An "Oh Sh*T" Moment or Three!

I was moved to title this post with an asterisk censored exclamation borrowed from the title of a recent post by Niall Ferguson, Author and Professor of History at Harvard University. Ferguson pulls no punches in a hard hitting essay that traces the decline of civilizations to a sudden drop off a cliff than a slow gradual decline over centuries. He explains the decline in these terms.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

Note these examples of how the great civilizations of the past ended their running with the bulls.

The Roman Empire didn’t decline and fall sedately, as historians used to claim. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions...

The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year....Here yesterday, gone today.

Ferguson lists five institutional innovations that he dubs "killer applications" that allowed the West to surge ahead of all of the Rest, beginning in 1500.

Western Civilization's Killer Apps

COMPETITION Western societies divided into competing factions, leading to progressive improvements.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.

THE RULE OF LAW Representative government based on private-property rights and democratic elections.

MODERN MEDICINE 19th- and 20th-century advances in germ theory, antibiotics, and anesthesia.

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY Leaps in productivity combined with widespread demand for more, better, and cheaper goods.

THE WORK ETHIC Combination of intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation. 

Ferguson presents troubling statistics to back up his view that we are hurtling like the train above, towards that cliff, and our own "Oh ShiT! moment. He then turns to describe what can be done to "reboot the system" and do, what he says Americans have always done;  kick start our instinctive loyalty to those "killer applications" of Western ascendancy.

Read More: America's Oh Sh*T Moment

Now if you want a couple of more possible "Oh Sh*T" moments to wake up too; try these possible scenarios. IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability

And Israel's possible response. Will Israel attack Iran's nuclear capabilities?

Finally, for a real slide down a mile long razor blade into a pool of alcohol is this story from The Atlantic. Read about how Pakistan moves their nukes and our plans for keeping them from ending up in the wrong hands.

Pakistan lies. It hosted Osama bin Laden (knowingly or not). Its government is barely functional. It hates the democracy next door. It is home to both radical jihadists and a large and growing nuclear arsenal (which it fears the U.S. will seize). Its intelligence service sponsors terrorists who attack American troops. With a friend like this, who needs enemies?

The Ally from Hell!

A roadmap for dealing with Pakistan

Gunmen in southwestern Pakistan attacked three NATO supply trucks on Tuesday, officials said. The New York Times reported on Tuesday evening that Pakistanis had been responsible for a 2007 ambush on U.S. soldiers.

 

The summer as waned and fall will soon usher in our second decade in the long war in Afghanistan. Last week troubling news about the often suspected and now confirmed involvement against our forces by Pakistan have come to light. Thomas Barnett has this excellent analysis of the situation and offers up five reasons for walking away from Pakistan and leaving her next door neighbors to checkmate her regional miss-behavior. Tom wrote this to introduce his column for Esquire's Political Blog.

In the wake of Admiral Mike Mullen offering such electrifying testimony last week, various commentators — and respectable ones, like Christopher Hitchens and Dexter Filkins — are circling the "long war" question of the moment: What to do about Pakistan? And it's clear to anybody with a brain at this point that Pakistan has abused our trust and military assistance as much as — or worse than — we have long abused that fake state in our pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So now, as the West's fiscal crisis kicks into high gear, progressively denuding us of NATO allies while Congress finally gets serious about reining in the Pentagon's vast budget, we've come to a clear tipping point in the whole Af-Pak intervention as its tenth year of operations draws to a close.

My advice here is simple: It is time for both Afghanistan and Pakistan to stop being our problem and ours alone to solve. The Bush-Cheney unilateralism segued right into the Obama-Biden version: We simply refuse to deal with the regional powers, all of which want a far bigger say in how this whole thing settles out. Instead of working with India, China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — and accepting that their more vigorous management of the situation would mean "victories" for them and not us — we've chosen consistently to side with Pakistan, which not only wants but is committed to keeping the region unstable.

Barnett continues by serving up five reasons, outlined below:

1. Focus on the Arab Spring instead.
2. Follow Al Qaeda elsewhere where it's really going.
3. Make new friends. And make China babysit.
5. Leave 'em be.

Now take a few minutes to read over what he is proposing and see if the logic floats?


Read More:
Pakistan America Relations

"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace."

