Stratfor, an international-affairs think tank, foresees hightened tensions following this week’s terrorist attacks in India:
If the Nov. 26 attacks in Mumbai were carried out by Islamist militants as it appears, the Indian government will have little choice, politically speaking, but to blame them on Pakistan. That will in turn spark a crisis between the two nuclear rivals that will draw the United States into the fray.
Although India, logically, will need to respond forcefully to assure the country’s people — voters, in othe words – that such an attack will not happen again, the problem is that Pakistan can do little to stop Islamic fundamentalists within their midst. After all, this is a country that has little authority over the western part of the country that borders Afghanistan — and the place where, most likely, Osama bin Laden is hiding.
This is why it is so dangerous: India must respond, but Pakistan is too weak to stop the extremists. India and the United States have also become closer ever since the War on Terror began (and as a result of globalization). It does not help that several Americans, including a rabbi and his wife, were killed in the attacks. Israel, which also has ties with India and the United States, also had several citizens who died or are currently missing. Israelis, a courageous people who usually fear nothing, have tended to ignore government warnings not to travel to places like Sinai or India at certain times, but now they make think otherwise. The fact that the terrorists targeted Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish group with offices in every location in the world that tries to help Jews in foreign countries and fight local poverty, is a sign that Muslim extremists will even target Jewish targets that pose no conceivable threat at all.
This coming week will reveal what will happen in one of the most unstable parts of the world.
