The Why, and the Way Forward

According to Paki journalist Ahmed Rashid, Al-Qaeda is the prime sponsor of these attacks, because it hopes to provoke India into a military buildup on the Pakistan border. This would in turn force Pak to deploy its troops on that border, by diverting them away from the northern areas of their country. With military pressure taken off Taliban and Al-Qaeda, this would allow them to have free run of the tribal northern areas of Pakistan.

Personally, I'm not sure that Pakistan's govt would be some innocent victim of circumstances in all of this. I feel that Islamabad/Rawalpindi are quite capable of colluding with Al-Qaeda in such an agenda, because Pak Army/ISI would rather face off against us than continue fighting fratricidally against its jihadi children. They feel their nukes would effectively deter us from crossing the border anyway. So it's a safe gamble for them, especially since they know there's another indecisive wimp named Singh in charge in New Delhi. As proof, notice how Pakistan has been very quick to warn its Western patrons that it may have to rush troops to the Indian border. We haven't even yet made the slightest move to mass our troops on the border, but Pakistan is already making a case for redeploying its forces.

I feel we have to respond to these attacks, but we'd better not just do another Operation Parakram like the last time, which turned out to be a damp squib with us having to back down yet again.

What options do we have?

We could put pressure on the Americans, telling them that if they don't put pressure on Pakistan then we will (ie. by massing our troops on the Pak border, with the aforementioned consequences for the US-led war on Taliban/AlQaeda). We can't be a party to a lop-sided War on Terror, where we're all collaborating to ensure US soil is kept safe, while our own cities are left open to the wolves.

We can ask for more US backing in further closures of the sluice gates on Baglihar Dam (The US has the dominant role in the World Bank, which is the guarantor on the water-sharing agreement.) If Pakistan wants to burn down Mumbai, then we can turn Lahore into a desert.

Another thing we could do, but only after careful consideration of the pitfalls, might be to deploy Indian troops to Northern Afghanistan, since we could free up NATO troops to go southward to fight Taliban. This would have the effect of stepping up pressure on Al-Qaeda/Taliban instead of relieving it. We would then concentrate on building more roads and infrastructure for the North, to strengthen it in the likely event of a US withdrawal/retreat from Afghanistan. This would place the non-Pashtun North in a better position, once Afghan political unity breaks down and the country returns to civil war. By supporting the Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north against the inevitable Talib-dominated south, as in the past, we would re-crystallize the ethnic tectonic blocs that would revive Pashtun nationalism. The Pashtunistan issue could put Pak back on the ropes again.