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Mumbai: Intoxicated India deaf & blind to internal terror. Unable to introspect, resolve its huge race, caste & religious problems

Some Inexplicable questions for Indian Leaders

Indian hatred for Pakistan knows no bounds. It existed in 1947 and in the 60s and it has exponentially grown as Pakistan got stronger.

It is a level of frustration gone amok. India would like to treat Muslims of Pakistan the way it treats Muslims in Gujarat. Alas it cant!

Thus the had wringing, the name calling and the media blitz to demonize Islam and all Pakistanis

Indians want Pakistan to disappear so that they can spread their tentacles into the heart of Central Asia and transport their goods and services to Europe and beyond. Pakistan is the only impediment to their growth.

It is also considers them the Dalits that got Away. How dare the malich challenge the Brahmans?

What Are India’s Options? “Bomb Islamabad!” That’s what a representative of the Samajwadi Party suggested at one of the UPA meetings. But are there serious options that one could look at as a credible response to these terror attacks?

Reasons Bharat cannot bomb Pakistan.

Over the last week, many Americans (and not a few Indians) have asked me why India does not “do a Gaza” on Pakistan, referring, of course, to an emulation of Israel’s punitive use of force against Hamas-run Palestine, a territory from which rockets rain down on Israeli soil with reliable frequency (if not reliable destructiveness … but that is not for want of Hamas intent).

My answer, given with the heavy heart that comes always with a painful grip on reality, is simple: India does not because it cannot.

Here are five reasons why:

1. India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories. India does not have the immunity, the confidence and the military free hand that result from an overwhelming military superiority over an opponent. Israel’s foe is a non-sovereign entity that enjoys the most precarious form of self-governance. Pakistan, for all its dysfunction, is a proper country with a proper army, superior by far to the tin-pot Arab forces that Israel has had to combat over time. Pakistan has nukes, to boot. Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it an apocalyptic risk for India. This is, in fact, Pakistan’s trump card. (This explains, also, why Israel is determined to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.)

2. Even if India could attack Pakistan without fear of nuclear retaliation, the rationale for “doing a Gaza” is, arguably, not fully present: Israel had been attacked consistently by the very force–Hamas–that was in political control of the territory from which the attacks occurred. By contrast, terrorist attacks on India, while originating in Pakistan, are not authored by the Pakistani government. India can– and does–contend that Pakistan’s government should shut down the terrorist training camps on Pakistani soil. (In this insistence, India has unequivocal support from Washington.) Yet only a consistent and demonstrable pattern of dereliction by Pakistani authorities– which would need to be dereliction verging on complicity with the terrorists–would furnish India with sufficient grounds to hold the Pakistani state culpable.

3. As our columnist, Karlyn Bowman, writes, Israel enjoys impressive support from the American people, in contrast to the Palestinians. No other state–apart, perhaps, from Britain–evokes as much favor in American public opinion as does Israel. This is not merely the result of the much-vaunted “Israel lobby” (to use a label deployed by its detractors), but also because of the very real depth of cultural interpenetration between American and Israeli society. This fraternal feeling buys Israel an enviable immunity in the conduct of its strategic defense. India, by contrast–while considerably more admired and favored in American public opinion than Pakistan–enjoys scarcely a fraction of Israel’s “pull” in Washington when it comes to questions of the use of force beyond its borders.

4. Pakistan is strategically significant to the United States; the Palestinians are not. This gives Washington scant incentive to rein in the Israelis, but a major incentive to rein in any Indian impulse to strike at Pakistan. However justified the Indian anger against Pakistan over the recent invasion of Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists, the last thing that the U.S. wants right now is an attack–no matter how surgical–by India against Pakistan-based terror camps. This would almost certainly result in a wholesale shift of Pakistani troops away from their western, Afghan front toward the eastern boundary with India–and would leave the American Afghan campaign in some considerable disarray, at least in the short term. So Washington has asked for, and received, the gift of Indian patience. And although India recognizes that it is not wholly without options to mobilize quickly for punitive, surgical strikes in a “strategic space,” it would–right now–settle for a trial of the accused terrorist leaders in U.S. courts. (Seven U.S. citizens were killed in Mumbai: Under U.S. law, those responsible–and this should include Pakistani intelligence masterminds–have to be brought to justice.)

