In this morning’s Washington Post Prince Turki al-Faisal of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, former director general of their intelligence service and also their former ambassador to the United States offers President Obama some advice on how to proceed in Afghanistan with which I find I am in almost complete agreement. His advice consists of six action items:

• There is no viable opposition to Karzai in Afghanistan. He is a fact. Deal with it.
• Concentrate on fighting foreign terrorists and build bridges with the Taliban.
• Fix the Durand Line.
• Meet with the security and intelligence departments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, China, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to devise ways of eliminating Al Qaeda’s leadership. Nobody has more on the line than the Saudis in that battle and Russia and China are at greater risk than we are from them.
• Exert influence to induce Pakistan and India to resolve the matter of Kashmir.
• Use measures similar to those used in Turkey (in which the U. S. bought the entire crop directly from farmers, something I’ve been suggesting, and allowed them to plant alternative crops).

Read the whole thing. I’m hoping that John Burgess will weigh in on this. John, are you there?

Monday, Samoa will switch to driving on the left side of the road in order to benefit from cheap used cars from Australia and New Zealand.  This gave Time’s Randy James to explain, “Why Don’t We All Drive on the Same Side of the Road?”  It’s especially odd that two-thirds of the world drives on the right, since most of us are right-handed and driving on the left is not only much more convenient but was the norm for centuries.

Theories differ, but there’s no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there’s evidence of a Parisian “keep-right” law dating from 1794). Some say that, before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany. (Hitler, in turn, ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s). Nations that escaped right-handed conquest, such as Great Britain, preserved their left-handed tradition.

Nor was the U.S. always a nation of right-hand drivers; earlier in its history, carriage and horse traffic traveled on the left, as it did in England. But by the late 1700s, the theory goes, teamsters driving large wagons pulled by several pairs of horses began prompting a shift to the right. A driver would sit on the rear left horse in order to wield his whip with his right hand; to see opposite traffic clearly, they traveled on the right.

One of the final moves to firmly standardize traffic directions in the U.S. occurred in the 20th century, when Henry Ford decided to mass-produce his cars with controls on the left (one reason, stated in a 1908 catalog: the convenience for passengers exiting directly onto the curb, “especially… if there is a lady to be considered.”) Once these norms were set, many countries eventually adjusted to conform to the right-hand standard, including Canada in the 1920s, Sweden in 1967 and Burma in 1970. The United Kingdom and former colonies such as Australia and India are among the western world’s few remaining holdouts.

One would think that the holdouts would switch to right-hand driving if simply for the ability to market their cars more easily.  But, as the decades-long effort to switch the United States to the near ubiquitous and much simpler Metric system demonstrate, people fight very hard to hang on to cultural norms.

Do you recall the aid we’ve been sending Pakistan so that the Pakistani government will let us supply our troops in Afghanistan via Pakistan, secure their nuclear weapons, and oppose the Taliban and Al Qaeda being harbored within Pakistan’s borders? Apparently, Pakistan is seizing the opportunity to build up its nuclear arsenal:

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

“Yes,” he said quickly, adding nothing, clearly cognizant of Pakistan’s sensitivity to any discussion about the country’s nuclear strategy or security.

So, let me see if I’ve got this right. We’re concerned about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal so we’re giving money to the Pakistani government which in turn is using the money (remember, money is fungible) to build up the nuclear arsenal that we’re concerned about.

Well, at least the money’s being put to a good use. I’m sure the Indians will be thrilled.

Shelly’s poem Ozymandias is forced to mind when reading this piece from the Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, Florida. It makes perfect economic sense—cheap, useful cars with good gas mileage—but does it ever speak volumes about the inevitability of change…

Indian car company readies Sarasota showroom
Toni Whitt

SARASOTA COUNTY – While working for General Motors in the 1980s and early 1990s, Pawan Goenka discovered Americans’ passion for trucks and SUVs.

As president of the automotive sector for Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd., based in Mumbai, India, Goenka is using that knowledge to bring India’s first trucks to the United States this year.

But Mahindra is not off-loading the stereotypical gas guzzler. The Mahindra trucks benefit from advanced emissions technology, making them more environmentally friendly. They also run on diesel and get about 30 miles per gallon.

