Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in the United States for the first official state visit by any foreign leader since President Barack Obama took office this year. While the atmospherics are right, and the two leaders probably won't be looking as stilted as Obama and China's President Hu Jintao appeared to be during Obama's trip last week (for the Indians are rarely short on conversation), there is a sense of unease.

And much of it has to do with AFPAK - the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan which is very nearly at the top of Obama's foreign policy agenda and one that some fear may eventually consume the rest of his presidency. America's ally Pakistan worries about India's expanding assistance and links to Afghanistan, seeing it as part of a strategy to encircle it from the rear.  Ordinarily, Pakistani noises wouldn't bother India as much, but for signs that the Obama administration has begun to adopt those concerns as its own in its desperate search for a solution, as Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.

And that is producing a "perverse view" of the region, he says adding it was a bit strange that India was being criticised for its influence in Afghanistan. India is the hegemon in South Asia, with a GDP 100 times that of Afghanistan and it was only natural that as Afghanistan opened itself up following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, its cuisine, movies and money would flow into the country. The whole criticism about India,  Zakaria says, is a little bit like saying the United States has had growing influence  in Mexico over the last few decades and should be penalised for it.

But what about Pakistan's concerns, a country that was dismembered in the last full-scale war with India in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh. The last thing it would want is a hostile regime in Afghanistan on its western flank on top of the Indian army, the world's third largest, massed on the eastern front, not to mention the Islamist militants whom it once nurtured turning on  the State itself.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani told the U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones earlier his month that Indian presence in Kabul would hurt the war objectives.

And what about the Afghans themselves ? The India-Pakistan rivalry is probably a sideshow in the broader battle between a resurgent Taliban and the foreign forces, but perhaps one they can do without.

[Photographs of Afghan children and Indian and U.S. flags at the White House]

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has held out an olive branch to Pakistan by renewing an offer to talk, while also calling on it to take action against militants operating from its territory.  India’s Press and Information Bureau has the excerpts of a speech delivered in Kashmir. in which Singh held out “a hand of friendship” to Pakistan. It’s worth reading in detail because it was clearly carefully prepared, endorsed politically by Congress president Sonia Gandhi who accompanied the prime minister, and according to The Hindu newspaper. an attempt to advance the peace process with Pakistan. 

India and Pakistan, he said, had made progress in peace talks started in 2004, and had been able to open up trade and travel across the Line of Control (LoC), the ceasefire line dividing Kashmir. “These are not small achievements given the history of our troubled relationship with Pakistan.”

“However, all the progress that we achieved has been repeatedly thwarted by acts of terrorism. The terrorists want permanent enmity to prevail between the two countries. The terrorists have misused the name of a peaceful and benevolent religion. Their philosophy of hate has no place here. It is totally contrary to our centuries old tradition of tolerance and harmony among faiths.

“I strongly believe that the majority of people in Pakistan seek good neighbourly and cooperative relations between India and Pakistan. They seek a permanent peace. This is our view as well.

“The cross-LoC initiatives have been well received on both sides of the border. But I am also aware that they are not as people friendly as they could be. Trade facilities at the border are inadequate. There are no banking channels. Customs facilities need to be strengthened. There are no trade fairs. The lists of tradable commodities need to be increased. Clearances for travel take time. Prisoners of India and Pakistan are languishing in each other’s jails even after completing their sentences.

“The fact is that these are humanitarian issues whose resolution requires the cooperation of Pakistan. We are ready to discuss these and other issues with the Government of Pakistan. I hope that as a result things will be made easier for our traders, divided families, prisoners and travelers. For a productive dialogue it is essential that terrorism must be brought under control.

“We will press the Government of Pakistan to curb the activities of those elements that are engaging in terrorism in India. If they are non-state actors, it is the solemn duty of the government of Pakistan to bring them to book, to destroy their camps and to eliminate their infrastructure. The perpetrators of the acts of terror must pay the heaviest penalty for their barbaric crimes against humanity.”

