“The pall of gloom is deepening,” says MK Badrakumar in World Politics Review. Due to the latest terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the geopolitics of south Asia – “the most dangerous place on the planet” – are in a state of flux. There are huge uncertainties about regional security and the region now finds itself at a crossroads. Specifically, “Asia-watchers fear that recent tentative improvements in relations between India and Pakistan could be reversed by the Mumbai attacks”, says The Independent’s Sam Marsden. He notes that “the two nuclear-armed states have been to war three times since the partition of India in 1947 and the threat of further military conflict is ever present”. Tensions between the countries have now reached levels not seen since 2001, when a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament pushed them to the brink of war.
As public anger builds, Indian Foreign Ministry officials have suggested that the attack’s masterminds are still at large in Pakistan. As such, they expect “strong action would be taken”, which “needed to match the sentiments expressed by [Pakistan’s] leadership that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India”. In response, Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, said that if India shared the results of its investigation, Pakistan would “do everything in our power to go after these militants”.
With elections just months away, the Indian government “needs to be seen as acting decisively”, says Robert Walsh in The New York Times. Its current stand carries risk if it can’t furnish convincing evidence for its claims of Pakistani involvement. Furthermore, “the ominous atmosphere poses a special challenge for the United States, a strong ally of India that also depends on Pakistan for cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda”.
Indeed, instability and the rise of militants pose “the single most important threat against the American people”, says the US President-elect this week. So India-Pakistan relations may become Barack Obama’s first big external test. “Although Iraq and Afghanistan remain important items on Obama’s foreign policy to-do list, the dramatic appearance of the tensions between India and Pakistan could well constitute its top priority,” says The Hindu.
There had already been speculation about Obama appointing a special envoy to deal with the long-running territorial spat over Kashmir, “if only to relieve the Pakistani military from deploying major resources on the Indian border”, and get them diverted to the country’s northwest, where the Jehadi fundamentalist groups are in control. Current affairs show host Chris Matthews has even mooted the possibility of former president Bill Clinton being asked to mediate. The trouble is, as Fox News points out, although both Bill and new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “have maintained warm relations for years with India”, and Hillary’s campaigns “profited from the largesse of Indian-American fundraisers”, that “could complicate diplomatic perceptions of her ability to serve as a neutral broker between India and Pakistan”.
Some think the solution lies elsewhere. Following last week’s inconclusive Kashmir talks, reporters questioning the two top diplomats “had more queries about cricket – the sub-continent’s biggest passion – than Kashmir”, says Voice of America’s Steve Harman. India’s cricketers are resisting a four-week Pakistan tour early next year because of security concerns. But Pakistan captain Shoaib Malik has urged Indians to turn up: “if we play… the people of both the countries will have a chance to divert their attention and the situation will improve.”