5. My last, and meta-, point: Israel has the privilege of an international pariah to ignore international public opinion in its use of force against the Palestinians. A state with which few others have diplomatic relations can turn the tables on those that would anathematize it by saying, Hang diplomacy. India, by contrast, has no such luxury. It is a prisoner of its own global aspirations–and pretensions. Five Reasons Why India Can’t ‘Do A Gaza’ On Pakistan Tunku Varadarajan, 01.05.09, 12:00 AM ET . Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at the Stern Business School at NYU and research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is opinions editor at Forbes.com, where he writes a weekly column.

The terrorist struck just a week after the Al Queda number two, Al Zawahiri, released his latest audio tape saying the election of Barack Obama made no difference to the aims and intent of the Islamists.

That doesn’t mean this was an Al Queda operation, but it is possible the response to the attack will benefit AQ and that this was part of the wider agenda of the attackers.

After 9/11 many people said ‘We’re all Americans now’, but for those of a certain bent the phrase was ‘We’re all Al Queda now’. The franchise of ideas and modus operandi has spread thoughout the wider jihadist movement.

The timing of the attack was perfect. It came just before local elections and during an economically important cricket tournament, and during the American transition period – between the Bush years and Obama’s time.

The Indian government cannot afford to be seen to be weak in its response to Mumbai. If so it will be wiped out by the Hindu Nationalist BJP at the next election. But if they can restrain themselves, what happens if there is another attack in the next few weeks? National outrage would be so great – the government would likely fall amid rioting in major cities.

So as well as various diplomatic responses such closing border crossing, cancelling cricket tours and reducing trade – another option open to New Delhi is to move troops to the Pakistan border. This is what happened in 2001/2002 after the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament.

Pakistan responded in kind and a crisis quickly developed with cross border artillery battles and the rattling of nuclear sabres. A powerful Bush administration moved to calm things down but it was a close call, it was almost a full scale war.

If, over the next few weeks, India moves tens of thousands of extra troops to the border Pakistan would be forced to respond. The Pakistani troops would be moved from the North-west Frontier region bordering Afghanistan where they are currently engaged in anti terrorist operations against the Taliban. The USA wants them to stay there as part of its strategy in Afghanistan. So, enter Washington DC. The American government is desperate to restrain India from going too far, whilst at the same time trying to pressure Pakistan to keep taking on the Taliban.

Pakistan is under enormous pressure from America and India, but the diplomatic climate has changed since 2001. Then General Musharraf was President and in almost full control of his military and intelligence officers. Now there is a weak civilian ggovernment in Islamabad, led by President Zardari, and a military and intelligence community which believes it should be calling the shots on issues of national security.

This all adds up to a very dangerous situation in which the American government has to play a calming role at a time when it is in transition and has many other problems to deal with. The young men who carried out the mass murder ion Mumbai may niot have worked all of this out in advance, but its quite possible, those who sent them to kill intended this to end up in a crisis which impacts on America ability to fight Al Queda and the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mumbai, Terrorism And Strategy, Tim MarshallDecember 1, 2008 11:12 AM

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Writing in a post for his blog on The New Yorker, Steve Coll, an old and much respected hand on security affairs in South Asia had something interesting to say about the terrorist attack in Mumbai and the likely reaction from Pakistan. His argument is that the options for India are limited. Simply because the Pakistanis know that they are blessed when it comes to its relevance in geo-politics:

“The Pakistan Army understands this international equation thoroughly and exploits the gaps—it is careful not to expose its direct fingerprints, and yet it is brazenly persistent in pursuit of its objective of military pressure against India in Kashmir and political-military pressure on India more broadly.”

