Since FA didn’t have an issue in the wake of Mumbai, it offered as backgrounders two seminal essays it had published earlier: Dennis Kux’s India's Fine Balance (May/June issue, 2002) and Sumit Ganguly’s Will Kashmir Stop India's Rise? (July/August issue, 2006). Kux praised the then government’s decisiveness in bringing India behind the US over the war on terror and studied the consequences of the December 13, 2001 Parliament attack. A positive appraisal of India and its future, it cautioned the government to settle domestic issues first, such as the legacy of the Gujarat riots. Ganguly’s piece admits the problem of Kashmir as a hindrance for India and Pakistan, but rules out its potential to destabilise India's economic and political rise. Nevertheless, Kashmir could cause a nuclear war and the US must use its influence in Islamabad to bring about an agreement on Kashmir.

The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic introduces Robert D. Kaplan’s Behind Mumbai as offering “insight into the Hindu-Muslim tensions festering within India”. Kaplan’s main article will appear in the next issue (January 2009). In a short piece, Kaplan analyses the name “Deccan Mujahideen”: how the Deccan was one area the Mughals never dominated. This Mughal history “has taken on heightened symbolism in India in recent years precisely as a result of electronic communications and education, all of which have sharpened the country's religious divide”. What follows is more of the history of the “home-grown”.

The American Prospect

A.J. Rossmiller's Will the Mumbai Terrorists Get What They Wanted? paints one of the worst doomsday scenarios. Rossmiller seems convinced that “the goals of the terrorists—destabilising India and strengthening extremists in Pakistan—will have some success” — India’s government is weak and won’t be able to ignore 26/11 "even if it wanted to". Unable to get its demands met, India will send troops to the border. Sectarian violence within India will follow and a hard-line government come to power. A frustrated and fractured India in war posture, a US in a tight corner, a Pakistan moving troops away from the Afghan border to the east is a recipe for catastrophe, he concludes.

City Journal

Guy Sorman’s The Mumbai Strategy begins with an academic pretence: that Islamist terrorists owe more to Leninist thinking than the Quran (nothing new there). Mumbai, 26/11 happened during crucial elections, exposing its links to Al-Qaeda’s global ambition—to conquer a country for its military base and create a model for a future Caliphate. In India, the Internet and the globalised city are destroying the million local, syncretic Islams and converting migrant Muslims to a global Islam. The Indian leadership should acknowledge that with the shift in its economy and urbanisation, “India has become the perfect hunting ground for Islamist recruiters”.

Der Spiegel

Two Spiegel articles deserve particular mention - In the Triangle of Terror by the Spiegel team and Claus Christian Malzahn’s opinion India is pointing in the Right Direction. India is “an outpost of the West in the East” and globalised Mumbai is the city that obviously attracts Islamists' fury. Spiegel makes no secret that it suspects Pakistan. Referring to Carl von Clausewitz, Malzahn says that it is “difficult to win a war when one side refuses to accept moral, military, or state boundaries while the other is permanently bound by them”. This, in brief, is the story of the war against the jihadis. Despite the odds, the Indian and Pakistani regimes can “agree to a marriage of convenience” since they have the same enemy