Napoleon, and later General George Patton made "Audacity, audacity, always audacity." a famous phrase encouraging bold courage in the face of great challenge. In the same vein, blog friend Mark of Zenpundit has shown intrepid audacity for calling attention to the rogue beast roaming the strategy room in the White House for the past eight years.

It is the elephant in our strategy room - if the elephant was a rabid and schizophrenic trained mastodon, still willing to perform simple tricks for a neverending stream of treats, even as it eyes its trainer and audience with a murderous kind of hatred. That Pakistan’s deeply corrupt elite can be “rented” to defer their ambitions, or to work at cross-purposes with Pakistan’s perceived “interests”, is not a game-changing event. Instead, it sustains and ramps up the dysfunctional dynamic we find ourselves swimming against.

Mark is writing about a post that he linked from Dawn.com. The post itself is worth the read are many of the 200 comments. The comentary penned by Mark is masterful and as several of his readers note, is "spot-on." I think that his words ring out like Jefferson's metephoric "fire bell in the night," calling to, "America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite" to heed the warning before the mastodon turns on it's audience.

Read more: None Dare Call it A Rogue State.

After reading both Mark's post and the linked article, take the time to join the discussion or better; send a copy to your congressmen, senator, or even the White House, with a note that we are all watching and waiting for them to act with the same intrepid courage of those who call for this discussion.

Petraeus: "We have two weeks to save Pakistan"

Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus

Islamabad in relation to the Northwest Frontier and the Taliban

Pakistan Nuclear Facilities

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This story broke last night and was reported in the Daily Telegraph by Isambard Wilkinson. In a bit of what if and if it happens, what caused it will accelerate the debate that we took our eye off the ball, when we turned our attention to Iraq, then in a fit of hubris tried to solve the problem by borrowing against the farm and eating our seed corn as we stumbled on for three years, like a blinded elephant in Iraq and let the Taliban and AQ reconstitute themselves in sanctuaries in Pakistan. Now we are faced with the potential of having to escalate the war to a degree not seen since Vietnam or Korea to prevent Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of those who would not hesitate to pull the trigger and escape to paradise. Talk of what we might do is too sensitive for open discussion, we can only stand by and wish General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen and finally President Obama the vision and wisdom to make the right decision.

American officials have watched with growing anxiety as Taliban fighters have strengthened their grip on north-western Pakistan.

Militants advanced to within 60 miles of Islamabad, the capital, last month and were pushed back only when the US put pressure on Pakistan to launch a counter-offensive.

Gen Petraeus, the head of Central Command, which covers all US forces in the Middle East and south Asia, is reported to have said that “the Pakistanis have run out of excuses” and now accept that tough action has to be taken to guarantee the government’s survival.

Gen Petraeus, who oversaw the American troop surge credited with quelling the insurgency in Iraq, is reported to have wearied of Pakistan’s excuses for failing to take on the Taliban.

Read more: Petraeus: we have two weeks to save Pakistan

Failed States II

This week Pakistan commands our attention alongside Afghanistan as both countries seem to teeter on the brink of an abyss. Last week I wrote about Afghanistan and Failed States, this week we lead off with this column by Thomas Barnett.

In my latest book, "Great Powers," I advance the controversial notion that America's success in spreading our model of globalization around the planet will force us into many compromises with local extremists seeking cultural sanctuary from its revolutionary norms of individual emancipation. My argument is that - as a rule - most such compromises will be generational, for what is "radical" to elders soon becomes "normal" to youth.

But then I'm confronted by the recent political agreement between Pakistan's faltering government and the ascending Taliban in Swat Valley, whereby the latter is granted judicial emancipation from Pakistan's laws to enforce Islamic sharia.

Is not such accommodation a form of national suicide?

Read the whole story:

Tom Barnett: Here's how globalization meets Pakistan.

Offering another view of how Shariah Law would be administered, is this next post from LOW INTENSITY CONFLICT by Anwaar Hussain.

Now that the state of Pakistan has effectively rolled over, paws up, at the feet of the beheaders, it is time to get a glimpse into the abyss the state has brought us onto.

But before that glimpse, the lessons first.

The lesson that other militants draw from the state’s capitulation to the Taliban in Swat; the more brutal, the more ruthless, the more insane your actions against the state and the common citizens, the more concessions you can extract. If the Swat Taliban, essentially only a few hundred unruly Pathans, can bring the government of Pakistan down to its wobbly knees, why can’t the same be done in the heart of Punjab by the sons of the soil? Witness the brazen Lahore attacks.

