Following up on my earlier post about what is happening behind the scenes in the fraught relationship between India and Pakistan, it's worth keeping track of this report that Islamabad is considering appointing former foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan to handle the informal dialogue with New Delhi known as "backchannel diplomacy".

As discussed in this story there has been much talk about trying to get the backchannel diplomacy between India and Pakistan up and running again, both to reduce India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan and to prevent an escalation of tensions between the two countries themselves.  So any forward movement on the backchannel diplomacy, if confirmed, would be important.

To recap (and with apologies to those who already know this), India and Pakistan have many different ways of engaging with each other.  They have a formal peace process known as the composite dialogue, started in 2004 and broken off by India after last November's attack on Mumbai.  India has said it will not resume the composite dialogue until Pakistan takes more action against those accused of involvement in Mumbai.

Then there are Track II talks, in which politicians, journalists, administrators and others on both sides of the border meet in a private capacity to try to promote understanding between India and Pakistan.

Senior politicians also have a habit of holding bilateral meetings on the fringes of international conferences, as happened when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met President Zardari in Russia in June and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in Egypt in July. The foreign secretaries, or top diplomats, of both countries are also expected to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this month, ahead of a meeting between the foreign ministers.

But of all the different ways that India and Pakistan have found to engage with each other, the backchannel diplomacy carried out away from the glare of the media has arguably been the most successful. In 2003, the two countries agreed a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing disputed Kashmir, and extended it to Siachen, where the two countries had fought a high-altitude war since 1984.

In 2007, Satinder Lambah, a special envoy to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and Tariq Aziz, envoy to then president Pervez Musharraf, etched out a set of principles meant to allow them to work towards a resolution of the Kashmir dispute (Praveen Swami at The Hindu gives the details here.)

I'm told there is no evidence the deal would ever have worked - many crucial details had yet to be negotiated. And since the backchannel talks were held in secret, it has always been unclear whether either country could win over domestic constituencies which might resist or sabotage any peace deal. But the backchannel diplomacy, and the intellectual space it opened up even to consider an agreement on Kashmir, functioned as an important "shock absorber" between two nuclear-armed countries which have already fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947.

The tentative "roadmap" agreement fell apart as Musharraf's own political fortunes deteriorated, and the backchannel talks have yet to find their feet again in any kind of structured format.

The signs are that many other informal discussions are going on. As discussed here, the Pakistan Army has moved a significant number of troops away from its eastern border with India to fight the Pakistani Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan. The head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) broached what is effectively Indian territory by attending an iftar at the Indian High Commision in Islamabad. And the Indian government is trying to work out how to engage the Hurriyat, the main political separatist group in Kashmir, and that is something it can only do with Pakistani acquiescence.

But these informal contacts have lacked the structure of the backchannel diplomacy, whose main aim was to work out a way towards peace.

Until this week, it was unclear who would handle the backchannel diplomacy on the Pakistan side to replace Tariq Aziz, who was an appointee of Musharraf. On India's side, Satinder Lambah could remain as a special envoy to the prime minister.

So the suggestion that Riaz Mohammad Khan might be appointed to fill that role for Pakistan would be a major step forward.

That said, there are plenty of spoilers in both countries who don't believe in the peace process. So if India and Pakistan find a way back into their secret backchannel diplomacy, we might never know.

(Reuters file photos: A child at the funeral of Benazir Bhutto; Prime Minister Singh and President Zardari in Yekaterinburg; the gates closing on the india-Pakistan border; and a soldier at base camp in Siachen)

India and Pakistan, with their competitive strategic interest in Afghanistan, are keenly watching the war-battered nation’s election this week, the second since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001.

The front-runner of that vote is incumbent President Hamid Karzai who is facing a stiff challenge from his former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani. There are more than two dozen other candidates.

While a successful vote could mean a step toward achieving basic political and military stability in Afghanistan, its outcome holds crucial geopolitical significance for India and Pakistan.

