PARIS, July 13 (UPI) -- The danger of this moment after the bombings of Bombay was best signaled at a meeting in the U.S. State Department in Jan. 2002, when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was running the crisis group that was trying to fend off an Indo-Pakistani war after Pakistani-based terrorists had assaulted India's parliament.
"Hands up everyone who thinks we are going to have nuclear war," said Armitage, at the worst moment of the crisis as India began shifting troops to the frontier. Every single hand went up.
There are four separate contexts in which the atrocity of Bombay needs to be understood, and one of them could risk the same kind of nuclear crisis that brought India and Pakistan perilously close to war four years ago after a terror attack on India's parliament.
There is as yet no evidence to link the Bombay bombings to any specific group, and the usual Kashmir-based and Pakistani-backed suspects like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen have denied responsibility and denounced the attack. The Indian government says there are so far few leads, and it has deliberately refrained from naming any particular organizations as suspects.
"I urge each one of you to remain calm," said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. "Do not be provoked by rumors. Do not let anyone divide us. Our strength lies in our unity."
But India's foreign ministry has called on Pakistan to take action against militants operating from its territory, and New Delhi's official spokesman accused Pakistan's foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri of an "appalling" attempt to link the bombings to the failure to resolve the dispute over Kashmir.
With the death toll from the bombings now claiming over 200 lives, the second context is that of India's domestic politics. The risk of ethnic violence between Hindus and India's Muslim minority is ever present, and this latest outrage will test the cohesion of premier Singh's awkward coalition government while energizing the Hindu nationalism of the opposition. The political pressures on him are acute.
The third context, which looms the larger as the G8 summit in St. Petersburg brings together the world powers, including a scheduled visit by premier Singh, is the broader issue of Islamic extremism and terrorism.
"Since 2003, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two of al-Qaida, has been critical of India and the Hindus," says former Indian Cabinet and intelligence official B. Raman. "Since the visit of President Bush to India in March 2006, Osama bin Laden has joined this criticism. Before March 2006, al-Qaida and bin Laden used to talk of a Crusader-Jewish conspiracy against Islam. Since March 2006, they talk of a Crusader-Jewish-Hindu conspiracy against Islam."
India, with its simmering dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and with its own Muslim minority forming the world's second largest Islamic population, has long felt itself to be in the front line of targets for Islamic terrorism. The return of the Taliban insurgency to Afghanistan and the support bases that al-Qaida evidently maintain in Pakistan's North-West frontier province, widely believed by Western intelligence agencies to be bin Laden's own sanctuary, puts the menace on India's doorstep.
The fourth and final context is the fragile Asian security equation, in which China and India have emerged as the two dominant regional powers, condemned by geography to a kind of geo-political rivalry. Despite strenuous efforts in Beijing and New Delhi to improve relations, Pakistan is still seen by India as China's client state. Pakistan has been armed, financed and backed from China because it is useful to Beijing as a way to keep constant pressure on India's western flank, and as a distraction for India's military forces and its strategists.
Last week, India tested unsuccessfully its new Agni-III ballistic missile, whose long range makes it irrelevant to the Indo-Pakistan nuclear balance. The Agni-III is designed to reach Chinese cities like Guangdong and Shanghai, and thus to establish a clear and permanent nuclear deterrent against Beijing. This need not be destabilizing; the evidence of the Cold War is that mutual nuclear deterrence can make for stable relations, if not for good neighbors.
But the pattern is ominous. India, for all the caution of the government, believes that the acts of terrorism against it are being carried out by Islamic groups that have enjoyed discreet support from ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence arm. (The police chief of Maharashtra state, of which Bombay is the capital, said Wednesday that the bombings "bore the hallmarks" of Lashkar-e-Toiba, the best-known and most militant of the Pakistan-based organizations operating in Kashmir.)
China's unflinching support for Pakistan's military-backed government of President Pervez Musharraf is seen by Indian hard-liners as giving China some indirect responsibility for the attacks. This is specious; they might as well blame the Bush administration, whose hailing of Musharraf as a leading ally in the war on terror would thus make Washington into some kind of accessory to the attacks. But that is the way that intelligence officials and military men are trained to think, and there is no shortage of Indian politicians on the left who think that the United States is indeed playing a double game with Pakistan, for all the Bush administration's embrace of India as a strategic partner.
The point is that each of these four contexts is dangerously unstable, and that Indo-Pakistani relations, Hindu-Muslim relations and the broader Asian security system are all simultaneously fragile and mutually interlinked. And yet such is the delicate state of India politics and Manmohan Singh's coalition government after the big stock market correction that out such a dent into India's economic self-confidence, that the government must be see to be doing something decisive in response to the latest atrocity.
Clearly it has to find and punish those responsible and the terrorist cells in the support system. Over 350 people were arrested overnight in and around Bombay, but the Kashmiri terrorist groups are well-organized, well-financed and well dug-in. There will be no quick fix. Second, the government must guard against any attempts to provoke communal violence and be prepared to deploy police or paramilitary forces -- and to overrule local state governments whose record on this score has been appalling -- at the first sign of trouble.
New Delhi also has little choice but to take up the issue of terrorist attacks on Indian cities directly with the Pakistani government in Islamabad. Under the Islamabad accord of 2004, Gen. Musharraf solemnly pledged to end the use of Pakistani territory by terror groups. He has made some token gestures, but by changing their names and moving office addresses, the work of the groups has continued, and Indian intelligence officials firmly believes that ISI continues to provide arms and funding and discreet support. So expect the Indian government to join Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai in demanding that Pakistan get serious and transparent and start verifiably to shut down terror groups that operate on its territory, close their training camps and arrest their leaders.
That is where the final, international context comes in, as the G8 leaders gather in Russia. The pressure on Pakistan to police its own wild children in ISI and to get serious about the terror havens in its frontier districts is going to have to become international, with Russian and Chinese support for the kind of cross-border counter-terror operations that frustrated U.S. troops in Afghanistan have yearned to carry out. That is where the G8 can make a key contribution, and if it does not, then the tensions of the Indo-Pakistan relationship could become as dangerously heated as they were in 2002, when the U.S. State Department's own experts thought that there was going to be a nuclear war.
