Nasty Neighbors With Nukes

Indian-Pakistani relations are about at the worst place they've been since they almost came to blows a few years ago. There's a preponderance of evidence pointing to the theory that the Mumbai terrorists received several months of training in Pakistan itself.

A former Defense Department official said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies had determined that former officers from Pakistan’s Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped train the Mumbai attackers.

But the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that no specific links had been uncovered yet between the terrorists and the Pakistani government.

His disclosure came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held meetings with Indian leaders in New Delhi and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad, in a two-pronged effort to pressure Pakistan to cooperate fully in the effort to track down those responsible for the bloody attacks in Mumbai last week.

Also on Wednesday, a “fully functional” bomb was found and defused at a major Mumbai train station that had reopened days earlier, the Mumbai authorities announced. The discovery raised terrifying questions about why the authorities had failed to find it all this time.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people marched through Mumbai, both mourning the at least 173 dead and protesting the failures of Indian politicians and security services to protect citizens.

Ms. Rice strove to balance demands on both countries. She said that Pakistan had a “special responsibility” to cooperate with India and help prevent attacks in the future, here and elsewhere. At the same time, she warned India against hasty reaction that would yield what she called “unintended consequences.”

“The response of the Pakistani government should be one of cooperation and of action,” she said at an evening news conference in New Delhi with her Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee. “Any response needs to be judged by its effectiveness in prevention and also by not creating other unintended consequences or difficulties.”

Mr. Mukherjee said his government was convinced that the attackers and their “controllers” came from Pakistan. He said he had conveyed to Ms. Rice “the feeling of anger and deep outrage in India” and said that his government was prepared to act “with all the means at our disposal” to protect Indian territory and citizens.

Both American and Indian authorities have concluded that there was little doubt that the Mumbai attacks were directed by militants inside Pakistan, and Indian officials have said they have identified three or four masterminds of the attack, including a leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Yusuf Muzzamil.

If this is true, then we could very well have another war on our hands here. If this had happened in the US, right now we'd be lobbing a hell of a lot of missiles, bullets, bombs and troops into the tribal regions of Waziristan.