Should it become clear that the men who rampaged through Mumbai trained in Pakistan, even if the Pakistani government had no hand in the operation, what will stop the Indians from adopting the same position?

“In some ways, it doesn’t even matter whether this attack was hatched in some office in Islamabad,” said Paul Kapur, a South Asia expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and Stanford University. “The provocation in this case is orders of magnitude more than anything that’s happened before.”

Even if the Bush administration can keep the situation from escalating, President-elect Barack Obama will find his administration trying to broker cooperation between two aroused and suspicious regional powers.

An important element of Obama’s plan to reduce militancy in Pakistan and turn around the war in Afghanistan has been to push for a reconciliation between India and Pakistan, so that the Pakistani government could focus its energy on the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan that are controlled by Islamic extremists.

Obama’s advisers have spent the past few days watching the unfolding crisis for hints about how the situation might look after January 20. While they said they understand that the tensions unleashed by the Mumbai attacks might hobble the new president’s aspirations, they held out hope that the attacks might, instead, open the door to increased cooperation between Pakistan and India to weed out militants intent on more attacks.

Some in the Bush administration, as well as outside experts, agree that an Indian military response is not a foregone conclusion. The Indian government has long believed that the instability caused by a conflict with Pakistan would act as a brake on the rapid economic growth India has enjoyed. Singh has also seen Pakistan’s new civilian government as a hopeful departure from the militarism of President Pervez Musharraf's government.

... contd.