A new brand — coming out just as GM struggles with solvency and Chrysler declares bankruptcy — and that new technology should create enough excitement to overcome dealers’ problems selling trucks and sports utility vehicles amid a recession and on the heels of last year’s gasoline spike, Goenka said.
…

In anticipation of next week’s NATO meeting in which the issue of Afghanistan will be front and center, President Obama has briefed Congressional leaders on his plans:

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to further bolster American forces in Afghanistan and for the first time set benchmarks for progress in fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban there and in Pakistan, officials said Thursday.

In imposing conditions on the Afghans and Pakistanis, Mr. Obama is replicating a strategy used in Iraq two years ago both to justify a deeper American commitment and prod governments in the region to take more responsibility for quelling the insurgency and building lasting political institutions.

In the new plan the number of U. S. troops will be increased:

The new strategy, which Mr. Obama will formally announce Friday, will send 4,000 more troops to train Afghan security forces on top of the 17,000 extra combat troops that he already ordered to Afghanistan shortly after taking office, administration and Congressional officials said. But for now, Mr. Obama has decided not to send additional combat forces, they said, although military commanders at one point had requested a total of 30,000 more American troops.

I gather that the new plan places substantial emphasis on the role of other countries in the region:

The goals that Mr. Obama has settled on may be elusive and, according to some critics, even naïve. Among other things, officials said he planned to recast the Afghan war as a regional issue involving not only Pakistan but also India, Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian states.

His plan envisions persuading Pakistan to stop focusing military resources on its longstanding enemy, India, so it can concentrate more on battling insurgents in its lawless tribal regions. That goal may be especially hard to achieve given more than a half century of enmity — including a nuclear arms race — between Pakistan and India.

Although there is no bright line between counter-terrorist activities and counter-insurgency activities, one possible yardstick would be the relative emphasis on providing security for local people under a counter-insurgency strategy. As I understand President Obama’s plan, he intends to focus more strongly on counter-terrorism than counter-insurgency.

This promises to allow for a shorter term commitment than the as much as thirty years that might be required for a successful counter-insurgency operation and, possibly, at a lower cost.

There are, however, no guarantees and in some ways the plan is a risky one. Imagine a highly intricate machine that is completely dependent on just a couple of fragile parts. In the case of this plan among the fragile parts would be getting the Pakistanis to devote their attentions to what we’re interested in (securing their border with Afghanistan and pursuing the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, a mischievously puzzling euphemism if ever there was one) as opposed to what they’re interesting (their ongoing hostilities with neighboring India, generally percolating just below the level of war).

Another of the fragile parts is the ability of Afghanistan to support a large, standing national army. The per capita GDP of Afghanistan is $800. The American way of war is expensive and, since they’ll be trained by Americans, the new Afghan military will be trained in practicing the American way of war. I see no way that Afghanistan will be able to support that for the foreseeable future.

My conjecture is that we’ll be footing the bill for the Afghan military in a place far, far away with head-spinningly complex ethnic and tribal interrelationships. If you think that there has been a lot of waste and corruption in Iraq, just wait until you get a load of supporting the Afghan military in perpetuity.

Yesterday Pakistan acknowledged what the Indians have been saying all along, that the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November were planned in Pakistan and executed by Pakistanis with the assistance of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani officials took what could be a decisive step forward in the country’s fight against Islamic extremism Thursday, publicly admitting for the first time that the Mumbai terrorist attacks were planned in and launched from Pakistan .

“Some part of the conspiracy has taken place in Pakistan ,” Rehman Malik , the top security official in the Interior Ministry , told a news conference in Islamabad . “I want to assure the international community, I want to assure all those who have been victims of terrorism, that we mean business.”

Before the announcement, Pakistani officials had denied that there was any proof that its citizens were involved in the November Mumbai bombings, which killed some 170 people and pushed nuclear-armed Pakistan and India to the verge of war. Indian officials Thursday promptly welcomed the Pakistani admission as a “positive development.”

However, the attacks had international implications as well:

Investigators also discovered that the attackers had made extensive use of Internet and telephone communications from Texas to Europe and the Middle East . A man named Javed Iqbal who lived in Barcelona , for instance, set up some of the Internet phone accounts — which were paid for in Italy. Iqbal was “lured” back to Pakistan during the investigation and detained, officials said. The attackers in Mumbai used phones to keep in touch with their handlers throughout the operation.

Malik stressed that the conspirators were “non-state actors,” a response to Indian allegations that Pakistan — especially its Inter-Services Intelligence agency — helped orchestrate the attack.

