Yet another crisis in Indo-Pak relations is at hand. The prospects for its rapid regionalisation, to include Afghanistan, and inevitable internationalisation, involving the US and NATO, are now real.

India’s friends will wonder — its enemies have already bet on the UPA government’s weakness — whether Dr Singh has the strategic resolve for a new confrontation with Pakistan’s armed forces and direct it towards a credible set of political objectives.The decision to replace Shivraj Patil with P. Chidambaram at the home ministry suggests that the UPA government may finally be ready to take major political decisions in confronting the national security crisis at hand.

Dr Singh knows one of the first principles of statecraft is not to issue threats that cannot be carried out. If he fails to act on his promise to raise the costs to Pakistan, the credibility of his government will sink even lower. The question is not whether India should act, but how.

In developing a response to the Mumbai aggression, Dr. Singh will have to review the military/nuclear crises with Islamabad over the last decade.

In 1999, when the NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee discovered the occupation of Kargil heights in Jammu and Kashmir by the Pakistan army, it had no option but to embark on a limited war to reclaim Indian territory. Vajpayee faced a more complicated situation during 2001. In its audacity and intended political consequences, the attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001 is the closest parallel to the Mumbai attacks last week.

After considering and ruling out immediate air strikes on terrorist camps across the border, and announcing a series of rather ineffective sanctions against Pakistan, Vajpayee turned to what was then called “coercive diplomacy”. He ordered the full mobilisation of the Indian armed forces on the border and gathered the navy in the Arabian Sea.

India threatened to go to war with Pakistan, with all its consequences including nuclear, if Islamabad did not end cross-border terrorism. Analysts in India and abroad are divided over the effectiveness of India’s coercive diplomacy during 2001-02. It nevertheless saw the US along with Britain exert pressure on Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, who agreed to end cross-border terrorism on a permanent basis.

Musharraf’s promise became the eventual basis for the new peace process that was launched in January 2004. After Mumbai we are now back to square one, confronting the same dilemmas. The option of threatening a war and actually going to one must remain in Dr Singh’s political quiver. Any decision to confront the Pakistan army, however, must be crafted with great care and take into account the significant differences in the political context between 2001 and 2008. Letting outrage and domestic posturing drive policy could make matters a lot worse for India.

One major difference between 2001 and 2008 is Pakistan’s internal situation. Musharraf then was the unchallenged CEO of Pakistan. In contrast, Pakistan’s power structure is fragmented today. While Pakistan’s civilian leadership led by President Asif Ali Zardari has signaled its positive intent towards India, its security establishment has done the exact opposite.

In 1999 Indian policy-makers had to consider intelligence information that Musharraf may not have fully informed the civilian prime minister on the Kargil operations. This time, India will have to factor in the possibility that Pakistan’s president and PM may have been in the dark about the planning and execution of the Mumbai aggression.

In their statements last week, Dr Singh and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee have been careful not to blame the Pakistani leadership for the Mumbai attacks. They, instead, pointed to “elements inside Pakistan”. Zardari, in turn, has been definitive in his offer to act against any group in Pakistan, if it is shown to have links to the Mumbai aggression.

India’s actions in the next few days must be sensitive to the internal divide in Pakistan. India’s case that the Mumbai attacks are linked to groups operating in Pakistan must be strong enough to mobilise significant international pressure to test Zardari’s offer to act against these groups and their patrons in the security establishment.

Unlike in 2001, India will also have to factor Afghanistan into the equation. Official reports from Islamabad suggest that Pakistan army is ready to shift its troops from the Afghan border to the east. Pakistan’s army, never enthusiastic to join the US and NATO in the fight against the extremists on its western borderlands, is quite clearly eager to shift the political focus from Afghanistan to India.

It clearly hopes to leverage this threat with Washington at a time when the US and NATO desperately need the Pakistan army’s cooperation to stabilise the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. New Delhi’s challenge, however, is to ensure that the current crisis will lead to lasting changes in Pakistan’s policy to the benefit of both Afghanistan and India.

What Dr Singh needs now is a strategy that combines controlled escalation with flexible diplomacy to build an international coalition that includes the civilian leaders of Pakistan as well as the US and NATO. Handled right by New Delhi, this crisis may yet lead to a structural change on our north-western frontiers.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore