As if the challenge facing President-elect Barack Obama of stabilising Afghanistan was not difficult enough, it may have just got much, much harder after the Mumbai attacks soured relations between India and Pakistan — undermining hopes of finding a regional solution to the Afghan war.

As discussed in an earlier post, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has blamed a group outside India for the attacks which killed at least 121 people. The coordinated attacks bore the hallmarks of Pakistani-based Kashmiri militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says was set up by Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

Pakistan has condemned the attacks and an Indian government spokesman said the head of the ISI had agreed to visit India to share information — an extraordinary agreement given that the two countries have fought three wars and came to the brink of a fourth in 2001/2002. But it’s hard to believe that would be enough to appease India after the brazen attack on its commercial capital exposed its vulnerability.

So where does that leave Obama’s plans for Afghanistan, given that a major element of this was to persuade India and Pakistan to make peace over Kashmir?

As discussed in posts here, here and here, the argument is that the cause of instability in Afghanistan is in Pakistan, and that Pakistan in turn will never fully turn against Islamist militants as long as it believes it might need them to counter India.  Since Pakistan is nervous both about the growing power of India on its eastern border, and about rising Indian influence in Afghanistan on its western border, the best way to calm the situation down, so the argument goes, would be to persuade the two rivals to make peace.

It was always an ambitious plan — getting India and Pakistan to put behind them 60 years of bitter struggle over Kashmir as part of a regional solution to many complex problems in Afghanistan.  Have the Mumbai attacks pushed it out of reach? And if so, what is the fall-back plan?

(Reuters photo of smoke and flames billowing out of Taj Mahal hotel/Jayanta Shaw)

An attack of the scale and sophistication unleashed on Mumbai would not be possible without months of planning, and yet it completely went below India’s intelligence radar.

Indeed, so unaware were the security agencies that even when the attacks began, the first reaction was these were probably gangland shootings that India’s financial capital is known for.   So if the agencies have been so clueless about an attack so mammoth in its sweep, the question experts are beginning to ask is how safe are India’s vital assets?

The nuclear facilities for instance ? A chilling thought but one that must be answered, says B. Raman, a former top officer at India’s Research and Analysis Wing. “I shiver and sweat at the thought of what is waiting to happen tomorrow and where. The mind boggles as one tries to think and figure out how the terrorists could have planned and carried out terrorist strikes of such magnitude, territorial spread and ferocity without our intelligence and police having been able to get scent of it,” Raman, one of India’s foremost intelligence experts, wrote. “I could not sleep the whole of last night. One question, which kept bothering me again and again was : how safe are our nuclear establishments and material?”

Of course nuclear installations are far more heavily guarded than a public place such as a hotel, hospital or a railway station and Raman probably means to rouse what he thinks is an establishment gone into deep slumber. But after the attacks on Mumbai, no longer can Indian experts be be going around saying Pakistan is unique in not having a grip on the militant threat. After repeated attacks beginning in Varanasi last year to Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Delhi twice this year and finally Mumbai, and still no wiser as to who is behind them,  New Delhi looks as much at sea as its counterpart in Islamabad.