It has been a tense game of poker between India and Pakistan since the Mumbai attacks. On the face of it, India had the much stronger hand — not least because it captured one of the attackers alive and got him to confess to being trained in Pakistan.

But has it played its cards well?

Some analysts say India overplayed its hand in the initial days after the attack by saying the military option remained open.

That allowed Pakistan to cloud the issue and raise the spectre of an Indian military strike — neatly uniting the country behind the army and against India.

One former foreign secretary told me India had made a mistake on those initial days, by making a threat it was not prepared to carry out and allowing Pakistan the chance to play the victim.

Since then, New Delhi has been much more restrained and cautious in what it has said, admirably so according to diplomats and analysts I have spoken to. On Monday it presented its carefully complied dossier of evidence to Pakistan and other countries.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the stakes again this week by suggesting that the Pakistani “agencies” must have known about and supported the plan to attack Mumbai.

Pakistan has once again pounced on this claim, accusing Singh of engaging in a propaganda war.

Last year India had the backing of the U.S. in its allegation that the ISI was involved in the attack on its embassy in Kabul.

But this time around, diplomatic sources say New Delhi has yet to prove to them that the ISI was involved.

“In their oral presentation, Indian officials told the envoys of their belief that the ISI was indeed involved in the incident,” Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in the Hindu newspaper.

“Thought his claim was not contested, at least one nation, the United States, has told India it is still not in a position to share this perception.”

I wonder now if Singh might have overplayed his hand again. Should he have stuck to what can be proved in a court of law, so that he retains the moral high ground and gives Pakistan no room to wriggle out?

Or is he simply saying what everybody knows — that the ISI has links to extreme Islamist groups and must have at least known this attack was being planned?

I once paid a cop 30 ringgit (about $10 then) for making an apparently illegal left-hand turn in Kuala Lumpur. Scores of drivers in front of me were also handing over their "instant fines", discreetly enclosed within the policeman's ticketing folder. It was days ahead of a major holiday and the cops were collecting their holiday bonus from the public.

Malaysia opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim holds a disc he says contains evidence of judge-fixing in Malaysia 

I felt bad about this, of course. What I was doing was illegal, immoral and perpetuating an insidious culture that goes by many names in the East -- "baksheesh" in India, "Ali Baba" (and his 40 thieves) in Malaysia, "swap" in Indonesia (means "to feed").  But the policeman pointed out I would have to take off the good part of a day to go to court and pay 10 times as much to the judge. So I rationalised: "When in Rome..."

Alas it was not the first time, nor would it be the last that I have (ahem) paid an "informal levy" to officialdom. I've given baksheesh to the phone company in India to get a telephone installed, and to get a driver's license without a test (no wonder there are so many accidents in India.)  I've paid the immigration officer at Jakarta airport to let me in with a nearly expired passport.

Many of my friends in Asia have similar tales to tell about bribing customs agents, power companies, hospitals, schools -- anybody with the power to give a license or provide a service. A couple of bucks here, a couple there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money. Daniel Kaufmann, who spearheaded the World Bank's efforts to improve the study of governance and the rule of law estimates that $1 trillion of bribes are paid every year. A Reuters series on corruption in Asia found that perceptions of corruption in the emerging markets of Asia have not improved much over the years and have even declined in some cases. This is despite a growing revulsion among people in those countries for business as usual on the "demand" or government side, and a growing realisation from companies on the "supply side" of the bribery equation that payola is simply bad for business.

  Protester holds a  wanted poster for ousted Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra at a mass anti-government rally in Bangkok.

Part of the problem is mindset and a major attitude adjustment might be needed. People may be fed up with "money politics" and crony capitalism in their countries, but they still pay off people in their neighbourhoods. A U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research study on unpaid parking fines issued to diplomats in New York, home to the U.N., showed Southeast Asian nations again among the league leaders and a remarkable correlation with more conventional measures of corruption. You can take the man out of his corrupt country, but you can't take the culture of corruption out of the man. 

Anti-graft fighters model uniforms that those convicted of corruption offenses inIndonesia willbe required to wear in court and jail.

    For years, Indonesia ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world.  It permeates almost every level of society, reducing the country's appeal to foreign investors, and curbing Indonesia's potential for growth.  Today, Indonesia's anti-corruption agency, known by its acronym KPK, has won plenty of media attention with its Jame Bond-like undercover exploits against corrupt officials.  The government is also trying to get at the root of the problem by sending officials and judges to "anti-corruption school.

    Passers-by in Jakarta walk past a poster that reads "fight corruption." 

