One year after Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai, Pakistan and India are in a state of cold war, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad The 10 Pakistani gunmen who killed 163 people in the Indian port city of Mumbai on 26 November 2008 can claim at least one posthumous victory. By their action they brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war: cold, defused, but war nonetheless. Islamabad is fighting a ruthless counterinsurgency against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda on its Afghan border yet most of its military hardware remains on its eastern flank primed against India. Delhi is combating its own Maoist rebellion in its southeastern states but most of its forces, too, are ranged against Pakistan. Of all the political casualties caused by Mumbai this is the most dangerous: the attack ended a fragile four-year Pakistan-India peace process and raised again the spectre of nuclear armed conflict between two nations that have already fought three times since they were partitioned out of British-ruled India 62 years ago. Belligerency, not peace, is the mood now. When, last summer, the two governments said they would "work towards" resuming negotiations they were met with scepticism in Pakistan and hostility in India, whose right-wing Hindu opposition parties demanded retribution before reconciliation. At a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September Pakistan and India's Foreign Ministers could only endorse the "idea" of resuming talks, not talks themselves. And on 22 November -- on the eve of a trip to the United States -- Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Newsweek, "It's a tragedy that Pakistan has come to the point of using terrorism as an instrument of state policy." He was referring to Mumbai. Pakistan denies the charge. The US and United Kingdom also insist there is no evidence the Pakistan state was involved in the Mumbai carnage. On the contrary, Islamabad accepts the attack was carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani jihadi outfit once nurtured by the army to fight a proxy war against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir but banned in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America. In the last year Islamabad has arrested seven LeT men in connection with Mumbai. But Delhi counters that it has left the LeT organisation as a whole intact, including its civilian wing Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), which runs hundreds of schools, mosques and clinics across the country. Worse, the man India accuses of masterminding the attack -- LeT founder and JuD leader Hafiz Said -- remains free. Twice he has been put under house arrest in Lahore only to be twice released by the Pakistan High Court. Most of the evidence India gleaned against Said is from the confession of the sole surviving Mumbai gunman, Ajmal Kasab, extracted almost certainly under torture. Pakistan lawyers say it wouldn't stand up in any court of law; so do US and UK investigators. Yet the ease with which Said received due process -- compared to other political prisoners in Pakistan who don't -- confirms for many that he and the LeT still have their protectors in Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence forces. But the main reason restraining Pakistan from going after LeT is political. For the last year the Pakistan army has been at war with its local Taliban and Al-Qaeda guerrillas. That war is not confined to its western border with Afghanistan. In the last month more than 300 people have been killed in Taliban-inspired retaliatory attacks on Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi and other towns. LeT is one of the few jihadi groups not to have taken up arms against the Pakistan state; it is also one of the most formidable, schooled by long years of guerrilla war fought in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The idea the army will open a new front against it at Delhi or Washington's bidding is imaginary, says Pakistan Senator Mushahid Hussein. "We will prosecute those behind Mumbai. We cannot do more. India has to be realistic." Delhi too has done little to ease tensions, says Pakistan. In May the Pakistan army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, offered to withdraw some forces from the eastern border, freeing them to fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda on the western one, if India did the same. India's response was to increase its strength on the border and mount three days of "war games". Pakistan says pegging the peace process on action against LeT is India's way of avoiding the issues that lie at the heart of South Asia's longest conflict, which include a more equitable distribution of waters in the partitioned Punjab state and, above all, a final solution for the divided territory of Kashmir. "Indian intransigence about resuming the dialogue process is not helping," says army spokesman, General Athar Abbas. "It is making South Asia hostage to one incident." In many ways Pakistan and India are hostage to groups like LeT. The Pakistan army is currently so stretched that it cannot deter a day-long militant siege against its own headquarters in Rawalpindi, let alone intercept a ten-man cell attacking India. If Mumbai brought the two countries to the brink of war, all know another Mumbai-like attack may tip them into it. Very few people in either nation want this. But, without peace, neither side may be able to do much to prevent it.