So what are the options that India can exercise in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack?

If the politicians are to be believed, there was a lot of sabre rattling at two meetings held by the government on Sunday, November 30 night. While the all-party meet called by the government was a more sedate affair, an earlier meeting organised exclusively for the UPA and its allies, held in Parliament was more telling. A representative of the Samajwadi Party is said to have suggested that this was a good time to “bomb Islamabad!”

Fine. Let’s bomb Islamabad, assuming we have the capability to do so and that the frontline aircraft of the Indian Air force are all serviceable, the MiG-21s ready to escort the bombers, and we can launch a full-scale military attack by penetrating the secure skies over Islamabad and then bomb it back to the stone age.

But are we really ready for a war?

Are we ready for the fallout when two nuclear nations go to war? Are we ready for destroying everything that we have built in the last decade and a half? Are we prepared for rolling back our consistent 9 percent growth story and undertake hardships that several generations of Indians have never seen?

All this must be weighed before we take on the job of rattling our sabres. We did that once, post December 13, 2001 attack on Parliament. What did we really achieve from that 11-month old stand off with the Pakistanis? We stood on the border and they stood on the border, eyeball to eyeball, and we finally sent the forces back to the bunkers after that. But not before we had spent something to the tune of Rs 6000 crores (the official figures put it at a much lower figure pegging it a few hundred crores) and lost many precious lives of our soldiers, who stepped on mines not mapped, or tried to clear mines with bare hands while our bureaucrats held back critical mine clearing equipment.

Our air force, sanctioned 39.5 combat squadrons, is down to 30 off squadrons, our armoured corps doesn’t have the tanks to roll in, our infantry is horribly tied up in counter-insurgency operations, our soldiers and officers are poorly paid and cheated in pay commission after pay commission, while we talk about “bombing Islamabad.”

But there are options that one could look at as a credible response to these terror attacks.

…..

The international outrage that has emerged after the terrorist attack is an opportunity that rarely presents itself in a nation’s history. This is the time to forge partnerships with all those willing to work with us.

Intelligence cooperation has already been ramped up (the first warning for the current attack came from the Americans) and there are other diplomatic measures that are already underway. But, this is also the time to build partnerships with those elements in Pakistan who recognise the fact that the idea of Pakistan is in greater danger than from these terrorists than its declared enemies.

This is the time to look for partnerships in intelligence gathering — not just the non-functional anti terror mechanism that was set up earlier, but a mechanism that produces hard, actionable intelligence that can be put to good use. This is the time to look at joint covert operations against terrorists and their infrastructure simply because this is a job that the Pakistanis cannot do on their own. The Americans, the British and the NATO forces are already in the region and this is as good a time as any to build partnerships with them.

Perhaps a partnerships sounds too utopian and unrealistic, a diplomatic impossibility in times of rhetoric. But look at the facts. There is no terror attack that can bend a nation as resilient as India. It has an innate strength that will ensure that the good news story, that India was, will continue to hold true.

A lot will have to be done to weed out the systemic failures in our security apparatus. It is not about “intelligence failure” and as this case has shown, our intelligence actually produced good stuff. By calling it “intelligence failure” we are trivialising the discussion to a level that is insulting to our counter-terror mechanism as well as security apparatus. Instead, we have to realise that systemic faults have to be addressed systematically. The overhaul, if the political leadership is willing, will have to happen over months, and perhaps years. But if politics goes back to the usual set of empty promises, the usual rhetoric and the usual coteries, that will be an attack on the very idea of India itself. And the time to act, is now. Saikat Datta

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Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — India blamed “elements” from Pakistan for last week’s deadly Mumbai terror attacks and told its neighbor to match its words of cooperation with “strong action” to build a “qualitative new relationship.”