India broke off peace talks after last year’s attack on Mumbai and has been reluctant to resume a formal peace process until Pakistan takes more action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group accused of involvement in the assault. But with Pakistan pursuing a military offensive against Pakistani Taliban militants in South Waziristan, and facing a wave of reprisal attacks across the country, action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been seen as dropping down the priority list, all the more so given that it is one of the few militant groups in the country not yet believed to have targeted the Pakistani state.

That has left both countries deadlocked at a time when the region is desperately in need of stability to stem an increase in violence and help ease tensions over rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan.

The Hindu said in an editorial that the speech in Kashmir might offer a way forward. ”What the Prime Minister has essentially done is to separate out the strands of the dialogue process as it existed prior to its suspension following the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008 and raised the possibility of forward movement on the ‘humanitarian’ strands even as substantive political engagement, or ‘productive dialogue’, must await the action that India has asked Pakistan to take against the camps and infrastructure of terrorist groups and other hostile non-state actors on its territory.”

If Pakistan acted against these groups, it said, then both countries could resume a peace process on Kashmir. ”And in the interim, as a demonstration of the two countries’ stated commitment to the welfare of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, discussions on making existing cross-LoC initiatives more ‘people friendly’ can begin more or less immediately.”

Can the prime minister’s gesture make a difference?

Pakistan welcomed the offer of talks, but a foreign ministry spokesman reiterated Pakistan’s position that the correct forum was the formal peace process or composite dialogue. India has so far refused to resume the composite dialogue.

And political separatists in Kashmir in the Hurriyat Conference are unlikely to want to open bilateral talks with the Indian government if there is no progress in improving relations between India and Pakistan.

While there is little sympathy for either India or Pakistan in the Kashmir Valley after two decades of separatist revolt, few believe that a solution to the long-running Kashmir dispute can be found with one country without the support of the other. And while that would not necessarily mean India and Pakistan sitting at the same table with representatives from Kashmir, there would still need to be some form of three-way dialogue to make progress.

The Pakistan government also has its hands full already without trying to work out how to respond to any Indian overture that might eventually require politically unpopular concessions at home.

That said, both countries have been trying to improve the mood ahead of an expected meeting between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad in November.

Singh’s hand of friendship could help pave the way for a more productive meeting.

With so much noise around these days in the relationship between India and Pakistan it is hard to make out a clear trend.  Politicians and national media in both countries have reverted to trading accusations, whether it be about their nuclear arsenals, Pakistani action against Islamist militants blamed for last year’s Mumbai attacks or alleged violations of a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir. Scan the headlines on a Google news search on India and Pakistan and you get the impression of a relationship fraught beyond repair.

Does that mean that attempts to find a way back into peace talks broken off after the Mumbai attacks are going nowhere? Not necessarily. In the past the background noise of angry rhetoric has usually obscured real progress behind the scenes, and this time around may be no exception.

MORE TALKS

The Hindu newspaper reported on Sept 1 that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may meet either the president or prime minister of Pakistan on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad in November. It said the Indian government was already working out what strategy to adopt to make any meeting meaningful, while also pushing Pakistan to take more action against Pakistan-based militant groups in order to prevent another Mumbai-style attack.

There is no confirmation of that Trinidad meeting, and nor is there likely to be for some time, but The Hindu in recent months has proved to be well informed about the prime minister’s approach to Pakistan. Singh himself laid out his plans in a speech in parliament in July in which he promised a “step by step” approach to dialogue – effectively meaning that India would talk to Pakistan while refusing for now to reopen a formal peace process broken off after the Mumbai attacks.

The two countries’ foreign ministers are also expected to talk on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York this month, although it is unclear whether this would be preceded by a meeting of foreign secretaries in line with an agreement reached in July that the top diplomats of India and Pakistan should meet ”as often as necessary”.  The Hindu said the foreign secretaries would meet in New York; more recent newspaper reports have called this into question.

DISMANTLING JAMMU AND KASHMIR?

In the meantime, both countries are edging forward in their approach to the two parts of Jammu and Kashmir which they control. (After their first war in 1947/48 the former princely state was divided into the regions of Ladakh, Kashmir and Jammu which are held by India, and the regions of Gilgit and Baltistan along with an area known as Azad Kashmir which are held by Pakistan.)

