A smart friend e-mails:
The claim of responsibility from a group called "Deccan Mujahadeen" is almost certainly bullshit. No new group pulls off something like this as its first operation. Also, the reports of a focus on Westerners seems to have been at least in part a ruse, as the percentage of Westerners in the casualties is pretty low.More broadly, although this was brazen and sophisticated beyond recent attacks, most notably because of the number of people publicly involved (making capture and interrogation of some of the participants virtually certain), initial speculation is still tilting toward Pakistan's ISI, mostly because all Indian Islamic groups have links to the ISI, at least in their origins. The level of command and control (of ISI over these Indian groups) is an open question, but there very well may be traces back to Pakistan from this.Pakistan generally tends to provoke strife in India when things are going badly internally, under the (I think flawed) assumption that keeping India distracted with internal problems will make Pakistan safer. Oy. Worth noting that in all of 2007, under Musharraf's rule in Pakistan, there were two major attacks in India. In 2008, under the new civilian rule, there have now been eleven. Whether that's because the civilian government (1) doesn't have control over the elements of Pakistan that foment these activities and they're freelancing or (2) is directing more attacks than Musharraf did, is also an open question.Either way, if -- and this is a big if -- India decides/discovers that Pakistani intelligence was involved in the attacks, the risk of outright war between the two will not be insubstantial. Similar attacks occurred against the Indian Parliament in December 2001, and when those attacks proved to be linked to the ISI, India quickly went to full combat readiness and had their largest military mobilization in 30 years. Only intensive diplomatic intervention prevented a war. Keep an eye out for Indian military movement to Kashmir as a sign of whether (or how much) this will escalate. (Incidentally, to provide a staffing hook to all this, the guy who Obama probably got on the phone yesterday is Karl Inderfurth, a southeast Asia expert who was a Clinton administration official but an early Obama supporter. He also has notably close relations with all of our favorite foreign policy org, the National Security Network. Whatever he ends up saying about this is probably right.)On the bright side of all this, at least neither side has nukes! Oh, wait . . .