Conventional wisdom is that a victory for Karzai will help India. Karzai has lived and studied in India, cultivated a strong relationship with New Delhi and spoken out angrily against Pakistan, especially during the years it was ruled by Pervez Musharraf.

Abdullah and Ghani too have India connections — while the former lived there, Ghani was once posted in New Delhi with the World Bank.

So in that sense, Pakistan should have no serious good option, and the various candidates who offer any potential to project its influence in Afghanistan, Islamabad should be more or less a supporter of them, says Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Markey says Pakistan may tend to prefer Karzai simply because he is “known quantity” and his relations with the civilian government in Islamabad are better than before.

But former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar argues Pakistani intelligence disfavours Karzai’s victory as it has scores to settle with almost all the warlords who rally behind Karzai — Mohammed Fahim, Karim Khalili, Mohammed Mohaqiq, Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan — and they happen to be in the rogues’ gallery in the Western world, too.

But a Hamid Karzai victory may not be without complications for India.

New Delhi, which is seeding Afghanistan with projects spanning sanitation to roads and power, is worried at Karzai’s election promise to intensify peace talks with the Taliban and other insurgent groups such as Hezb-i-Islami.

Last month Karzai’s government announced it had reached a truce with local Taliban fighters in Badghis, a province in the north. Some Taliban leaders later denied there was such a truce.

Karzai’s government has enlisted the help of former Taliban officials in recent months to act as go-betweens in an effort to reach out to fighters. Saudi Arabia has also indicated its
willingness to help in mediation efforts.

Such moves have worried Indian officials who say they fear a U.S.-British-Saudi-Pakistani plan to co-opt the Taliban into the Afghan power structure as part of the NATO’s Afghan exit plan.

If that happens, Indians suspect, wouldn’t it then just be a matter of time before the Taliban start going after their enemies?

It may not, however, be as simplistic but India does seem to have a job of dissuading Karzai from pushing for a rapprochement with the Taliban.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has staked his political reputation on talks with Pakistan, earning in equal measure both praise and contempt from a domestic audience still burned by last November's attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants.

"I sincerely believe it is our obligation to keep the channels of communication open," he said in a debate in parliament on Wednesday. "Unless we talk directly to Pakistan we will have to rely on a third party to do so... Unless you want to go to war with Pakistan, there is no way, but to go step-by-step... dialogue and engagement are the best way forward," Singh said.

That may sound like fairly anodyne stuff. But to recap, Singh signed a joint statement with Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani at a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt this month in which both ordered their foreign secretaries -- their top diplomats -- to hold more talks to improve relations. Singh however also said the formal peace process -- the so-called composite dialogue -- could not be resumed until Pakistan took more action against those who organised the Mumbai attack.

The outcome was pretty much what was expected from the talks in Egypt, effectively forming a stepping stone between an ice-breaking meeting between Singh and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on the sidelines of a regional summit in Yekaterinburg in Russia in June and the next international forum where senior politicians from both countries will be present -- September's U.N. General Assembly (though Singh is not personally expected to attend.)

But what has outraged the political opposition in India, along with large sections of the media, has been the specific wording of the joint statement.

The first allegedly offending reference is contained in the part of the statement which summarises what each prime minister said during their talks: "Prime Minister Gilani mentioned that Pakistan has some information on threats in Baluchistan and other areas."  Outsiders may find this hard to follow but the mention of the "B" word has been portrayed as Indian capitulation to Pakistani accusations that it supports a separatist movement in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, an allegation India denies.

The second allegedly offending reference is as follows: "Both prime ministers recognise that dialogue is the only way forward. Action on terrorism should not be linked to the Composite Dialogue process and these should not be bracketed."

No matter how many times I read that sentence, I still find it has all the ambiguity of an Escher painting. It can mean either that India will talk to Pakistan without waiting for it to take action on terrorism, or that Pakistan should take action on terrorism without waiting for India to resume the formal peace process.