According to Praveen Swami, a Kashmir expert at The Hindu, the Indian government has been holding secret talks over the summer with the main political separatist alliance in Kashmir, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, to try to agree an approach to bring peace to the region. ”Perhaps most important,” he said, “Pakistan is being asked to endorse the talks.”

Over on its side of the border, the Pakistan government has decided to grant limited autonomy to Gilgit and Baltistan. It had previously run the region  directly from Islamabad, much to the irritation of local people who felt they had been deprived of their political rights to the kind of self-rule given to Pakistani provinces. 

To digress briefly into history, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was created in the 19th century by Hindu Dogra rulers expanding outwards from their base in Jammu and comprising people of different linguistic, ethnic and religious groups.  Were it not for the tremendous importance given to Jammu and Kashmir by both India and Pakistan - both of which claim the state in full - it might have broken up naturally years ago.

The people of Gilgit and Baltistan never felt much loyalty to the former maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir and have long complained that they have been held hostage to the Kashmir dispute (you hear the same complaints from Ladakhis on the Indian side.)

So do the parallel moves on both India and Pakistan suggest both countries are taking small steps towards an eventual dismantling of the former princely state which would allow a settlement of the long-running Kashmir dispute? Not quite - Pakistan has been careful to say it is not giving full provincial status to Gilgit and Baltistan. There are also historical grounds for treating the region differently from other parts of Jammu and Kashmir, which date back to partition and before.

Yet given that anything to do with Jammu and Kashmir is potentially explosive, reactions to the Pakistan government’s move on Gilgit and Baltistan have so far been relatively muted. Dawn newspaper said that the decision stuck a balance between meeting the aspirations of its people for political rights and maintaining the region’s status as disputed territory. The Daily Times said that the people of Gilgit and Baltistan had been held hostage to the Kashmir dispute for long enough and should eventually be incorporated as a full province of Pakistan. On the Indian side, I’ve seen criticism from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party but nothing from the government.

A roadmap for peace sketched out by Singh and former president Pervez Musharraf in 2007 effectively acknowledged the division of the state by accepting there would be no exchange of territory between the two countries - although both pledged to try to make borders irrelevant. That agreement was shelved when Musharraf’s own political fortunes nosedived.  But are the governments of India and Pakistan nonetheless following some of the signposts in that roadmap despite all the angry rhetoric currently dominating their relationship? And if so, how far are they exchanging information about their plans?

WILD CARDS

Just in case the above looks too rosy a view on the prospects of progress in relations between India and Pakistan, it is probably worth remembering it can all go wrong, particularly if there is another major militant attack in India.

The other wild card comes from the transformation of the political landscape in India with the implosion of the opposition right-wing BJP initially triggered by the furore over a book on Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah by former senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh. So far the jury remains out on how the political drama will play out. Analysts variously predict a collapse of the right, or its opposite - a revival of the right as the BJP returns to its hardline anti-Pakistan Hindu nationalist roots in an attempt to reinvent itself after losing two consecutive general elections. Until the political landscape becomes clearer, India’s Congress-led government is likely to tread cautiously.

(Reuters file photos: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Siachen; Singh with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari in Russia; Dal lake in Srinagar; Drass on the Line of Control; former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh)

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)

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has dropped a plan to travel to Egypt next month where he was expected to hold further talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh following their meeting in Russia this week.

Pakistan's foreign office has said Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani will attend the summit of Non-Aligned Nations in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh although soon after the Singh-Zardari meeting in Yekaterinburg the two sides announced plans for a second meeting in July.

Has something gone wrong?

Newspapers on both sides of the border read more into the change of plans than just a normal swap of duties between the prime minister and the president.

The Dawn linked the cancellation to displeasure over Singh telling Zardari in the full glare of the world's media that Pakistan should not allow its soil to be used for militant attacks on India.

The soft-spoken Singh's rather unexpected remark right at the beginning of the first-to-face encounter with Pakistan's leaders since the Mumbai attacks in November ensured that the meeting was unpleasant from the outset, it said.

