As the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice arrives in New Delhi to handle what could be the last major international crisis for the Bush administration in the wake of the Mumbai aggression, President-elect Barack Obama is gearing up for his first.

Obama and his team are being kept in the loop by Rice and her colleagues in the Bush administration on the post-Mumbai dynamic between India and Pakistan. Obama got his first briefing as he sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, when an official team arrived in Chicago to fill him in.

When he announced his national security team on Monday, Obama reaffirmed his solidarity with India that he had earlier conveyed to Manmohan Singh. He also declared that “the situation in South Asia as a whole and the safe havens for terrorists that have been established there, represent the single most important threat against the American people”.

During the campaign, Obama articulated the proposition that Afghanistan can’t be stabilised without addressing the problems insidePakistan. He also pointed to the relationship between the crises on Pakistan’s western and eastern frontiers.The Mumbai attacks are likely to reinforce his conviction that South Asia needs an integrated approach. If the Bush administration is unable to manage the crisis in the next weeks, it could well be the first order of diplomatic business when Obama is sworn in next month.

At the moment though, American attention will be riveted to Indo-Pak crisis management rather than conflict resolution. Although Rice is not traveling to Pakistan in an obvious mediatory effort, India knows Washington is fully engaged with Islamabad on defusing the gathering tension. Obama promised that his “administration will remain steadfast in support of India’s efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and bring them to justice”.

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