Thousands of words have been written about the meaning of this sentence, along with the "B" word, in the last two weeks since the joint statement was issued. (And to keep it in perspective, that's considerably less than the many words which have been written about the exact timing, details, circumstances and implications of the Instrument of Accession signed by the Maharajah of Kashmir pledging his kingdom's allegiance to India in 1947.)

But to get back to the bigger question of Singh's approach to Pakistan - his admirers say he has proved himself to be a great statesman; his critics that he naively caved in to Pakistan.

The Hindu newspaper said he had accomplished the impossible with his speech in parliament by silencing his critics while leaving himself the flexibility for a step-by-step approach to relations with Pakistan. "Essentially, what the Prime Minister’s remarks have done is create room for the government to be flexible in its approach to Pakistan, giving it room to calibrate the pace of engagement to the degree to which Islamabad moves ahead on its commitments to act against terror," it said.

"In the fullness of time, Dr. Singh’s response to the debate will be seen as a potential game changer in India’s official discourse on Pakistan, especially his emphasis on the inevitability of engagement, his clarity on the fact that the alternative to dialogue was war, his fear that the absence of peace with Pakistan would hold back South Asia and allow foreign powers to get involved in the region, and his recognition of the need to strengthen Pakistan’s civilian leaders. On all these points, the Prime Minister is far ahead of his advisers and, perhaps, of the “national mood” that retired diplomats and generals still fighting the battles of the past."

Indian blog, The Acorn, summed up however how far many thought Singh had taken too big a risk with his speech in parliament in the face of intense pressure to either back down or distance himself from the joint statement.

"So he stood his ground, and didn't make use of the lifelines that were created for him by the foreign ministry," it wrote.

"Whether he intended it or not, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made himself personally vulnerable. Whether he intended it or not, his Sharm-el-Sheikh lollipop is a gamble: if there is another Pakistan-originated terrorist attack during his tenure, Dr Singh will be thrown to the dogs by his own party; if there isn’t one, as the phrase goes, Singh is King."

For a man in his late 70s, who had a coronary bypass this year and who is expected to hand over power eventually to a younger generation of Congress party politicians clustered around Rahul Gandhi, the fear of being forced to resign may weigh considerably less than the possibility -- however remote it might seem -- of a peace deal with Pakistan.

And he is not alone in taking a risk on Pakistan. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajapayee made repeated attempts to make peace with Pakistan and won respect for doing so.

Where he is perhaps alone is in running so quickly against the tide of popular opinion.  His gamble appears to be that Pakistan is on the cusp of change and by failing to seize the moment, India might lose it altogether.

Right now, he has international support running in his favour. An improvement in relations between India and Pakistan could help underpin stability in Afghanistan at a time when backing for the U.S.-led war is flagging on the home front as the United States and Britain face their worst monthly losses since the Afghan war began. The United States, wary of being seen to interfere overtly in relations between India and Pakistan, is expected to continue quietly to bolster peace efforts.

So the timing, as astrologers might say, is auspicious.

Veteran Indian journalist M.J. Akbar quotes what he says is an old Sufi saying: "When you are trapped in a vicious circle, draw a larger one around it."

Can Singh and his Pakistani interlocutors complete the circle and succeed where so many others before have failed?

(Photos: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh; on the Line of Control in Drass; the Taj in Mumbai and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee meets his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Lahore)

China’s troubled Xinjiang region shares borders with eight countries, which is perhaps one reason President Hu Jintao dropped out of the G8 summit to head home, underscoring the seriousness of the situation and the need to quickly bring the vast oil-rich region under control.

Xinjiang touches Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, besides the Tibet Autonomous Region.

China, as this piece for the Council on Foreign Relations points out, has long been concerned that these states on its periphery both in central and south Asia may be tempted to back a separatist movement in Xinjiang because of the Uighurs’ cultural ties to its neighbours.

To that extent it has cultivated close ties with some of these neighbours, even trying to promote direct trade between Xinjiang and the provinces of neighbouring countries just over the border.