The lesson that common citizens draw from the shameful debacle; the state is simply incapable of protecting their lives and property therefore safety lies in meekly kowtowing to the people who kill in the name of God. Witness the sad happiness of the poor Swatis after the truce with the militants was announced by the provincial government. These are the same people who, just over a year ago in the election of 2008, had comprehensively booted out religious parties in favour of a liberal, secular party to rule them.

This post is written with a pen that barely contains the rage of the author towards those who in the name of religion, impose a level of barbarity, mostly aimed towards controlling women and the weak.

Read more:

Swat Truce: A Glimpse into the Abyss

Turning our attention back to Afghanistan, this post by Agha Amin, author and former officer in the Pakistani Army comments on a recent pessimistic article by former CIA officer Milton Bearden, entitled, Curse of the Khyber Pass.

1-I am rather disappointed with this article.

2-Milt does not realise that British occupation of Afghanistan was a success story.The brits with about 15 lakh an year controlled Afghanistan's foreign policy and Afghanistan did not harbour any anti British groups with success.

3-Afghanistan's problems are centred in its neighbours.The USSR failed not because the mujahids were more martial butb because the USSR failed to realise that the centre of gravity of the problem was the Pakistani base being used by USA and Saudi Arabia.A simple solution that the USSR could have followed was massive aid to India to mount a conventional invasion of Pakistan.As a matter of fact this if done in 1983-87 would have finished the Afghan problem.

4-Presently the Afghan problem is again centred in its regional neighbours.Now no one including Russia,China,Iran,Saudi Arabia and parts of the powers that matter in Pakistan do not want the USA to succeed in Afghanistan.SEEN IN THIS CONTEXT THE USA ULTIMATELY WILL HAVE TO :

1-Agree on a settlement of Afghanistan in alliance with Russia,India and Central Asian States.

2-Divide Afghanistan into a Northern Alliance led North and a wasteland of Talibans in the south.

3-Maintain air bases to pound targets of opportunity in the region think its a myth to think that Afghanistan cannot be pacified.

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In 17th century Kabul had a Hindu Rajput Governor and Kandahar and Herat was Persian ruled.

I am surprised that respectable US analysts are so pessimistic.

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Agha Amin is an outspoken observer who brings a prospective of one seems to know the lay of the land. His observations are sometimes biting and controversial, but always worth the consideration of his point of view.

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Read more:

What the USA Can do in Afghanistan-Why Milt Bearde...

I realize the photos that accompany this post are disturbing, but I make no apologies for using them. The mistreatment of women is one of the greatest anchors holding back the advancement of a society to raise itself out of the abyss of poverty and disconnectedness.

The point raised by Tom Barnett in his column is that Pakistan can follow the example of how the United States is able to co-exist with the 562 tribal areas inside her borders. First and foremost, those tribal areas are able to exist by conforming to the Constitution of the United States as well as state laws. Pakistan as a nation must have enough power to enforce the barest constitution guarantees of basic civil rights. Without that, we must then accept the fact that parts of this world will forever remain festering sores, that the world avoids and hermetically seals off from transmigration. The course seems clear that the world can not ignore and disengage from confronting this problem. It will take the combined skill and courage of all to use the tools of diplomacy, intelligence, military and most of all economics to help pull these disconnected societies out of an abyss from which for many there seems no escape.

Reads of the Week.

Barak Obama's Administration picks

Burned NATO trucks Pakistan

First Vietnamese-American Congressmen Joseph Cao, Louisiana

Leading off this week is this post from Zenpundit, The Elite as a Tribe about President-elect Obama's appointment.

A taste of Mark's comments.

I’m not unhappy with Obama’s appointments, finding them so far to be well qualified and I’ll offer high praise for Obama’s selection of General Jones and Secretary Gates. The Small Wars/COIN bloggers are jumping for joy and the national security bloggers, along with the conservative political bloggers, should be pleased; the next Defense Secretary or Secretary of State might easily have been Anthony Lake. It’s a more conservative national security group than any time during the Clinton administration. Count your blessings folks.

What strikes me as amusing though is the entirely visceral, euphorically emotive and almost tribal “he’s one of us” support from the elite for the President-elect. Reactions that run against the supposedly cerebral and “reality based” pretensions of empiricism and skepticism for which they make a claim but seldom practice because most of them are highly-trained, vertical thinking, experts.

