Pakistan under pressure after Mumbai massacre

What happened

Tension between India and Pakistan escalated this week as India pointed to a Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist group as the instigator of last week’s savage assault on India’s commercial capital of Mumbai. India said the attack, in which 10 young men armed with grenades, bombs, and semiautomatic weapons killed at least 174 and injured 300, was launched by boat from the Pakistani port of Karachi. Indian police said the lone captured terrorist had been trained in Pakistan at a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group of Islamic extremists dedicated to wresting control of the disputed region of Kashmir from India, and data retrieved from a phone the terrorists left on a boat detailed calls to a Lashkar operative in Pakistan. India demanded that Pakistan hand over 20 suspected terrorists and start to eradicate terrorist groups within its borders, implying it might send troops into Pakistani territory if Pakistan’s response were insufficient. “We are a nation outraged right now,” said Anand Sharma, India’s deputy foreign minister. “Our response will be very serious.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen went to India and Pakistan to mediate between the nuclear-armed neighbors. India is a majority Hindu nation, while Pakistan is primarily Muslim. Pakistan offered to undertake a joint inquiry with India into the attack, but skeptics question whether Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has sufficient power to compel cooperation from the Pakistani military and intelligence services, elements of which have been supportive of Islamic terrorism in the past.

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What the editorials said

Pakistani leader Zardari’s “late wife, Benazir Bhutto, was a victim of radical terrorism,” said The Miami Herald, and he appears to understand the threat it poses. His job now is to persuade his military, the “real power in Pakistan,” not to fall into “the trap set by militants who want to stoke a war with India.” Pakistan must show “unstinting cooperation” in uprooting its homegrown terrorists.

In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces mounting political pressure to go after terrorists in Pakistani territory, said The Wall Street Journal. But an incursion by India would “do more harm than good,” whipping up widespread anti-India sentiment, weakening the moderate Zardari government, and creating “an opportunity for an Islamist takeover” of a nuclear-armed nation.

What the columnists said

Everyone seems to be calling last week’s attack “India’s 9/11,” said Amitav Ghosh in The New York Times. But as America’s “misconceived” response to 9/11 showed, framing a terrorist attack as an existential threat invariably leads to extreme overreactions that only aid the terrorists. Judging by its measured conduct thus far, India’s government seems to recognize that “defeat or victory is not determined by the success of the strike itself; it is determined by the response.”

India wasn’t the only target of the attacks, said Daniel Benjamin in Slate.com. So was Pakistan. The terrorists’ goal was “to destroy the limited progress that had been made to reduce Pakistani-Indian tensions and to undermine the new Pakistani civilian government’s efforts to defeat the Islamist radicalism that is consuming the state.” Indeed, one motivation of the terrorists may have been “retaliation” for Pakistani President Zardari’s efforts to rein in terrorist sympathizers in the ISI, Pakistan’s murky intelligence service.

If Pakistan can’t or won’t uproot its homegrown terrorist groups, said Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, the world has to step in. The international community should declare the terrorist-infested parts of Pakistan “ungovernable” and send troops to help the Pakistani government round up and kill the bad guys. Would this violate Pakistani sovereignty? Of course. But “nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched.”

What next?

The obvious question for Americans witnessing the Mumbai attacks was, “Could it happen here?” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. It could. An estimated 17 million vessels ply the waters on the U.S.’s massive coastline, and despite billions in Homeland Security spending, there is no defense against heavily armed fanatics who arrive by sea and simply start firing into crowds. Said one CIA expert on terrorism: “Police department commandos in America should be scratching their heads and praying.”