Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
The jihadi terrorists who launched the Nov. 26-29 attack on India's financial capital of Mumbai deemed it a huge success because they killed more than 170 people and maimed or wounded at least 300 more.
Now fallout from the attacks may soon enable terrorists to lay claim to two more "successes": raising tensions to a dangerous level between India and Pakistan, longtime foes with nuclear arsenals; and weakening the NATO-led war against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
India's government blames Pakistan's government -- not for the attacks -- but for its failure to control remote, rural areas of the country where Jihadi terrorists, including Taliban and al-Qaida, train and make plans to mount Mumbai-like attacks on other cities around the world.
Pakistan is supposed to be an anti-terror ally, yet it has refused to cooperate with New Delhi's request to help find perpetrators of the Mumbai siege, although India officials say they have a good idea who they are.
Pakistan even denies the jihadist assailants used their soil as a sanctuary. That claim is a denial all right -- a denial of the hard truth that Pakistan's fragile democratic government won't, or can't, admit to because its intelligence agencies and other key government bureaucracies are honeycombed with radical Muslim sympathizers.
Instead of prompting cooperation between the two countries to apprehend the Mumbai terrorists, tensions have escalated to where Islamabad has begun moving thousands of its troops away from Afghanistan border areas and toward India -- undermining the U.S.-backed campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The last thing our perilous world needs at this time is another confrontation between these two nuclear powers. They've already fought three hot wars -- fortunately, before either side developed nuclear arsenals.
There is something to be said, however, on behalf of India's desire to take out jihadists' safe havens on Pakistani soil. We want the same thing. Islamist terrorists can never be defeated so long as they benefit from such a sanctuary. But India is the last nation that should make a military drive to control the area -- it could trigger a disastrous nuclear exchange.
Commanders of the United Nations-sanctioned, NATO-led troops need to lay down the law to Islamabad -- that if Pakistan can't control its own territory, then they will. The civilized world simply cannot allow terrorists to operate with impunity in Pakistan or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world.