In April this year, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region signed an agreement to establish friendly provincial relations with Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, according to this report in the state-run China Daily.

The two sides agreed to explore partnership in oil and gas resources, bilateral trade and agriculture besides vowing to accelerate work on a long-planned direct rail link.

More importantly, Pakistan’s ambassador to China, Masood Khan, who signed the agreement, said the two sides must deepen their partnership to oppose “terrorism, extremism and separatism.”

Beijing’s concerns over the instability in Pakistan especially in the NWFP spilling over into Xinjiang have frequently surfaced, although in perhaps characteristic style, they have gone about it in low-key manner, quite different from the Western approach.

In March this year, Xinjiang governor Nuer Baikeli, speaking on the margins of China’s annual parliament meeting said his region faced threats from violence rippling across south and central Asia. Militant attacks in Pakistan and even the one in Mumbai and the violence in Afghanistan showed Xinjiang had reason to fear, he said.

The links go back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As the piece for the Council of Foreign Relations noted, many Uighurs travelled into Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s, where they were exposed to Islamic extremism.

China has worried ever since about the militants slipping in and out Xinjiang.

Pakistan’s Daily Times noted the Chinese concerns, but said Islamabad could only play a limited role given that it was itself fighting to regain control of its territory in the northwest from the militants.

[PHOTO: A boy runs past an overturned car just outside the Uighurs neighbourhood in Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region July 8, 2009. REUTERS/Nir Elias]

Foreign Policy magazine has just released its 2009 list of failing states or those at risk of failure and South Asia makes for sobering reading.

All of India’s neighbours, except for tiny Bhutan, figure in the list of top 25 states that are faltering, although their rankings have improved marginally over the previous year.

So Afghanistan remains at number 7 in the table of failing states topped by Somalia. Pakistan is ranked 10th, just marginally better than its 9th position in last year’s table which perhaps reflects the belief that the state has begun to fight back the militants who threaten its existence.

(The higher you are on this list, based on 12 indicators measuring state cohesion and performance, the closer you are to failure)

You can see the full report of The Failed States Index 2009 here.

But just to distil it, here are the rankings for South Asian nations as they changed over the past year. Myanmar is ranked 13th which is what it was in 2008.

Bangladesh has moved down to 19th position from 12th the previous year, reflecting perhaps the return of an elected civilian government there.  But it remains at risk and as a Reuters analysis here points out there is a tendency to neglect the militant threat in Bangladesh, with all the attention focused on the violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Sri Lanka takes the 22nd spot and Nepal 25rd, both slightly less at risk this year than in 2008 but still very much in the world’s top 25 states.

And India? Foreign Policy puts it at 87th position, a healthy score for a country that some thought wouldn’t survive especially during the Sikh revolt of the 1980s, and other insurgencies in that period.

Giant neighbour China, according to the editors of the magazine, is more at risk with a score of 57.

[Photo of a U.S. Marine in southern Afghanistan]

After a diplomatic pause enforced by India's lengthy election campaign, the country will soon have a new government after the ruling Congress party won an unexpectedly decisive victory.  But analysts doubt the change of government will bring a significant change of heart in India towards Pakistan.

Despite Pakistan's offensive against the Taliban in the Swat valley, they say India has yet to be convinced the Pakistan Army is ready to crack down more widely on Islamist militants, fearing instead that it will selectively go after some groups, while leaving others like the Afghan Taliban and Kashmir-oriented groups alone.  While Pakistan wants to resume talks broken off by New Delhi after last November's attack on Mumbai, India has said it wants Islamabad to take more action first against those behind the assault, which it blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is expected to remain in office after the Congress election victory, is now likely to come under pressure from the United States to soften India's stance towards Pakistan.  The current stand-off leaves both countries vulnerable to a fresh flare-up of tensions which could torpedo Washington's plans for Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also complicates U.S. efforts to persuade the Pakistan Army to move troops from the Indian border to fight Taliban militants on its western border with Afghanistan.

