Stratfor's Reva Bhalla on Yesterday's Mumbai Bombings

Reva Bhalla is interviewed at the Dylan Ratigan show. She's Director of Analysis at Stratfor. It's good:

RELATED: At Los Angeles Times, "Relief and worry after slaying of Hamid Karzai's half brother."

Multiple Bombings Rock Mumbai!

There's a live blog at Telegraph UK, "Reports of at least 20 dead, over 100 injured."

And at New York Times, "3 Bomb Blasts Shake Central Mumbai":

MUMBAI, India — Three bomb blasts shook the city of Mumbai at the height of the evening rush hour on Wednesday, killing at least 20 people in what Indian officials called a coordinated terror attack on the country’s economic capital.

The explosions struck central locations in the city, including the crowded Dadar neighborhood; the Zaveri Bazaar, a well-known jewelry market; and near the Opera House, according to India’s Home Ministry, which said 113 people had been injured.

The attack was the first in Mumbai since militants from Pakistan mounted large-scale assaults on hotels, a train station and a Jewish community center in November 2008, killing more than 160 people.

No immediate claim of responsibility for the Wednesday bombings was reported. India’s home minister, P. Chidambaram, said at a news conference in New Delhi that terror investigation teams had been dispatched to the blast sites.

More at the link. Also, at Toronto's Globe and Mail, "Mumbai blasts a 'co-ordinated attack by terrorists': India's home minister."

Pakistan's Nuclear Posture

Well, it's not all babe-blogging and punk flashbacks around here! [Here, actualy.] I do actually find time to read some professional literature -- although that won't matter to those attacking me as a shitty political scientist! (I'll respond to that later ... idiots!)

Anyway, here's a great piece from the latest International Security, Vipin Narang's, "Posturing for Peace? Pakistan's Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability." From the introduction:

On November 26, 2008, terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba—a group historically supported by the Pakistani state—launched a daring sea assault from Karachi, Pakistan, and laid siege to India’s economic hub, Mumbai, crippling the city for three days and taking at least 163 lives. The world sat on edge as yet another crisis between South Asia’s two nuclear-armed states erupted with the looming risk of armed conflict. But India’s response was restrained; it did not mobilize its military forces to retaliate against either Pakistan or Lashkar camps operating there. A former Indian chief of Army Staff, Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury, bluntly stated that Pakistan’s threat of nuclear use deterred India from seriously considering conventional military strikes. Yet, India’s nuclear weapons capability failed to deter subconventional attacks in Mumbai and Delhi, as well as Pakistan’s conventional aggression in the 1999 Kargil War. Why are these two neighbors able to achieve such different levels of deterrence with their nuclear weapons capabilities? Do differences in how these states operationalize their nuclear capabilities—their nuclear postures—have differential effects on dispute dynamics? ....

To many scholars and practitioners, the world’s grimmest security concerns converge in Pakistan. Pakistan has supported the Taliban, against which the Pakistan Army is fighting a de facto civil war; it supports cross-border terrorism in India, provoking periodic crises in South Asia; and, of course, it has a growing nuclear arsenal. In addition to the risk of inadvertent nuclear use by the Pakistan Army, the arsenal could be vulnerable to malicious elements within the state, whose acquisition of nuclear material or weapons could be catastrophic for regional and international security. Pakistan’s designation as one of the United States’ “major non-NATO” allies cannot obscure concerns in Washington that Pakistan may be the world’s worst security nightmare. Given this nexus of instability, a sober analysis of the pressures and compulsions of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program is of critical importance to South Asian and international security.

It's available in PDF, and while long, it's worth a look.

Narang lays out the evolution of Pakistan's strategic doctrine, which deviates dramatically from the expected predictions of traditional deterrence theory. Especially fascinating is the concept of "catalytic" deterrence, a posture Pakistan adopted to "catalyze" U.S. intervention during a South Asian crisis. The regime in Islamabad would move toward nuclear use amid military confrontations to "signal" to the United States a potentially catastrophic security breakdown. Nuclear mobilization wasn't designed to deter India, but to bring about U.S. intervention: "Pakistan exploited U.S. interests in the region’s stability to impel the United States to intervene on its behalf when its interference in India triggered periodic crises."