The attacks that began Nov. 26 and ended three days later have threatened to derail peace talks between the two nuclear- armed neighbors. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Nov. 27 said India will “go after” individuals and organizations behind the assault, while Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said his government will act, provided there’s evidence.

“It was conveyed to the Pakistan High Commissioner that Pakistan’s actions needed to match the sentiments conveyed by its leadership,” Vishnu Prakash, India’s foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters today in New Delhi.

India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since 1947 over the Kashmir region, which is divided between them and claimed in full by both countries. The two nations came to the brink of a fourth war in 2002, though some analysts said the latest incident may not bring tensions to that level.

“Indian and Pakistan political leaders are wiser after the experience of 2002,” said New Delhi-based C. Uday Bhaskar, a defense analyst and former director of the Institute for Defense Studies & Analyses. Statements by the Indian officials are “carefully nuanced where attention is drawn to elements in Pakistan” without “casting aspersions on the Pakistani state.”

The assault on two luxury hotels, a cafe, a rail station and a Jewish center killed 195 people, including 22 foreigners, and was the deadliest in 15 years in Hindu-majority India.

Pakistan Training Alleged

The outlawed Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Kashmiri guerilla group alleged to have carried out the attacks, still operates training camps for militants inside Pakistan and has expanded its membership, the Washington Post reported yesterday, citing Michael Scheuer, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst.

Ajmal Amir Kasab, the only suspected terrorist caught by the police, told interrogators that 24 people were trained in Pakistan over the course of a year, 10 of whom were picked for the Mumbai operation, the Times of India reported today, citing unidentified people.

Kasab said the terrorists were trained by a former soldier in seven phases, including the use of weapons and ammunition and such physical activity as diving, running and swimming, the newspaper reported, citing the unidentified people.

The two nations ended their fifth round of talks between home secretaries in New Delhi on Nov. 26, just before the attacks began that evening. They resolved to cooperate with each other to combat terrorism and take “severe action” against any elements.

Peace Talks

India says the success of the peace talks that started in 2003 depends on Pakistan ending alleged support for cross-border terrorism in the part of Kashmir under Indian control and taking steps to combat militants.

Pakistan and India should work together in the wake of the terrorist attacks and not allow the incident to spur new antagonism between them, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, told CNN yesterday. “Non-state actors” were forcing their agenda and Pakistan’s government “will cooperate with India in exposing and apprehending the culprits” behind the attacks, Zardari said on Nov. 28.

The U.S. doesn’t believe Pakistan’s government was involved in the attacks, and the Bush administration trusts Pakistan to investigate the issue, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters today. “We have no reason not to” trust Pakistan “right now,” she said.

Pakistan Meeting

Pakistan’s political leaders will meet tomorrow to discuss security policy. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will head the meeting to assess the regional situation, according to Zahid Bashir, the Pakistani premier’s press secretary.

The biggest opposition group, the Pakistan Muslim League faction headed by former premier Nawaz Sharif, which split from the Pakistan Peoples Party-led coalition government in August, will attend the meeting, party spokesman Siddiq-ul-Farooq said.

Gilani canceled a trip to Hong Kong, where he was to attend the Clinton Global Initiative summit starting tomorrow, to focus on addressing growing tensions with India, Bashir has said.

The 60-hour killing spree by less than a dozen terrorists underscores the failure of India’s police force to keep pace with better armed, equipped and trained militants, a former intelligence agent said.

“That system has collapsed,” said Vikram Sood, former director of India’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the Research and Analysis Wing. “Police are overworked, understaffed and undertrained.”

At least 20 officers, including the head of the Maharashtra state Anti-Terrorism Squad, were among almost 200 people killed in the gun and grenade attacks. India Tells Pakistan to Match Its Words With ‘Action’ on Terror By Bibhudatta Pradhan and Pratik Parija To contact the reporter on this story: Bibhudatta Pradhan in New Delhi at bpradhan@bloomberg.net; Pratik Parija in New Delhi at pparija@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: December 1, 2008 12:01 EST

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