No sooner had Mark commented on the selection of so many academic elites to roles in government, than he posted this, The Chicago Way is Incompatible with Gravitas.

I think most people familiar with Illinois politics expected that eventually some kind of Chicago landmine was going to go off under President-elect Barack Obama - it’s just that few people expected it might happen before the 20th of January.

www.stratfor.com files another report on the Next Steps in the Indo-Pakistani Crisis.

It begins:

In an interview published this Sunday in The New York Times, we laid out a potential scenario for the current Indo-Pakistani crisis. We began with an Indian strike on Pakistan, precipitating a withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border, resulting in intensified Taliban activity along the border and a deterioration in the U.S. position in Afghanistan, all culminating in an emboldened Iran.

The scenario is not unlikely, assuming India chooses to strike.Our argument that India is likely to strike focused, among other points, on the weakness of the current Indian government and how it is likely to fall under pressure from the opposition and the public if it does not act decisively. An unnamed Turkish diplomat involved in trying to mediate the dispute has argued that saving a government is not a good reason to go to war. That is a good argument, except that in this case, not saving the government is unlikely to prevent a war, either.

Related to a post last month, What the ----- People! part of which, was about the Taliban ambushing a supply convoy in the Kyber Pass and stealing humvees destined for NATO forces in Afghanistan. I thought that embarrassment would spur commanders to improve their supply chain security. But I was wrong.

Now, two reports of attacks on the supply chain reflect out far out of sync things have gotten in Pakistan.

Trucks Torched at Pakistan Terminal Used for NATO - Associated Press

And the ink was not even dry on the story above when this report "hits the fan."

Second Attack on NATO Trucks in Peshawar - The Times

Suspected Islamist militants in northern Pakistan set fire to 100 vehicles and other supplies for US and Nato forces in Afghanistan in the early hours of yesterday morning in the second such raid in as many days.

Witnesses and local officials said that several militants attacked a freight terminal on the outskirts of Peshawar, setting fire to several dozen containers and military vehicles.

“The militants came just past midnight, firing in the air, sprinkled petrol on containers and then set them on fire,” said Mohammad Zaman, a guard at the terminal on the Peshawar ring road. “They told us they would not harm us but they asked us not to work for the Americans,” he said.

Some local officials said that about 50 containers were destroyed, while others said the attackers set nearly 100 vehicles alight including Jeeps and 20 supply trucks.

Finally, this story from Louisiana. A state that a few decades ago has a reputation for political corruption and segregationist policies. This story mirrors the recent election of Barak Obama and Governor Bobby Jindal. The United States is a nation of immigrants who become Americans with each wave adding to our strength and innovation.

GOP Finds an Unlikely New Hero in Louisiana (By Paul Kane)

Less than 24 hours after his upset defeat of a longtime Democratic congressman from New Orleans, Anh "Joseph" Cao found the weight of the entire Republican Party resting on his diminutive shoulders.

Cao, 41, ran as a reform-minded conservative against Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), a nine-term incumbent who won reelection in 2006 despite widespread publicity about the FBI finding $90,000 in his freezer during a 2005 raid on his home. Cao, the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress, plans to take a victory lap through Washington this week.

Pakistan's Army Meets Ho Chi Minh?

U.S. Army Vietnam, 1966

Search and Destroy Mission

Vietnam War Tunnel

Pakistan Army after a battle

Pakistan Army with captured arms.

In the last year of my teenage decade, I was part of the force sent by the United States to try and do what turned out to be, the impossible. The history of the Second Indochina War or Vietnam War as it is known to most Americans has been studied and debated since the first moment an American boot set foot on Vietnamese soil. That war will continue to be fodder for debate for as long as the United States exists.

An article recently in the New York Times about the efforts by the Pakistani Army to seize back a stronghold that the Taliban had carved out of their border region reminded me of tactics used forty years ago by a United States Army, superbly trained to confront their sworn enemy the USSR and the Warsaw Bloc.

We took an army that was designed to fight the "mother of all state on state wars" against the USSR. Our tactics and equipment were designed for total war and strategic thrusts and scorched earth methods to deny the enemy a foothold. The first two years of combat saw our best professional soldiers chewed up by a largely hidden enemy. By the time we adjusted our tactics the countries patience had worn thin and it became an exit strategy that governed our soul.