Some Indian commenters have attributed Pakistan’s admission to pressure from the West:

NEW DELHI: Why did Pakistan do a volteface on the Mumbai attacks? After flinging around disinformation for the past few weeks, tossing names from Austria to UK, US and Bangladesh, what possessed the government of Asif Ali Zardari to tread the straight and narrow?

It’s easy to detect the hand of US and western pressure, particularly as it came a day after US special envoy Richard Holbrooke exited Islamabad. Even if Mumbai was not discussed with Holbrooke, as Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi insisted, a phone call from US President Barack Obama to Zardari on Wednesday had an entirely different effect.

According to sources, Pakistan’s admission had a lot to do with its precarious finances and a threat of aid cut-off by the US which is trying to undercut its dependence on Islamabad for the success of the fight against Taliban.

Former high commissioner to Pakistan G Parthasarathy said, “Pakistan’s acknowledgement of reality was brought about by relentless US pressure despite lack of concrete Indian action.”

However it came about it’s a positive development and that’s how the Indians seem to be taking it. Some are saying that Pakistan needs to go substantially farther:

New Delhi (IANS): A day after Pakistan acknowledged the role of its nationals in the Mumbai atrocity, India Friday asked Islamabad to “unveil the full conspiracy” behind the assault and said it would continue to review actions taken by it to bring its perpetrators to justice.

Addressing the Lok Sabha, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee termed the Pakistani response a “positive development” and underlined that it was imperative that they act with sincerity and effectiveness to get to the bottom of the crime.

He also said India would share “whatever we can” in response to Pakistan’s queries over its investigation

The critically acclaimed “Slumdog Millionaire” is not doing well in its native India, Madhur Singh reports for TIME.

For many Indians, the film’s subject and treatment are familiar to the point of being banal. A lot of Indians are not keen to watch it for the same reason they wouldn’t want to go to Varanasi or Pushkar for a holiday — it’s too much reality for what should be entertainment. “We see all this every day,” says Shikha Goyal, a Mumbai-based PR executive who left halfway through the film. “You can’t live in Mumbai without seeing children begging at traffic lights and passing by slums on your way to work. But I don’t want to be reminded of that on a Saturday evening.” There is also a sense of injured national pride, especially for a lot of well-heeled metro-dwellers, who say the film peddles “poverty porn” and “slum voyeurism.”

I’m quite unlikely to get around to watching it any time soon for a different reason:  the subtitles.   I like reading.  I like watching movies.   I despise doing them simultaneously.

Over the last several months a scandal has been emerging in India that’s received precious little attention over here: the Indian information technology services outsourcing giant, Satyam Computer Services Ltd., has been found to have been cooking the books, overstating its financial and business strength over the period of nearly a decade. Now the next shoe has dropped in the story. Two employees of Satyam’s auditing company, Price-Waterhouse, have been arrested:

HYDERABAD, India – Police in India have arrested two employees of Price Waterhouse, the auditors of the troubled Indian outsourcing giant Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

S. Gopalakrishnan and T. Srinivas of the auditing firm are being investigated for fraud and criminal breach of trust, senior police official A. Siva Narayana said late Saturday.

Satyam’s founder and former chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, confessed earlier this month to perpetrating a $1 billion fraud.

Price Waterhouse subsequently said its audit reports for the last eight years relied on potentially false data provided by Satyam and should be disregarded.

The unfolding scandal has been described as the “Indian Enron”. It certainly appears as though the Indian scandal has at least one thing in common with the American one: complicity of its auditors in the fraud.

Satyam was troubled before this latest set of revelations emerged: it had already been banned from doing business with the World Bank for bribing World Bank employees. The new fraud scandal has already cost Satyam several blue chip American clients, notably Bank of America and State Farm.

The Indian authorities are to be commended on the alacrity they’ve shown in dealing with this situation. We could use a bit more of that on the part of our own law enforcement. However, I do think this scandal raises serious issues about the reliability of offshore outsourcing. Everything I’ve read about this particular scandal suggests that Raju, Satyam’s founder, was treating the publicly-held company as a personal fiefdom and piggy bank. Note that one of the revelations has been that Satyam claimed to have 53,000 employees while actually having only about 40,000. Millions of dollars have been drawn from Satyam’s accounts to pay the salaries of these fictitious employees and nobody seems to know where the money went. There are some reports that the company is having difficulty securing financing to pay its employees, unsurprising given the current credit environment.

Will this incident produce an Indian Sarbanes-Oxley, some sort of change in regulations on corporate governance? My guess is that more scandals will need to come to light before that happens.