Some OECD countries will even let you take a tax deduction for providing "facilitation payments" to get routine services such as a phone installed. Facilitation payment? Hello, it's called a bribe, payola, grease, ice, a backhander. It's corruption, the dictionary definitions of which include moral perversion, depravity, debasement, not to mention rottenness. Okay, that's a little harsh. We're not talking about the moral equivalent of, say, paedophilia. But it's surely a slippery slope from giving the cop some lunch money, to bribing the customs guy to look the other way on a smuggled shipment, to paying off politicians.

Ramon Navaratnam, 73, the Transparency International Malaysia President told me the battle for him started when he was a young man in the finance ministry and he came home one night from work to find a case of whisky on his doorstep from a company bidding on a government contract. "It took a lot of doing, but the company finally took the whisky away. "If I had taken that box of whisky, I can never say no later on."

The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq's capital. A decade later,  the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York. 

Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in "the age of celebrity terrorism". Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was "an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion". 

It's too early to tell if governments will respond with extreme reaction, but the saturation coverage of the drama in the world's media would suggest that, at least on this level, the killers were successful.  

"Almost within minutes, television screens showed harrowing scenes of pools of blood where people had died or been injured, hotels ablaze, Indian army snipers firing at distant targets, and CCTV images of the attackers," Cornish writes.

The first reports of shooting in the streets of India's financial capital did not actually come from the mainstream media.  A BBC news technology blog suggested that the social networking site Twitter  "came of age" during the attacks because it carried messages on the shootings some time before television networks and news agencies started reporting them. Indeed, according to a Reuters report, blogs fed an information frenzy on the 60-hour gun rampage and siege, underlining the emergence of citizen journalism in news coverage.  

However, the live coverage that followed on television networks, particularly Indian ones,  was shrill, sensationalist and bordering on the hysterical. As the Financial Times points out, this is not new in India's competitive television market, where some channels flash the words "Breaking News" all day and "the only thing that matters is to be 'first', even if first is wrong".  The blizzard of reporting inaccuracies over this incident was astonishing. In a despatch on why we should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt, Jack Shafer catalogues the instances from Mumbai of what he calls "crap masquerading as authoritative news".

How does high-octane reportage like this feed into the popular mood, and how far could that influence the hands of policy makers in New Delhi and Islamabad?

To find out, watch for Breaking News.

                                                      By Simon Cameron-Moore

Anyone who lives in Islamabad will recall the  moment they heard the explosion of a suicide truck bomb that killed 55 people at the Marriott Hotel on a Saturday night in September.

Sitting in their homes, watching television, having supper, putting their children to sleep, they were physically hit by  the shockwave.

The cause was unmistakable. The sight of flames leaping from the windows of a place where we had all dined, met contacts, and attended conferences was chilling.

A month later, I left a depressed Islamabad for a week's leave. Many of the foreigners and their families had left the Pakistani capital for good. I just went to India for a break to
see colleagues and old friends I first met in the late 1990s during an earlier assignment.

Living in a city spooked by security scares and covering bomb blast after bomb blast inevitably results in a certain morbidity.

As I visited old haunts in Delhi and Mumbai, the
vulnerability of India's beautiful hotels  was all too obvious.

I told my friends that I feared  it would only be a matter of time before the five star hotels were targeted.

The militants had hitherto mostly sought to create panic and mayhem by attacking the general population as they shopped at bazaars or travelled on public transport.

India's luxury hotels are centres of excellence, they are masters of hospitality, full of grace and style. They are where elites and foreign businessmen and wealthy tourists go.

Security at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai had tightened when I visited in early November.

The side and back entrances, which journalists often use, were closed, and the only way in was via the main front entrance.

I passed by the elegant, colonnaded swimming pool, and thought how easy it would be for someone to toss a grenade over the wall from the street behind. as they did at Islamabad's
Luna Caprese restaurant in March.

A few years ago there was an explosion at a taxi rank opposite the Taj, where the road curls round by the Gateway of India. After that, I think taxis were barred from dropping passengers on the covered concourse apron at the foot of the steps to the lobby.

Since then the hotel management took a further step, introducing a security check at the entrance to the concourse from the road that visitors on foot would pass through.

It seemed rather thin protection for someone used to hotels in Pakistan. I walked past the Taj and the Oberoi on Nariman Point, and I thought of the truck bomb filled with explosives,
spiked with aluminium powder that created the inferno at the Marriott.

The results were devastating even though the truck never made it past the entrance from the road thanks to a retractable steel barrier that rises out of the ground to stop vehicles entering freely before being checked.

And then I thought how the security industy's infrastructure would
change the landscape of India's porous cities when their enemies shifted targets.