Averting an India-Pakistan crisis over the Mumbai carnage

(Updated December 1)

The ease with which 10 or so young men armed with automatic rifles and grenades were able to attack two luxury hotels, a restaurant, a railway station, a Jewish center and a hospital in Mumbai on 26-27 November 2008 is unnerving. Quite understandably, the people of India are indignant that about 200 people have been killed and many more wounded. On must express heartfelt sympathy for the bereaved families of the victims.

A majority of people today are reasonably certain about the identity of the perpetrators of 9/11, although none of them survived. In contrast, the Indian authorities have reportedly captured one of the assailants. With modern techniques of interrogation, even the most hardened terrorist ideologue is almost certain to disclose the relevant information, provided care is taken to ensure that the inquiry is free of any in-built bias.

The earlier view of some security experts was that the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were probably Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda. An e-mail claimed that the attackers were from a group called the Deccan Mujahideen, an hitherto unknown entity. Another hypothesis has been that this group may be linked to the Indian Mujahideen, which is suspected of carrying out a series of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people in 2008.

The dominant prevailing view in the Indian government is that Pakistani militants have carried out the Mumbai attacks, and that some of the attackers came to Mumbai by sea. Indian security officials have said that the attackers had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammad, guerrilla groups that have been banned in Pakistan. India had accused Lashkar-e-Taiba for the attack on its Parliament in December 2001 that precipitated 2002 military standoff with Pakistan.

The first order of business is to determine the origin and identity of the militants. Even if transpires some of the terrorists had links in Pakistan, or were of Pakistan origin, a knee-jerk reaction to the Mumbai attacks is not advisable. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should resist domestic pressure to rattle the saber. India is a big country with great power aspirations and the world expects it to behave judiciously. The goal should be to foster India-Pakistan cooperation to fight terrorism, rather than to score points by blaming Pakistan.

President Asif Ali Zardari is a vocal proponent of forging closer economic, cultural and political relations with India, believing this policy to be in the national interest of Pakistan. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was in India at the time of the Mumbai attacks. Could the Government of Pakistan knowingly have sent its foreign minister to New Delhi for a four day visit aimed at improving relations between the two countries, to coincide with an officially sponsored terrorist attack?

Pakistan is no less a victim of terrorism than India. More than 1,500 troops and thousands of innocent people have lost their lives in the ongoing campaign against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It was encouraging, therefore, that the Pakistan government had responded positively to the request of the Indian prime minister to send the head of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, the ISI, to India for consultations. It now appears that an ISI official with the technical competence to address India’s concerns would be going, at least initially.

A properly arranged visit of the DG ISI along with the Foreign Secretary might be a logical follow up step to lower tensions between the two neighbors, provided India abstains from blaming Pakistan. One recalls that a visit to India by Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Mr. Abdus Sattar in 1987 had helped prevent the escalation of the Brass Tacks crisis into a shooting war. If it is proven that any individual or entities based in Pakistan are responsible for the attack, then the government will surely take appropriate action.

The Times of London of November 29 warned: “After seven years of painstaking rapprochement between India and Pakistan, relations between the two dominant, nuclear-armed states of South Asia are once again seriously at risk. This not only threatens to destabilize the entire region but could also set back the West’s fight against al-Qaeda, the Taleban and other Islamic militants operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

The terrorists would like nothing better than for India and Pakistan to have it out or even to embark on a stand-off similar to 2002, which would give them a clear field to carry out their agenda. The bottom line, therefore, is that India and Pakistan must not wander off the road to reconciliation, no matter how great the provocation by non-state actors. The interests of the nearly 1.4 billion people require the leaders of South Asia to be steadfast in their pursuit of peaceful co-existence and multi-faceted cooperation.