Pictured above are the two Price-Waterhouse employees who’ve been arrested, Chief Relationship Partner S. Gopalakrishnan and Engagement Leader Srinivas Talluri. Photo courtesy of AP.

On Barack Obama’s second day in office, the Bush administration is fast fading into memory.   As accidental tax evader Timothy Geithner prepares to take over at Treasury in an administration where transparency and the rule of law will be touchstones, it’s an excellent time to begin looking at the global economy.

To do that, we’ll once again turn to Thomas Barnett’s forthcoming book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush.  I’ll attempt to weave a unified thread out of Chapter 4, The Economic Realignment: Racing to the Bottom of the Pyramid; Chapter 7, The Network Realignment: The Rise of the SysAdmin-Industrial Complex; and Chapter 8, The Strategic Realignment: Resurrecting the Progressive Agenda.

America is being replaced as “the global demand” center by rising powers India and China. This means that we’re no longer the only agenda setters.  This is “the price of our success in projecting the American System globally.”  China’s economic growth is the key factor in the global economy and the rise of the BRIC quartet (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and smaller emerging powers means “3 billion new capitalists who joined globalization over the past quarter century.”

Continued at New Atlanticist:  America and the World After Bush: Economics and Globalization

Barack Obama has been president for more than 24 hours now.  America is once again beloved by one and all.  Hubris and overreach are things of the past, as the inmates of Gitmo have been freed and the troops are all home from Iraq, participating in rebuilding the infrastructure at home.   Or, certainly, change is in the air.

As we wait for the Obama administration to settle in and finish whatever remains of the above tasks, we continue our look at the post-Bush era and Thomas Barnett’s forthcoming Great Powers: America and the World After Bush.  Rather than continuing a chapter-by-chapter treatment, today’s installment will look at Chapter 5: “The Diplomatic Realignment: Rebranding the Team of Rivals” and Chapter 6, “The Security Realignment: Rediscovering Diplomacy, Defense, and Development.”

We need a rethink our grand strategy, which Barnett defines as a “diplomatic approach to shaping this age.”  Because of our rule as the global Leviathan, it should be “mostly about trying to shape every other state’s grand strategy.”   Our main problem at the moment is “unreasonable expectations for immediate success.”

Continued at New Atlanticist:  America and the World After Bush: Diplomacy and Security

There’s an article over at Reuters listing some of the possible scenarios that might emerge in the confrontation between India and Pakistan. I think the article is best described as an editorial.

A mixture of opinion and superficial analysis, if it had a by-line it would be an op-ed. It’s not a news article since it’s not reporting the news. It’s too lightweight to be analysis. It’s basically a blog post but, since it comes from a legitimate news outlet, I guess it’s an editorial.

The editorial lays out three possible scenarios. War:

If conflict were to begin, analysts see the most likely scenario as an Indian strike on what it sees as militant targets in Pakistani Kashmir or in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The Pakistani military has vowed to respond to any such strike “within minutes”. Tit-for-tat missile strikes would be followed by the rapid mobilisation of troops along the line separating the two sides in disputed Kashmir and along their international border that runs south to the Arabian Sea. Both sides have hundreds of thousands of soldiers and large amounts of a range of military hardware based near their frontier. Their navies would face off in the Arabian Sea and analysts say India would probably try to block Pakistan’s main port of Karachi.

The fear is that strikes and counter-strikes would rapidly escalate between two countries armed with nuclear weapons and various ways of delivering them.

Peace:

India has imposed a “pause” on a peace process begun in 2004, which had brought better ties. Pakistan has said it regrets the move but there is nothing it can do if its interlocutor doesn’t want to talk. For the time being, a resumption of the peace process would be unpopular with the Indian public so the pause is likely to last at least until May elections in India.

In the longer term, India probably realises it’s better to engage Pakistan than ignore it, and it would like to help civilian leaders establish authority over the generals.

And “none of the above”:

If, analysts say, the Pakistani military refuses to abandon old jihadi assets, there will be no war and no peace. Instead there’s a real danger both sides could use non-state proxies to try to destabilise each other. India says Pakistan backs violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir and other areas while Pakistan says India stirs up trouble in western and northwestern regions on the Afghan border. The world would be haunted by periodic crises and fear of nuclear war between the neighbours.

It seems to me that whatever happens will be determined not by the merits of the case as the editorial suggests but by domestic political considerations in India and Pakistan. As I read the tealeaves Pakistan’s internal political situation prevents its government from acting and India’s political situation requires the government to act. That certainly looks like a formula for escalation to me.

