Mumbai attack might 'hobble' Obama's peace aspirations

NEW YORK: The audacious terror attacks in Mumbai that claimed around 200 lives might "hobble" the President-elect Barack Obama's aspirations to bring "reconciliation" between India and Pakistan under his administration, a media report said on Sunday.
 
Obama, who is closely monitoring the situation arising out of the terror strikes in Mumbai, has already talked to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the matter.
 
Obama's advisers, the New York Times said, have spent the past few days watching the unfolding crisis for hints about how the situation might look after January 20.
 
While they said they understand that the tensions unleashed by the Mumbai attacks might hobble the new president's aspirations, they held out hope that the attacks might, instead, open the door to increased cooperation between Pakistan and India to weed out militants intent on more attacks, the paper said.
 
An important element of Obama's plan to reduce militancy in Pakistan and turn around the war in Afghanistan has been to push for a reconciliation between India and Pakistan, so that the Pakistani government could focus its energy on the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan that are controlled by Islamic extremists, it said.
 
In December 2001, when Pakistani militants attacked India's Parliament, and again this summer, when militants aided by Pakistani spies bombed the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan, the Bush administration used aggressive diplomacy to dampen anger in New Delhi, the Times said.
 
This time, however, the Indian government might not be so receptive to the American message and that could derail the coming administration's hopes of creating a broader, regional response to the threat posed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it said.

Noting that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already faced months of criticism from political rivals about his government's decision not to respond forcefully to past acts of terrorism, the Times said that "domestic anger over the  carnage has increased the pressure on his government to strike back".
 
Officials in New Delhi, it said, might also feel less compelled to follow calls for a controlled response from the Bush administration, which has steadily escalated a campaign of air strikes on Pakistani soil using remotely piloted aircraft.
 
The White House, the paper noted, has adopted a clear position to justify those attacks: "if a country cannot deal with a terrorism problem on its own, the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally".
 
Should it become clear that the men who rampaged through Mumbai trained in Pakistan, even if the Pakistani government had no hand in the operation, what will stop the Indians from adopting the same position? The Times asks.  

"In some ways, it doesn't even matter whether this attack was hatched in some office in Islamabad," said Paul Kapur, a South Asia expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey in California.
 
"The provocation in this case is orders of magnitude more than anything that's happened before."
 
Even if the Bush administration can keep the situation from escalating, Obama will find his administration trying to broker cooperation between two aroused and suspicious regional powers, the paper added.
 
Some in the Bush administration, as well as outside experts, agree that an Indian military response is not a foregone conclusion, it said, adding Singh's government has long believed that the instability caused by a conflict with Pakistan would act as a brake on India's rapid economic growth.