakistan to focus less of its military effort on India, and more on the militants in its lawless tribal regions who are ripping at the soul of Pakistan.

But attacks as devastating as those that unfolded in Mumbai -- whether ultimately traced to homegrown Indian militants or to others from abroad, or a combination -- seem likely to sour relations, fuel distrust and hamper, at least for now, America's ambitions for reconciliation in the region.

Of course, we don't know enough yet about the source of the Mumbai attacks, if the terrorists were completely home-grown Indians or had help from outside the country. Pakistan's intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence, has been implicated in past terror attacks in India so it's not unreasonable for Indians to have some suspicions in that direction.

But as the NYT article suggests, the attacks are a likely setback to Indian-Pakistan relations at a time when the U.S. can least afford that. We need the Pakistanis to focus their military efforts not against India but the Taliban and al Qaeda in the nation's tribally controlled areas that border Afghanistan if the U.S. and its NATO partners have any hope of stabilizing Afghanistan.