But Reuters is a wire service, for goodness sake. Can’t it do better than this?

There have been a couple of interesting developments in the tense exchange of words between India and Pakistan that’s been going on since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November. Pakistan has responded angrily to the claims by India’s prime minister of involvement of the Pakistani government in the attacks:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 7 (UPI) — Pakistani leaders say Indian suggestions that official agencies may have been involved in training November’s Mumbai terrorists are pushing the region to war.

Tuesday’s statement by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the sophistication of the terror attacks pointed to the involvement of “some official agencies in Pakistan” has infuriated officials in Islamabad, who called the statement “irresponsible,” the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

“Vilifying Pakistan or … any of its state institutions on this score is unwarranted and unacceptable,” the Pakistani foreign ministry said in a statement. “This is a sure way to close avenues of cooperation in combating this menace.”

“If India takes military action against Pakistan, it would be a big mistake,” the Times quoted Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir telling Pakistani lawmakers. “India is pushing this region to war.”

However, Pakistan has also confirmed for the first time that the sole surviving terrorist attacker is a Pakistani citizen:

Pakistani authorities are reviewing the evidence but have dismissed Singh’s claims. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani accused India of waging a “media and diplomatic offensive against Pakistan.”

“It is clearly unhelpful to any serious and objective investigations and amounts to unnecessarily whipping up tensions in South Asia,” Gilani said.

But Pakistani Information Minister Sherry Rehman did say Wednesday that the lone surviving gunman was a Pakistani citizen, after weeks of refusing to confirm Delhi’s claims. Islamabad had previously said it could not find Ajmal Kasab — the only one of 10 not killed as commandos ended the siege — in its databases.

Indian leaders have made clear they do not want a military conflict with Pakistan, and Pakistan’s intelligence chief said there will be no war over the Mumbai attacks.

“We may be crazy in Pakistan, but not completely out of our minds,” Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, told German news magazine Der Spiegel. “We know full well that terror is our enemy, not India.”

For the present we can only hope that the angry exchanges between the two countries remain limited to words.

India’s Prime Minister has characterized Pakistan’s actions as using terrorism as a tool of state policy:

India’s prime minister accused Pakistan of using terrorism as a policy tool and said the Mumbai attackers must have had the support of some official Pakistani agencies, allegations that appeared to dim any prospect of cooperation between the two countries in probing the attacks.

A statement from Pakistan’s foreign ministry said the nation “emphatically rejects the unfortunate allegations.” Pakistani officials warned that Mr. Singh’s remarks could affect Islamabad’s offer of cooperation into the attacks. “Scoring points like this will only move us further away from focusing on the very real and present danger of regional and global terrorism,” said information minister Sherry Rehman.

The attacks in late November left more than 170 dead. India claims the attackers came from Pakistan and provided a dossier of evidence to substantiate its claims to Pakistan Monday. The latest verbal sparring comes amid heightened tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations, though both sides have said they want to avoid war.

The usually soft-spoken and reticent Mr. Singh made his remarks at a conference in New Delhi to review India’s internal security. India has announced the overhaul of its security system since the Mumbai attacks, which culminated a year of terrorist strikes around the country including in New Delhi, Jaipur and the northeast.

Mr. Singh made a distinction, however, between threats emanating from inside the nation, such as the separatist movement in the northeastern state of Assam and a Maoist rebellion in central and southeastern states, and terrorist threats from abroad.

To an outsider like me it looked as though things were cooling down in the situation between India and Pakistan after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November. Apparently, not so.

The transcript of Mr. Singh’s comments is here. Here’s the portion alluded to above:

Unfortunately, we cannot choose our neighbours, and some countries like Pakistan have in the past encouraged and given sanctuary to terrorists and other forces who are antagonistic to India. We have tried to minimize the impact of such hostility by erecting certain defences. We have fenced our border along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, from where the vast majority of the infiltrations into India tended to take place. We are currently fencing our border with Bangladesh, from where also a number of infiltrations have been reported.

Consequent upon this, those in charge of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan have resorted to other stratagems to infiltrate terrorists into India. Infiltration is occurring via Nepal and from Bangladesh, though it has not totally ceased via the Line of Control in J&K. We are aware that the sea route is another option that is now being exercised. A few interceptions have taken place, though we failed to intercept the 10 Pakistani terrorists who came by sea from Karachi on November 26.