So how will Singh respond?

Indian analysts are already arguing India must stand up to U.S. pressure to ensure its own interests are not sacrificed to those of the United States. In an editorial in the Times of India, Brahma Chellaney writes that U.S. policy -- very much focused on Afghanistan -- now runs counter to Indian interests. He argues that Kashmir-oriented groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba are of little interest to the United States. "Instead, Washington intends to goad New Delhi post-election to reduce border troop deployments, a step that would help Pakistan to infiltrate more armed terrorists into India."

It may not be entirely correct to say that Washington is not interested in the Lashkar-e-Taiba.  The group was cited in media reports as a suspect in the London underground bombings in 2005, potentially making it as much of a global threat as al Qaeda. But Chellaney's comments do underline a traditional suspicion in the region -- both in India and Pakistan -- about what is seen as a ruthless U.S. focus on its own interests.

In an editorial in The Hindu former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar says India must galvanise its regional diplomacy, rebuilding its once close relationship with Russia and Iran, to strengthen its hand. But he also writes that, "certainly, resumption of the composite dialogue with Pakistan ought to be a priority."

The other question to ask is whether Pakistan and India would both be better off talking to each other directly, rather than churning their arguments through the prism of U.S. diplomacy. According to some analysts the two countries came close to a breakthrough on Kashmir in 2007 -- a subject explored at length by Steve Coll in the New Yorker in March -- but were unable to close the deal after then President Pervez Musharraf became embroiled in political problems that eventually forced him to step down last year.  There has been no official confirmation, and the two countries have come close to agreements on other issues before only to see them fall apart on disagreement about the exact terms.

President Barack Obama has so far been a leader in a hurry. His energetic special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, earned a reputation for being able to bang heads together after he brokered the Dayton peace accords in 1995.  How far can, and will, the U.S. administration go to persuade India and Pakistan to talk peace?  And equally importantly, how well will India and Pakistan manage the U.S. administration?

(Photos: Congress party supporters celebrate in Allahabad; Congress leader Sonia Gandhi with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh)

Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, is visiting India for a second time in seven weeks. But what has surprised many is the timing of the trip, coming as it does at a time when India is preparing for a general election and most government business is virtually on hold.

Though India is not part of Holbrooke’s remit, New Delhi’s engagement is imperative for any effort to stabilise the so-called Af-Pak region.

But that hardly explains the visit now, considering that he could expect to do little business with a “lame duck government” in New Delhi.

So why is he coming now?

Many Indian analysts believe that keeping India and Kashmir out of Holbrooke’s brief was a way of Washington massaging New Delhi’s ego.

In reality, though, they say India is very much part of Holbrooke’s mandate because Pakistan wants a solution to disputed Kashmir as an element of any regional peace efforts — a demand Washington can hardly ignore if it expects Pakistan’s cooperation.

An Indian analyst here says Holbrooke is using the interregnum to show his turf includes India.

So if it is impossible to disentangle Kashmir from any effort to win Pakistani cooperation to stabilise Afghanistan, where does that leave India-U.S relations?

The Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group blamed by India for last November's assault on Mumbai, has threatened more violence in Kashmir after a five-day gunbattle that killed 25 people, including eight Indian troops.

A spokesman for the group, speaking from an undisclosed location, said: "India should understand the freedom struggle in Kashmir was not over, it is active with full force."

The threat by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, if followed through, would be a new headache for the United States, which would like to see an improvement in relations between India and Pakistan as it overhauls its approach to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Washington has been careful to avoid any suggestion that it would intervene overtly in the Kashmir dispute, in what has been seen as an acknowledgement of Indian sensitivities about outside interference.  But Indian newspapers have reported that the United States has nonetheless been quietly leaning on India to reduce tensions on Pakistan's eastern border so that its army can concentrate on fighting militants on its western border with Afghanistan.