One of the first things discovered by American troops was the ability of the enemy to slip away unseen to what came to be know as VC tunnels. Many parts of South Vietnam were a warren of tunnels, built decades before, for earlier wars against the French and the Japanese.

A tactic known as Search and destroy became the norm, for an army indoctrinated to total war concepts. Airstrikes, carpet bombing, and massive artillery barrages were used to kill an enemy who was able to replenish themselves from cross border sanctuaries. The only lasting result of our kinetic force was to earn the enmity of the people we were tasked to help.

Only the United States Marines with their Combined Action Program (CAP) had any success winning the hearts and minds of the common people of Vietnam. And to top it off, they were deployed by General Westmoreland, to guard the DMZ as a buffer against North Vietnam, instead of being deployed to the village and rice rich Mekong Delta where their CAP program could have done some substantial good.

The article by JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH, was published in the New York Times, November 10, 2008, and illustrates how some things never change. Even the final reference to Body counts and replenishment from across the border has a familiar ring to anyone of my generation.

LOE SAM, Pakistan — When Pakistan’s army retook this strategic stronghold from the Taliban last month, it discovered how deeply Islamic militants had encroached on — and literally dug into — Pakistani territory.

Behind mud-walled family compounds in the Bajaur area, a vital corridor to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s tribal belt, Taliban insurgents created a network of tunnels to store arms and move about undetected.

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Some tunnels stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart.

In tactics reminiscent of those used in Vietnam, The Pakistani Army is fighting the war with the army they built, not the army designed for this kind of war. Their ability to adapt is challenged by their perceived need to be prepared for state on state combat with their neighbor India.

After the Frontier Corps failed to dislodge the Taliban from Loe Sam in early August, the army sent in 2,400 troops in early September to take on a Taliban force that has drawn militants from across the tribal region, as well as a flow of fighters from Afghanistan.

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Like all Pakistani soldiers, the troops sent here had been trained and indoctrinated to fight in conventional warfare against India, considered the nation’s permanent enemy, but had barely been trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics.

Even the results of combat, mirror the American experience in Vietnam.

To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it.

The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt.

As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.

The aerial bombardment was necessary, Pakistani military officials say, to root out a well-armed Taliban force.

The Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force responsible for security in the tribal areas, say 83 of their soldiers have died and 300 have been wounded since early August. That compares with 61 dead among forces of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan in the first four months of 2008.

At some point, probably over a period of several years, though no official could explain exactly when, the militants dug the series of well-engineered, interconnected tunnels.

The military now believes such tunnels lace much of Bajaur, where the militants still control large swaths of territory, General Khan said in an interview at his headquarters in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province.

And finally, an echo of words spoken in countless press briefings during the Vietnam War.

.....Col. Nauman Saeed, the officer in charge of day-to-day operations at the headquarters in Khar, said he was mired in a classic guerrilla conflict.

In September, he said, Taliban leaders in Bajaur had replenished their forces with 950 more men from Afghanistan.

"You keep killing them,” Colonel Saeed said, “but you still have them around.”

The whole story: Pakistanis Mired In Brutal Battle To Oust Taliban

The challenge is for all parties involved, Pakistan, India, the United States, Russia, China and the regional powers, to work together to confront threats such as those born out of the conditions and cultures that drive disenfranchised young men into the arms of those, who instead of asking to be left along to live with their beliefs, seek to disrupt the connectivity that is empowering billions of people across the globe. Right now is the time for confronting those whom seek to make the next article a reality.

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One would hope that cooler heads in New Delhi, Islamabad, Washington and the other capitals come together to work on new strategies before the world wakes up to this news, US Should Expect Terrorist Attack by 2013 - Daily Telegraph.

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UPDATE: This post from the Small Wars Journal blog Remembering Old and New by Paul Yingling offers some insight in a look back at COIN tactics in the Vietnam War.

Like Sliding Down A Mile Long Razor Blade Into A Pool of Vinegar

The headline is a good metaphor to compare the mission that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be facing when she tries to restrain India and still protect our interests in Afghanistan. The first article describes India's demands of Pakistan. The second article, printed in full is courtesy of http://www.stratfor.com/ who provides strategic intelligence on global business, economic, security and geopolitical affairs.