The terrorist attack in Mumbai in November last year was clearly carried out by a Pakistan-based outfit, the Lashkar-e-Taiba. On the basis of the investigations carried out, including the agencies of some foreign countries whose nationals were killed in the attack, there is enough evidence to show that, given the sophistication and military precision of the attack it must have had the support of some official agencies in Pakistan.

He continues with an interesting and sophisticated discussion of the terrorist threats that India faces and the tools necessary for facing them. Indeed, his remarks reflect a deeper and more complex understanding of the situation than anything I’ve heard from an American politician.

Indian officials have been saying it all along but now Pakistani officials, too, are pointing to links between last month’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba:

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s own investigation of terror attacks in Mumbai has begun to show substantive links between the 10 gunmen and an Islamic militant group that its powerful spy agency spent years supporting, say people with knowledge of the probe.

At least one top leader of militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, or “Army of the Pure,” captured in a raid earlier this month in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, has confessed the group’s involvement in the attack as India and the U.S. have alleged, according to a senior Pakistani security official.

The disclosure could add new international pressure on Pakistan to accept that the attacks, which left 171 dead in India, originated within its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects. That raises difficult and potentially destabilizing issues for the country’s new civilian government, its military and the spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence — which is conducting interrogations of militants it once cultivated as partners.

Pakistani security officials say a top Lashkar commander, Zarar Shah, has admitted a role in the Mumbai attack during interrogation, according to the security official, who declined to be identified discussing the investigation. “He is singing,” the security official said of Mr. Shah. The admission, the official said, is backed up by U.S. intercepts of a phone call between Mr. Shah and one of the attackers at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, the site of a 60-hour confrontation with Indian security forces.

A second person familiar with the investigation said Mr. Shah told Pakistani interrogators that he was one of the key planners of the operation, and that he spoke with the attackers during the rampage to give them advice and keep them focused.

This is still hearsay and quotes from unnamed sources but take it for what it’s worth.

I’m not sure whether the confirmations that are coming out will defuse or inflame the situation between India and Pakistan. On the one hand it certainly looks as though the Islamabad government is pursuing its investigation as it promised and being forthcoming about the results. On the other it confirms the reasons that India blamed the attacks on Pakistan in the first place.

Apparently the troops Pakistan has transferred from the border with Afghanistan to the border with India are just going there for a nice Christmas holiday:

ISLAMABAD (AFP) — Pakistan again said on Saturday that it did not want war with India, as the international community tried to defuse tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours after Islamabad moved troops to the border.

The White House called for calm amid a flurry of diplomatic activity in both Islamabad and New Delhi aimed at easing already badly strained ties, one month after the Mumbai attacks, which India has blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

“We have lost our people — we do not talk about war, we do not talk about vengeance,” Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said in a speech on the first anniversary of the assassination of his wife, former premier Benazir Bhutto.

“Dialogue is our biggest arsenal,” he told ministers and lawmakers in remarks broadcast live on state television, saying negotiations were “the solution to the problem of the region.”

But Zardari did warn India not to push Islamabad too hard for action against extremist organisations like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group New Delhi says masterminded the Mumbai attacks, which left 172 people dead including nine of the 10 gunmen.

“We have non-state actors. Yes, they are forcing an agenda on us,” the Pakistani leader said

or, perhaps. they’re just going there for the waters.

You know when you’ve got enough light to read by when you’ve turned on enough lights that you can read. You know that you’ve cleared your front walk of ice sufficiently when you don’t fall down when you step outside your door. When “non-state actors” are able to force an agenda on you, you haven’t taken adequate action against them.

In my commentary in the aftermath of the attacks in Mumbai last month I’ve tried to hew as closely to the known facts as possible. I’ve tried to give Pakistan the benefit of the doubt whenever possible without dismissing India unduly. Ideally, I don’t think that I (or the U. S.) should take either side in the controversies between India and Pakistan.

But eventually Islamabad must stop coddling the “non-state actors” it’s supported over the years if it’s to be more than a nominal government. Islamabad’s unofficial policy of supporting jihadis in order to appease political forces within Pakistan is rendering its official policies of favoring a stable, peaceful Afghanistan and an improved relationship with India ineffective.

If Pakistan and India go to war, nobody benefits. It’s time to stop the double-talk.

For a backgrounder on the relationship between Pakistani intelligence, the I. S. I., and terrorism see here at the Council for Foreign Relations.