Pakistan's The News said New Delhi had handed Zardari a "well staged slight" but Islamabad was setting it aside because at the end of the day the two sides were talking again.

Indian newspapers were less restrained, saying Zardari dropped out of the next meeting after Singh's blunt talk and that Islamabad wanted to send the message that his rather public reprimand had not gone down well with Pakistan.

Did India over-reach then? Perhaps too much shouldn't be read into all this. The Hindu points out that this may not yet be the last word, as Zardari has changed travel plans at the last minute several times.

At home though, they are applauding Singh both for his tough talk and the realisation that you have to engage the "imploding neighbour" because that is the neighbourhood it lives in.

Singh had served notice that India and indeed its neighbours were going to see a more determined prime minister in the months ahead, "a far cry from the man who was seemingly too timid to take on his tormentors during the previous five years," as New Delhi's Mint wrote.

And columnist and former ambassador Kuldip Nayar said the meeting hadn't come a day too soon.

"Too much time and too much money have been wasted in talking against each other instead of talking to each other. The two countries have not experienced peace since independence; 62 years is a long period for the people to suffer estrangement and live in fear of war all the time," he wrote.

Are they slipping back into talking at each other?

Some people in India are calling upon the new coalition government to make a series of bold moves towards Pakistan that will compel the neighbour to put its money where  the mouth is.

If Pakistan keeps saying that it cannot fully and single-mindedly go after militants on its northwest frontier and indeed increasingly within the heartland because of the threat it faces from India, then New Delhi must call its bluff, argued authors Nitin Pai and Sushant K. Singh in a recent piece for India’s Mint newspaper.

How about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, back for a second term, giving a categorical public declaration that Pakistan need not fear an Indian military attack so long as the Pakistan army is engaged in fighting with Taliban militants?  While a verbal commitment may not convince the military brass in Rawalpindi, it will likely play well in Washington as it rathchets up pressure on the Pakistan army to take the battle to the militants.

Second and to back up its assurance, India could move some of the army strike formations from the international border with Pakistan in Punjab and Rajasthan. “Such a bold, strategic move will not only make India’s verbal assurances credible, but it will also immediately result in irresistible pressure on the Pakistani army to commit more of its troops to the western border,” the authors wrote in the Mint piece.

Clearly, the aim of such a peace gamble is to expose the contradiction within the Pakistani position, force them to either go full throttle after militant groups, some of whom are suspected to be tied to its intelligence agencies, or  face America’s wrath.

Moving Indian troops back will compel the Pakistan army to act against the Taliban, and because it is incapable of doing so, will cause the United States to realise that there is no alternative to dismantling the military-jihadi complex, Pai and Singh argue.

Taking out Pakistan’s military-jihadi establishment is really what the battle in Pakistan is all about - that is the refrain you hear incessantly in the strategic establishment in New Delhi  as I did during a visit over the past few weeks, and one you can be sure it will be telling U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expected to visit sometime in July.

But in the immediate future, is such a bold gamble as troop pullback really going to work?
Two issues. One, what about Kashmir ? No pullback is proposed on Kashmir where tens of thousands of troops are massed on both sides of the Line of Control, and according to some Pakistani experts this really is where is there should be a re-deployment of forces.

Ejaz Haider in a piece for Pakistan’s Daily Times, says the bulk of India’s military deployment  iscentred on Pakistan, with 7 of the army’s 13 corps “specific to Pakistan.”  In any case, given that the Pakistan army’s numerical strength is half that of India, the deployment of the Pakistan army along the eastern frontier is much thinner than India’s.

And if Pakistan does not face the threat of a hot war from India as everyone keeps telling it, Haider says, then India too does not face that prospect.

“If Pakistan is asked by the US and other western capitals on the basis of this argument to pull out troops from the eastern border and deploy them to the west, then perhaps India should also be called upon to thin its much-heavier Pakistan-specific deployment along the international border, the Line of Control, the working boundary and the actual ground position line,” he says.

But can the Indian army really thin out of Kashmir? At this point when the threat of infiltration of militants from Pakistan is again being talked about?

