Instead of agonising over the difficult choices in raising the political pressure on Pakistan, the UPA government must focus on a few urgent priorities after Mumbai. The first is to stop the next major terrorist strike against a major urban target. That US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly referred to “prevention”, in both New Delhi and Islamabad, may indicate the intelligence on another possible attack. If the UPA fails in this task, its domestic political credibility, or what remains of it, could be torn to shreds. It would at once eliminate all diplomatic options for New Delhi and could force it to take extreme measures with Pakistan. Prevention, however, involves a lot more than the protection of major facilities like airports. There are thousands of soft urban targets in India; there is no way to protect all of them. The government’s challenge is to catch the terrorists before they strike. Instead of blaming each other for the Mumbai fiasco, the government’s security agencies must launch a massive coordinated nation-wide effort to bust the various terrorist plots that we must assume are in play right now.

Preventing the next attack would necessarily involve increasing the political pressure on Pakistan. The most important way of doing this is to complete, rapidly and efficiently, the investigations into the Mumbai attacks and present a convincing case on the links between the terrorists who sailed into Mumbai last week and their handlers in Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Toiba. Thanks to the expansive communication trail left behind by the Mumbai attackers, that task should not be too difficult. India’s police work into past terrorist attacks has not always been satisfactory. There is no room for any shoddiness in wrapping up the Mumbai dossier.

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