Cold war

Will American mediation ease or deepen the crisis in Pakistan-India relations caused by the killings in Mumbai, asks Graham Usher in Islamabad

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One week after a dozen gunmen killed nearly 200 people in Mumbai Pakistan- India relations are at their coldest since December 2001, when a similar (albeit smaller) gun-and-grenade attack on the Indian parliament in Delhi led to a 10-month long standoff on the border between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Things have not yet come to that pass. Both militaries are immobile. American monitors have detected "no change" in military posture. "On the nuclear side" there is "nothing at all", a US military official told AFP on 2 December. "There is political and diplomatic activity. That is where it is happening right now".

But the diplomatic activity has been war by other means. Even before gunmen had completed their cull in Mumbai's railway station, hotels, restaurant, hospital and Jewish centre, Indian ministers, generals and media detected a Pakistani hand in the carnage.

Largely based on a "confession" extracted from the only arrested gunman the following charges have been laid: that some of the gunmen were Pakistani; that they set out by boat from Karachi; that they spent a year training for the attack in camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir; that among their trainers were ex-officers in the Pakistan army; and the camps were run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT), an outlawed Pakistani group active in Indian-controlled Kashmir. LT has dismissed the charge as "Indian propaganda".

But India believes the claims are credible and so, increasingly, do the Americans. On 1 December Pakistan's high commissioner was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Delhi. He was "informed that the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai was carried out by elements from Pakistan," said an Indian statement.

The Indian government "expects strong action to be taken against those elements, whosoever they may be, responsible for this outrage. Pakistan's actions needed to match the sentiments expressed by its leadership that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India".

On 29 November Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari promised on Indian TV that should "any evidence come of any individual or group in any part of my country, I shall take the swiftest action in the light of such evidence and in front of the world."

Pakistan has also offered to set up a joint "Pakistan-Indian commission" to "work together" on the Mumbai attacks. But the Pakistani plaint is with the Indian "evidence".

It is much smoke and little fire, says Pakistan Prime Minister Youssef Raza Gilani. "They have given us [names] of organisations but that is not evidence. If they give us evidence we are committed we will extend full cooperation," he told CNN on 2 December.

This is why Pakistan will not meet India's request that it "handover" 20 persons "who are settled in Pakistan and are fugitive of Indian law". One of these is LT founder Hafiz Mohamed Said. Pakistani security officials say he left LT before it was banned in 2002 and now heads Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an Islamic welfare organisation legal in Pakistan. Extraditing him or the other named fugitives is "out of the question", said the official.

Given the impasse, much is expected from Washington, which has "strategic" ties to both India and Pakistan. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed in Delhi on Wednesday and will travel to Pakistan. Her absolute priority will be to prevent the diplomatic crisis contaminating the Pakistani army's fight against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda on its western border with Afghanistan. But few expect her to be gentle with Islamabad.

"What we are emphasising to the Pakistani government is the need to follow the evidence wherever it leads," she said on 1 December. "I don't want to jump to any conclusions myself on this, but I do think that this is a time for complete, absolute, absolute transparency and cooperation."

On what will probably be her last foreign foray as secretary of state, Rice will also keep her successor, Hillary Clinton, abreast of developments. So far the latter's boss has been even more bullish on Pakistan than Rice. Asked on 1 December whether India had the right to retaliate against militant bases inside Pakistan, US President-elect Barack Obama replied: "I think sovereign nations, obviously, have a right to defend themselves."

As Pakistan's influential Dawn newspaper noted in an editorial on 3 December that could be construed as "yes".

American mediation may also widen the cracks that have appeared between Pakistan's government and military establishment over how best to tackle the crisis. The civilian leadership welcomes any US intervention, believing it will defuse tensions with India and prevent the two states sliding towards war.

The army is less sanguine. It believes George Bush, and especially Obama, are hostages to the pro-India lobby in Washington: a bias confirmed in its view by the CIA's recent policy turn of firing missile strikes against Taliban and Al-Qaeda "targets" inside Pakistan without the approval of its government. Bush authorised the policy in July; Obama advocated it throughout his presidential election campaign.

Ironically it is the army -- rather than the government -- that believes the crisis can best be contained through bilateral relations with India rather than via "help" from outside. "The perception that the Pakistan army sees India as the primary threat is not valid these days," says retired General Asad Durrani, former chief of Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence Agency. "In the current circumstances that perception applies to America." (see pp.8&14)