With the attacks in MumbaiPakistan-India relations have reverted to type, says Graham Usher in Islamabad Last week's television images of shadowy gunmen and frightened hostages being chased from Mumbai's blitzed Taj Mahal and Oberoi-Trident hotels struck several chords among Pakistanis. For some it was a grim reminder of their own recent history with radical Islam: like last year's bloody siege of Islamabad's Red Mosque and, more recently, the truck bombing that killed scores and set the Marriott Hotel ablaze, in its own way as iconic to Islamabad's landscape as the Taj Mahal Hotel is to Mumbai. Others saw the hostages as a metaphor for the transient "peace" that obtains between India and Pakistan, and how quickly it can dissolve into a prospect of war. For Barack Obama, Mumbai and its fall-out will be a lesson about the precarious nature of political visions. A month ago he was projecting peace between India and Pakistan as the fulcrum for a greater regional engagement in America's losing war in Afghanistan. Today his first foreign foray as US president may be to prevent regional war between South Asia's two nuclear tipped neighbours. MumbaiIndian-Pakistan relations have reverted to type: bristling distrust rather than collaboration. During and after the attack on India's financial capital, Indian ministers, police officers and, above all, media all laid the blame for the carnage on Pakistan or "elements in Pakistan". The evidence was sketchy and largely hearsay. But the accusations rapidly became a chorus, certainly in India and increasingly in the West. The mood now is that Pakistan could be sliding towards a war with India that few in the country want. "It is a serious situation," admitted Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi on 29 November. The strongest Indian charge is that the sole surviving assailant of the atrocity is a 21-year-old Pakistani national from the Multan region, Mohamed Amin Kasab. He and his cohorts are said to have spent five months training for the attack in camps run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), a Pakistani militant outfit. The aim was to "kill as many as possible," Kasab allegedly told his captors. Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) was one of several violent jihadi militias formed by Pakistan's premier Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the late 1980s to fight a "deniable" proxy war with India over Kashmir, the Himayalan territory contested between the two countries and cause of two of their three wars. Outlawed by Pakistan in 2002, it is active in anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir and, less violently, in Pakistan. India claims it has also carried out attacks inside India, most notoriously an assault on the Delhi parliament in December 2001 that nearly brought the two countries to war. LT denies the charge. It also denies any hand in Mumbai. "We have nothing to do with the attacks. We do not believe in killing innocent civilians," said a LT spokesman in Indian Kashmir on 27 November. Official Pakistan reaction to the Indian claims has been incoherence. The civilian government, quite honestly, has exuded fear. Probably prompted by Washington, it offered to send the head of the ISI to cooperate with any Indian investigation into the Mumbai attacks. The army vetoed the offer. While prepared to help "at the technical level", it was "too early" to send the ISI head to work with his Indian counterparts, said a former ISI officer. It could also be misconstrued that the ISI was somehow complicit in the attacks. The view in the army in any case is that India is exploiting Mumbai both to demonise the Pakistan military and distract attention from the "probability" that homegrown militants were behind the attacks. "The Indians are taking the escalation level up at a very brisk pace," said a senior military officer on 29 November. He warned that should India start to mobilise troops on Pakistan's eastern border the army would divert soldiers there from its western border with Afghanistan, where they are currently fighting Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants. Asked who would replace the army, "the tribes", he answered. America, Britain and others will act diplomatically to try to prevent hostilities. But with India angry and in election season, and the Pakistan army "tense", no one in Islamabad is ruling them out. Analysts sketch three scenarios, none of them good. The worst is war, with India soldiers mobilising on the eastern border and Pakistan responding in kind. A second is that India offers hard evidence that LT or another Pakistani group was responsible for Mumbai and demands that Islamabad act against them. Should the army refuse to do so, India may then do what America is doing on Pakistan's western flank: fire on militant targets inside Pakistan but without the approval of its government. The Pakistan army has so far refrained from any retaliation to the US strikes. It would be harder to do so were the finger on the trigger Indian. The third scenario is perhaps the likeliest. Pakistan-Indian relations will go cold until after the Indian elections are completed in April 2009. India wanted a "leap" in ties with Pakistan, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee told Qureshi on 29 November, but "outrages like the attack on our Embassy in Kabul [in which Delhi believes the ISI was complicit] and now the attack on Mumbai are intended to make it impossible." Leaping forward with India and Pakistan was part of Barack Obama's grand regional plan for peace in Afghanistan. It lies among the dead of Mumbai.