First the news article.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India demanded Pakistan take decisive action over deadly attacks in Mumbai it said were carried out by militants from its nuclear-armed rival, while the West urged cooperation to ease tension.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa were due in New Delhi, with the militant attacks that killed 183 people in India's financial capital threatening to reverse improving ties with Pakistan.

Britain's top military officer warned the tensions between the old adversaries could set back Pakistan's offensive against Islamist militants along the Afghan border.

India's foreign ministry said on Monday it called in Pakistan's envoy to New Delhi and told him attackers, who investigators said had months of commando training in Pakistan, had come from there.
More....India demands Pakistan act decisively on Mumbai attack, from Reuters.

As the preceding article focused on India's proverbial line in the sand challenge to Pakistan, the next article from George Friedman of www.stratfor.com, looks at the strategy behind the Mumbai Attack.

The article in full:

Strategic Motivations for the Mumbai Attack

Last Wednesday evening, a group of Islamist operatives carried out a complex terror operation in the Indian city of Mumbai. The attack was not complex because of the weapons used or its size, but in the apparent training, multiple methods of approaching the city and excellent operational security and discipline in the final phases of the operation, when the last remaining attackers held out in the Taj Mahal hotel for several days. The operational goal of the attack clearly was to cause as many casualties as possible, particularly among Jews and well-to-do guests of five-star hotels. But attacks on various other targets, from railroad stations to hospitals, indicate that the more general purpose was to spread terror in a major Indian city. While it is not clear precisely who carried out the Mumbai attack, two separate units apparently were involved. One group, possibly consisting of Indian Muslims, was established in Mumbai ahead of the attacks. The second group appears to have just arrived. It traveled via ship from Karachi, Pakistan, later hijacked a small Indian vessel to get past Indian coastal patrols, and ultimately landed near Mumbai.

Extensive preparations apparently had been made, including surveillance of the targets. So while the precise number of attackers remains unclear, the attack clearly was well-planned and well-executed.

Evidence and logic suggest that radical Pakistani Islamists carried out the attack. These groups have a highly complex and deliberately amorphous structure. Rather than being centrally controlled, ad hoc teams are created with links to one or more groups. Conceivably, they might have lacked links to any group, but this is hard to believe. Too much planning and training were involved in this attack for it to have been conceived by a bunch of guys in a garage. While precisely which radical Pakistani Islamist group or groups were involved is unknown, the Mumbai attack appears to have originated in Pakistan. It could have been linked to al Qaeda prime or its various franchises and/or to Kashmiri insurgents.

More important than the question of the exact group that carried out the attack, however, is the attackers’ strategic end. There is a tendency to regard terror attacks as ends in themselves, carried out simply for the sake of spreading terror. In the highly politicized atmosphere of Pakistan’s radical Islamist factions, however, terror frequently has a more sophisticated and strategic purpose. Whoever invested the time and took the risk in organizing this attack had a reason to do so. Let’s work backward to that reason by examining the logical outcomes following this attack.

An End to New Delhi’s Restraint
The most striking aspect of the Mumbai attack is the challenge it presents to the Indian government — a challenge almost impossible for New Delhi to ignore. A December 2001 Islamist attack on the Indian parliament triggered an intense confrontation between India and Pakistan. Since then, New Delhi has not responded in a dramatic fashion to numerous Islamist attacks against India that were traceable to Pakistan. The Mumbai attack, by contrast, aimed to force a response from New Delhi by being so grievous that any Indian government showing only a muted reaction to it would fall.

India’s restrained response to Islamist attacks (even those originating in Pakistan) in recent years has come about because New Delhi has understood that, for a host of reasons, Islamabad has been unable to control radical Pakistani Islamist groups. India did not want war with Pakistan; it felt it had more important issues to deal with. New Delhi therefore accepted Islamabad’s assurances that Pakistan would do its best to curb terror attacks, and after suitable posturing, allowed tensions originating from Islamist attacks to pass.

This time, however, the attackers struck in such a way that New Delhi couldn’t allow the incident to pass. As one might expect, public opinion in India is shifting from stunned to furious. India’s Congress party-led government is politically weak and nearing the end of its life span. It lacks the political power to ignore the attack, even if it were inclined to do so. If it ignored the attack, it would fall, and a more intensely nationalist government would take its place. It is therefore very difficult to imagine circumstances under which the Indians could respond to this attack in the same manner they have to recent Islamist attacks.