There's a summary table on page 45 of the essay. Noteworthy is the theory of why Pakistan's proxy fighting groups (peripheral terrorist organizations like Lashkar) are able to wreak devastating carnage on the Indian state without provoking retaliation against Islamabad. Focusing on "asymmetric escalation," Narang argues that Pakistan relies on a policy of nuclear first use, so that India, while sustaining devastating losses in sub-conventional warfare, hesitates to respond militarily for fear of catatrophic nuclear escalation:

India’s frustration with Pakistan-backed aggression reached deafening heights after roughly a dozen Lashkar-e-Taiba militants executed a precision commando attack on Mumbai on November 26, 2008.98 From the outset, India’s Congress government, and even General Malik (ret.), conceded that its military options to retaliate against Pakistan were again limited, because any meaningful strikes risked uncontrollable escalation, possibly quickly up to the nuclear level.99 India was therefore once more largely restrained by Pakistan’s low nuclear threshold from executing retaliatory airstrikes against suspected Lashkar camps in Pakistan. Former Army Chief of Staff Roychowdhury conceded that “Pakistan’s nuclear weapons deterred India from attacking that country after the Mumbai strikes . . . [and] it was due to Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons that India stopped short of a military retaliation following the attack on Parliament in 2001.”

A great piece of research.

More at the link.

Cross-posted from American Power.

Suicide Bomber Kills Scores in Pakistan!

The death toll varies across news reports, but scores have been killed in a suicide bombing at a Pakistan volleyball match. The Telegraph UK indicates 88 dead:

At least 88 people were killed on Friday when a suicide car bomber blew up himself and his vehicle as people gathered to watch a volleyball game in north-west Pakistan.

Police said dozens more were injured in the attack in the village of Shah Hasan Khan, in Bannu district.

“The villagers were watching the match between the two village teams when the bomber drove his double-cabin pick-up vehicle into them and blew it up,” said Habibullah Khan, the local chief of police.

Police said the attack was possibly retaliation against residents who had set up a militia to expel Taliban fighters from the area. The village is near South Waziristan, where the army last month completed a military offensive against extremists sheltering in the lawless territory.

Friday’s bombing took place after Pakistan’s security forces said they had foiled a suicide bomb plot against the country’s sensitive Wagah border crossing with India.

The plot, if carried out, would have sabotaged the first steps to improve relations between the two countries after the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. It was uncovered as Pakistani intelligence agents arrested 10 militants including the Taliban’s leader in Punjab, known as Khalilullah, and a 17-year-old boy who was being groomed to carry the bomb.

And at the New York Times:

A suicide bomber rammed a pickup truck loaded with explosives into a playground crowded with families and children watching a volleyball game in northwest Pakistan Friday.

Police and local officials said as many as 60 people had been killed, with scores wounded, making the New Year’s Day attack one of the deadliest of more than 20 suicide bombings carried out by militants since October.

The attack underscored the Taliban’s determination to prevent citizens from forming militias to keep the insurgents at bay as military operations disrupt their strongholds in the nearby tribal belt.

Local authorities said they had little doubt that the village, Shah Hassan Khel, was chosen because residents were forming a pro-government militia. In recent weeks, the militants had been threatening death to anyone who joined.

But as the bomber prepared to strike on Friday, he did not choose the most obvious target: A meeting underway of local leaders of the new militia.

Instead, he drove his double-cabin pickup truck into the middle of a nearby playground where teams were playing volleyball and detonated explosives so powerful that they collapsed homes surrounding the field.

It's not as if folks don't realize Pakistan's at the boiling point. For a while there, in the last couple of months, I was reporting a new attack in Pakistan every day. And this is the Taliban, so it's not going to be isolated. The Waziristan region of Af-Pak will continue to be the crosshairs of Islamist radicalism. Indeed, South Asia, encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India is now replicating the foreign policy challenges of Fallujah and Sunni Triangle from roughly 2004 through 2006. Just like Iraq in 2003, now the United Nations is pulling out of Pakistan as increasing danger threatens its mission there. Where once analysts warned of a U.S. defeat in Iraq under the Bush administration, now it's the Demcrats and Obama who'll take blame for deterioriation of the region, the descent and possible collapse of Pakistan, and a perhaps an ignominious American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Healthcare can wait. This administration is facing its highest stakes in foreign policy. We've started to move toward more efficacious counterinsurgency under the McChrystal plan, but President Obama's dithering and delay clearly has emboldened America's enemies in the theater. Dick Cheny is right.

Noteworthy is how the Taliban, by seeking to deploy teenage bombers, is now mimicking the most diabolical terrorism of al Qaeda in Iraq at the height of the insurgency. And as we saw yesterday, the bomber in the Afghan blast that killed 8 Americans had camouflaged the bomb under an Afghan army uniform.

See also, CNN's report, "Terror Attack Kills 75 at Pakistan Volleyball Match."