Mumbai attacks could chill India-Pakistan ties
The nuclear-armed rivals have been trying to mend their relationship, but now India suspects Pakistani militants were involved in the rampage.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad, Pakistan -- With India casting suspicion on Pakistani militant groups in the Mumbai attacks, analysts and diplomats warned Friday that slowly warming relations between the nuclear-armed rivals could suffer a reversal, with potentially serious repercussions for the entire region.
Pakistani authorities have vehemently denied any involvement in the three-day rampage by groups of gunmen in India's commercial capital, which left at least 150 people dead. But in contrast to bellicose rhetoric in previous times of crisis with its neighbor, Pakistan coupled its denials with conciliatory gestures, including the highly unusual step of agreeing to send a representative of its main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to help investigate the attacks.
That move was particularly symbolic because Pakistan's intelligence apparatus itself had been accused of helping Pakistan-based militant groups carry out previous attacks on Indian soil -- most notoriously in the 2001 assault on India's Parliament, which New Delhi blamed on the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad.
In the first hours of the Mumbai crisis, India used veiled though widely understood language to suggest Pakistani involvement. As investigators began interrogating captured assailants, reportedly finding Pakistani nationals among them, the accusations turned sharper.
"Preliminary evidence . . . indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved," India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said Friday in New Delhi.
Pakistan responded with fresh protestations of innocence. "Pakistan has nothing to do with this incident, no link with this act," Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gillani said. "We condemn it."
Pakistan, nudged along by the United States, recently sought rapprochement with India. President Asif Ali Zardari rattled his country's military establishment by asserting that India did not represent a threat to Pakistan, and by offering to repudiate first use of nuclear weapons.
This month, Zardari -- a political neophyte who inherited his leadership role from his assassinated wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto -- astounded his compatriots with a flowery declaration that in every Pakistani's heart there was a bit of India, and in every Indian heart a bit of Pakistan. That came close to heresy in a country where schoolchildren are taught that India is Pakistan's most enduring foe, and where many believe that India represents a greater threat to national security than do militant groups like the Taliban.
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