And former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, leading a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan expected to be released this week, has suggested in the past that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute would help ease tensions across the region.

In an interview with Germany's Spiegel magazine last December, he said that for those involved in global jihad, the Kashmir cause is in many ways "like a second Palestine".  Solving the conflict and bringing peace between Israelis and Palestinians, he said, would help dry up support for al Qaeda. "We are not going to get al Qaeda to change its mind. These are fanatics. What we want to do, though, is to separate the fanatics from the rest of the Islamic world."

So the last thing Washington needs is any new flare-up in violence in Kashmir that would push back any chance of resolving the dispute and raise tensions along the India-Pakistan border. (Before a ceasefire was agreed at the end of 2003, the Indian and Pakistani armies fought near daily artillery duels across the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, which India said were meant to prevent infiltration of militants into Kashmir from the Pakistani side.)

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On the subject of the review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, special envoy Richard Holbrooke made a couple of intriguing comments in an interview with the BBC this week. 

First he said openly that the Afghan Taliban were based in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.  "Quetta appears to be the headquarters for the leaders of the Taliban and some of the worst people in the world," he said.  Many analysts have assumed for some time that the Afghan Taliban are operating out of Quetta -- so much so that the New York Times suggested earlier this month that the United States might extend its attacks on militant targets on the Pakistan border into Baluchistan. But it's quite new for U.S. policymakers to talk publicly about the Taliban's presence in Quetta.

Foreign Policy picked up on a similar statement last week by Lieutenant General Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  "Now that the U.S. government has gone on record that the Quetta shura ... is operating openly in Pakistan, it won't be long before policymakers are asked some pretty tough and uncomfortable questions," it said. "Like, what are you doing about the fact that our own government now admits that the Taliban's nerve center is functioning not in Pakistan's tribal areas, but in the capital of a major Pakistani province..."

Secondly, the BBC quoted Holbrooke as saying that conflicting reports that Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself may support dialogue was a "mysterious issue" that U.S. officials were "trying to learn more about".  I've discussed the question of talks with the Taliban in an earlier post but I thought that response from Holbrooke was curious.

For an interesting take on the possibility of talks with the Taliban, Jean MacKenzie, program director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan has published an interview in the Global Post with two former high-ranking Taliban officials who both said dialogue was feasible.

She also has a separate story on an interview with the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.  There's a lot in there worth reading, though I was struck by his comment that “you cannot talk to the Taliban from a position of strength. We are Afghans. If we are in a lower position, and the enemy acts tough, we will act 10 times tougher.”  That is perhaps one answer to those who say the United States should improve its military position against the Taliban first before it considers dialogue.

(Reuters photos: Women mourn at the funeral of a Kashmiri Muslim soldier/Fayaz Kabli; and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke)

India's ruling Congress party thinks Pakistan is fast becoming the "Somalia of South Asia". The attack on Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore was the result of the state ceding its territory to the fundamentalists and Taliban of the world, a party spokesman said.

Strong words these, but are they going to come back to haunt India and the Congress itself ? Is this really just about Pakistan or is the fire, which many believe began when foreign forces moved into Afghanistan, already dangerously close to India?

If you saw TV images of the gunmen as they darted across a green in Lahore with their backpacks, aiming their assault weapons and taking cover behind trees,  you couldn't help but think of the Mumbai assault when a similar band of attackers roamed the streets, hotels and a train station killing and maiming at will.

If it was Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore on Tuesday, it could just as easily have been a foreign team in Amritsar, just over the border in India.  Amritsar is very near Lahore, writes former Indian ambassador M.K.Bhadrakumar, and it doesn't really matter any more on which side of the border the attack took place. The grim reality is both are faced with the same threat and it won't help India to pretend otherwise or sit tight while Pakistan unravels, he says.

"When the terrorists strike in broad daylight in the presence of tens of thousands people in a high security environment within earshot of Amritsar it naturally sends shock waves across India. It is no more relevant where they have struck -- on this side or the other side of the Wagah border. The ground reality is that there is no such thing as absolute security anymore," Bhadrakumar said.