What the Indians actually will do is not clear. In 2001-2002, New Delhi responded to the attack on the Indian parliament by moving forces close to the Pakistani border and the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, engaging in artillery duels along the front, and bringing its nuclear forces to a high level of alert. The Pakistanis made a similar response. Whether India ever actually intended to attack Pakistan remains unclear, but either way, New Delhi created an intense crisis in Pakistan.

The U.S. and the Indo-Pakistani Crisis
The United States used this crisis for its own ends. Having just completed the first phase of its campaign in Afghanistan, Washington was intensely pressuring Pakistan’s then-Musharraf government to expand cooperation with the United States; purge its intelligence organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of radical Islamists; and crack down on al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had been reluctant to cooperate with Washington, as doing so inevitably would spark a massive domestic backlash against his government.

The crisis with India produced an opening for the United States. Eager to get India to stand down from the crisis, the Pakistanis looked to the Americans to mediate. And the price for U.S. mediation was increased cooperation from Pakistan with the United States. The Indians, not eager for war, backed down from the crisis after guarantees that Islamabad would impose stronger controls on Islamist groups in Kashmir.

In 2001-2002, the Indo-Pakistani crisis played into American hands. In 2008, the new Indo-Pakistani crisis might play differently. The United States recently has demanded increased Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border. Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama has stated his intention to focus on Afghanistan and pressure the Pakistanis.

Therefore, one of Islamabad’s first responses to the new Indo-Pakistani crisis was to announce that if the Indians increased their forces along Pakistan’s eastern border, Pakistan would be forced to withdraw 100,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan. In other words, threats from India would cause Pakistan to dramatically reduce its cooperation with the United States in the Afghan war. The Indian foreign minister is flying to the United States to meet with Obama; obviously, this matter will be discussed among others.

We expect the United States to pressure India not to create a crisis, in order to avoid this outcome. As we have said, the problem is that it is unclear whether politically the Indians can afford restraint. At the very least, New Delhi must demand that the Pakistani government take steps to make the ISI and Pakistan’s other internal security apparatus more effective. Even if the Indians concede that there was no ISI involvement in the attack, they will argue that the ISI is incapable of stopping such attacks. They will demand a purge and reform of the ISI as a sign of Pakistani commitment. Barring that, New Delhi will move troops to the Indo-Pakistani frontier to intimidate Pakistan and placate Indian public opinion.

Dilemmas for Islamabad, New Delhi and Washington
At that point, Islamabad will have a serious problem. The Pakistani government is even weaker than the Indian government. Pakistan’s civilian regime does not control the Pakistani military, and therefore does not control the ISI. The civilians can’t decide to transform Pakistani security, and the military is not inclined to make this transformation. (Pakistan’s military has had ample opportunity to do so if it wished.)

Pakistan faces the challenge, just one among many, that its civilian and even military leadership lack the ability to reach deep into the ISI and security services to transform them. In some ways, these agencies operate under their own rules. Add to this the reality that the ISI and security forces — even if they are acting more assertively, as Islamabad claims — are demonstrably incapable of controlling radical Islamists in Pakistan. If they were capable, the attack on Mumbai would have been thwarted in Pakistan. The simple reality is that in Pakistan’s case, the will to make this transformation does not seem to be present, and even if it were, the ability to suppress terror attacks isn’t there.

The United States might well want to limit New Delhi’s response. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her way to India to discuss just this. But the politics of India’s situation make it unlikely that the Indians can do anything more than listen. It is more than simply a political issue for New Delhi; the Indians have no reason to believe that the Mumbai operation was one of a kind. Further operations like the Mumbai attack might well be planned. Unless the Pakistanis shift their posture inside Pakistan, India has no way of knowing whether other such attacks can be stymied. The Indians will be sympathetic to Washington’s plight in Afghanistan and the need to keep Pakistani troops at the Afghan border. But New Delhi will need something that the Americans — and in fact the Pakistanis — can’t deliver: a guarantee that there will be no more attacks like this one.

The Indian government cannot chance inaction. It probably would fall if it did. Moreover, in the event of inactivity and another attack, Indian public opinion probably will swing to an uncontrollable extreme. If an attack takes place but India has moved toward crisis posture with Pakistan, at least no one can argue that the Indian government remained passive in the face of threats to national security. Therefore, India is likely to refuse American requests for restraint.
It is possible that New Delhi will make a radical proposal to Rice, however. Given that the Pakistani government is incapable of exercising control in its own country, and given that Pakistan now represents a threat to both U.S. and Indian national security, the Indians might suggest a joint operation with the Americans against Pakistan.

