Mumbai Terrorists Likely Hoped To Inflame New India-Pakistan Tensions

The coordinated terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India likely were planned to help to inflame new tensions between largely Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan. Like most terrorist actions, small bands of political or religious extremists hope to cast a far larger shadow than what they can really achieve for themselves. This is the whole nature of their evil actions, creating a general sense of terror in the public far larger than their very limited means to create general mayhem.

Recent relations between India and Pakistan have been steadily improving, especially since the newer government has taken up power in Pakistan that replaced the Musharraf regime. It is hoped that most in India will really wait for more facts about who the terrorists really were and who funded them before many in India begin to blame Muslim Pakistan for involvement in these terrible acts of violence. Britain's MI5, which is roughly similar to the American FBI is also investigating the Mumbai terrorism for any signs that this terrorism was funded by the religiously radical and poorly culturally integrated large London and British Muslim community. The London bus and subway attacks came from this radicalized and poorly socially integrated community before, and it is a prime breeding ground for dangerous Muslim radicalism. Moderate British Muslims are alarmed at this home-bred extremism, but have had little success to stem it.

One unfortunate development is that India's Foreign Minister has already made a public statement that condemns Pakistan for involvement with the terrorism events, however the government of Pakistan has been quick to offer help with the use of one of their top terrorism experts to help India deal with the investigation matters.

The fact of the matter is that top security officials from Pakistan, Britain and the U.S. will all have to work together to find out who is really responsible for these acts of violence, and then will plan some military actions against those bases of support. But in the short term, while this investigation is advancing, residents in India cannot jump to conclusions and lay blame at Pakistan until answers emerge.

If the terrorists had really hoped to create some new tensions between India and Pakistan, then they might have partially succeeded in the shorter term. However, these small bands of radicals cannot be allowed to create dangerous new political tensions between India and Pakistan. The People of India have every right to be very angry at these actions, however they must realize that it was Americans, Jews and Britons who were targeted by these attacks and not really the people of India itself. The American FBI and other international anti-terrorist units really will need the cooperation of the government of India to get some answers about the attacks and to work to protect Americans abroad in the future.

After the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., an investigation of the attacks led to military action against the Taliban government of Afghanistan that gave the terrorist organization Al Qaeda a free hand to establish their terrorist camps to plan the attacks. The same thing needs to happen this time again, where India must allow international terrorism experts in to find out who is responsible for the attacks and take the fight back to them in response.