India and Pakistan will survive or sink together, and it doesn't really matter whether it is Pakistan or India that resembles Somalia.

Pakistan's Dawn also touches on this, saying that perhaps the same group that attacked Mumbai struck on Tuesday in Pakistan's cultural capital.

Lahore was a message to all of South Asia, Indian columnist Rajinder Puri writes, and it was up to governments to pay heed.  The men who carried out the attack on the Sri Lankan players weren't merely attacking cricket, they were attacking culture. "The lifestyle of the vast majority of the people on the subcontinent is not acceptable to the enemy,' he writes.

"Make no mistake. Neither the Afghans nor the Pathans are as a people sympathetic to the terror and repression unleashed by the pro-Al Qaeda Taliban. The people are simply forced into submission by the few gun-toting killers who are organized to terrorize the unorganized majority. The enemy will hit each nation and each region one by one until it attains victory."

A few years ago Lal Krishna Advani, the leader of India's Hindu nationalist party, talked about the cultural nationalism of South Asia, of the shared heritage, customs and perhaps obsessions like cricket. But it has been totally swamped by the bickering among governments of each country.

Perhaps it is time now to reverse course  and stop not just Pakistan's descent into chaos but its immediate neighbours too ?

([Reuters pictures of a helicopter at Lahore's cricket ground after attack and Sri Lankan cricketer Thilan Thushara with his son upon his return home]

"Everything is officially going to hell." The verdict of a reader quoted by All Things Pakistan said perhaps better than anyone else why the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore marked a defining moment in Pakistan's agonising descent into chaos.

Six Sri Lankan cricketers and their British assistant coach were wounded when gunmen attacked their bus as it drove under police escort to the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore.  Five policemen were killed.

The death toll was small by South Asian standards.  But what defined it -- beyond the audacity and apparent sophistication of the attack -- was the assault on the identity of a country where cricket, as in neighbouring India, is a national obsession.

"An ambush targeting the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore earlier this morning has literally sent waves of disbelief and shock across Pakistan," said a post on Metroblogging Lahore. "Citizens of Lahore are specifically terrified at the extent of sophisticated weaponry used by terrorists in an incident that caused unprecedented damage to the country's image and its cricketing future."

"Why can't we ever just have a slow news day ... every day there's something new," complained another post on Twitter.

South Asia is no stranger to violence, from the days of partition onwards. But there seems to me to be something qualitatively quite different in what is going on now, in which brutality and the alienation of the local population is not so much incidental but central to the method.

It's been there in the assault on traditional Pakistani music and culture, in the deliberately grisly videotaped beheading of a Polish geologist last month, in the targeting of girls' schools in the Swat valley and now in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers.

Even in darkest days of the Kashmir insurgency which set Pakistan and India at each other's throats you didn't see anything like this -- in fact one of the signs of normal life there came from boys out in the street playing cricket.  In Afghanistan, the hardline Taliban which banned most sports appear to have been less hostile to cricket, as Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming wrote in this feature about the country's fledgling national cricket team. I've even seen Pakistani soldiers spontaneously playing cricket the harsh terrain of the Siachen battlefield beyond Kashmir, bowling a few balls in the drizzling snow under the lee of steep mountain walls.

Pakistani officials are already speculating about Indian involvement in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers, in revenge for last year's assault on Mumbai.  This speculation will probably run and run -- it's echoing through comments on blogs and on Twitter. But it may obscure a more important point. When you attack a national institution like cricket, it's an expression of brute power, an assault on culture akin to the burning of books.

According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, quoted by the Independent: "I think this is a deliberate attempt to undermine the government at the time when there is a huge political crisis in the country. They are trying to create a vacuum of power in which eventually they can take over."

(Reuters photo: Pakistan's Salman Butt in match against Sri Lanka)