And finally does Singh, even with a stronger parliamentary support after a general election, really have the people’s endorsement of cutting back troops from the Pakistan frontier. The wounds from the 26/11 attack on Mumbai for which the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba has been held responsible, remain fresh for a large number of Indians.  They are not in a mood to forgive or forget.

[Photos of Indian and Pakistani troops at a border checkpoint and the site of a car bombing in Lahore on May 27)

India continues to turn up the heat on Pakistan for the Mumbai attacks, declaring once again on Wednesday that all options were open to disrupt militant networks operating from there. And this, a day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said official agencies must have been involved in an operation of such sophistication, a serious charge by a head of government against another state.

But is India really in a position to make good its threats against Pakistan ? The question has repeatedly come up here on this blog and elsewhere since those attacks on November 26 and now in the light of  Israel’s Gaza operation, some people are again asking why New Delhi cannot carry out punitive strikes inside Pakistan.

 Tunku Varadarajan, writing in Forbes magazine, advances five reasons why India can’t do a Gaza on Pakistan. 1) India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories with its overwhelming military superiority. Pakistan for all is dysfunction is a proper country  with a proper army and with nuclear weapons to boot. “Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it  an apocalyptic risk for India.”

(more…)

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?

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, India’s response has been to look to the United States to lean on Pakistan, which it blames for spawning Islamist militancy across the region, rather than launching any military retaliation of its own. So after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s trip to India and Pakistan last week, have the Americans done enough for now?

According to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, Rice told Pakistan there was “irrefutable evidence” that elements within the country were involved in the Mumbai attacks. And it quotes unnamed sources as saying that behind-the-scenes she “pushed the Pakistani leaders to take care of the perpetrators, otherwise the U.S. will act”.

India’s Business Standard said the Indian government was pleased with the U.S. warning. “This is exactly what India wanted,” the newspaper said.

The Times of India, however, fretted the U.S. action against Pakistan appeared to be “turning tepid”, in public at least. It attributed the U.S. approach to the perceived need to avoid backing the civilian government led by President Asif Ali Zardari into a corner. (India has specifically not accused the Pakistan government of involvement in the Mumbai attacks, pointing instead to militant groups supported by Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.) It also said the United States was wary of destabilising a partner on which it depends crucially as a transit route for supplies to Afghanistan, while also being hobbled by the change of administration in Washington.

So which way is the pendulum swinging — towards firm U.S. action that will allow Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to say he was right to put his faith in American diplomacy, or a lukewarm response that will either force India to act alone or leave its Congress-led government looking on in helpless frustration as it heads into a general election due by next May?

U.S. pressure has succeeded in pulling India and Pakistan back from the brink in the past.  When fighting erupted between the two newly declared nuclear-armed powers in the Kargil war in 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton persuaded then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to pull Pakistani troops back. (Sharif paid a high price. Later in the year he was overthrown by then General Pervez Musharraf, a lesson unlikely to be lost on the current civilian government which is seen as wary of making too many concessions to India for fear of alienating the powerful Pakistan Army.) (more…)

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged Pakistan to cooperate “fully and transparently” in investigations into the Mumbai attacks, while U.S. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has pointed a finger at Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant group.

That’s probably the kind of language that would go down well in India, which has been frustrated in the past by what it saw as the United States’ failure to acknowledge the threat from Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant groups, instead preferring to rely on Pakistan as a useful ally in the region while focusing its own energies on defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But what exactly can either the United States or India do if they want to put pressure on Pakistan? India has long complained that Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, another Pakistan-based militant group, were nurtured by the Pakistan spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, to stage attacks in both Indian Kashmir and elsewhere in the country. And while Pakistan denies providing more than moral support to Kashmiri groups, it has never cracked down on Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in Punjab and Pakistan-held Kashmir, in the same way that it has begun to tackle militants from al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Lashkar-e-Taiba’s charitable wing, the Jamat-ud-Dawa, earned popular support by working to rescue victims of the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, as discussed in this article by Steve Coll in the New Yorker. And much to India’s irritation, the Jamat-ud-Dawa continues to operate openly in Muridke outside Lahore. (more…)