What that joint operation might entail is uncertain, but regardless, this is something that Rice would reject out of hand and that Obama would reject in January 2009. Pakistan has a huge population and nuclear weapons, and the last thing Bush or Obama wants is to practice nation-building in Pakistan. The Indians, of course, will anticipate this response. The truth is that New Delhi itself does not want to engage deep in Pakistan to strike at militant training camps and other Islamist sites. That would be a nightmare. But if Rice shows up with a request for Indian restraint and no concrete proposal — or willingness to entertain a proposal — for solving the Pakistani problem, India will be able to refuse on the grounds that the Americans are asking India to absorb a risk (more Mumbai-style attacks) without the United States’ willingness to share in the risk.

Setting the Stage for a New Indo-Pakistani Confrontation
That will set the stage for another Indo-Pakistani confrontation. India will push forces forward all along the Indo-Pakistani frontier, move its nuclear forces to an alert level, begin shelling Pakistan, and perhaps — given the seriousness of the situation — attack short distances into Pakistan and even carry out airstrikes deep in Pakistan. India will demand greater transparency for New Delhi in Pakistani intelligence operations. The Indians will not want to occupy Pakistan; they will want to occupy Pakistan’s security apparatus.

Naturally, the Pakistanis will refuse that. There is no way they can give India, their main adversary, insight into Pakistani intelligence operations. But without that access, India has no reason to trust Pakistan. This will leave the Indians in an odd position: They will be in a near-war posture, but will have made no demands of Pakistan that Islamabad can reasonably deliver and that would benefit India. In one sense, India will be gesturing. In another sense, India will be trapped by making a gesture on which Pakistan cannot deliver. The situation thus could get out of hand.

In the meantime, the Pakistanis certainly will withdraw forces from western Pakistan and deploy them in eastern Pakistan. That will mean that one leg of the Petraeus and Obama plans would collapse. Washington’s expectation of greater Pakistani cooperation along the Afghan border will disappear along with the troops. This will free the Taliban from whatever limits the Pakistani army had placed on it. The Taliban’s ability to fight would increase, while the motivation for any of the Taliban to enter talks — as Afghan President Hamid Karzai has suggested — would decline. U.S. forces, already stretched to the limit, would face an increasingly difficult situation, while pressure on al Qaeda in the tribal areas would decrease.

Now, step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have created. First, the Indian government faces an internal political crisis driving it toward a confrontation it didn’t plan on. Second, the minimum Pakistani response to a renewed Indo-Pakistani crisis will be withdrawing forces from western Pakistan, thereby strengthening the Taliban and securing al Qaeda. Third, sufficient pressure on Pakistan’s civilian government could cause it to collapse, opening the door to a military-Islamist government — or it could see Pakistan collapse into chaos, giving Islamists security in various regions and an opportunity to reshape Pakistan. Finally, the United States’ situation in Afghanistan has now become enormously more complex.

By staging an attack the Indian government can’t ignore, the Mumbai attackers have set in motion an existential crisis for Pakistan. The reality of Pakistan cannot be transformed, trapped as the country is between the United States and India. Almost every evolution from this point forward benefits Islamists. Strategically, the attack on Mumbai was a precise blow struck to achieve uncertain but favorable political outcomes for the Islamists.

Rice’s trip to India now becomes the crucial next step. She wants Indian restraint. She does not want the western Pakistani border to collapse. But she cannot guarantee what India must have: assurance of no further terror attacks on India originating in Pakistan. Without that, India must do something. No Indian government could survive without some kind of action. So it is up to Rice, in one of her last acts as secretary of state, to come up with a miraculous solution to head off a final, catastrophic crisis for the Bush administration — and a defining first crisis for the new Obama administration. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once said that the enemy gets a vote. The Islamists cast their ballot in Mumbai.
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Either way, ten men, may have done more to weaken the saffron threads that hold peace together in South Asia, than any one could have imagined before last Wednesday night. Just by holding out, they created a news spectical that played out around the world as live video feeds kept viewers glued to their TV's watching this global trainwreck.