Mumbai attacks a diversion tactic: analyst

The Hindu: Atul Aneja
To relieve military pressure on the Afghan border
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Parliament attack was a similar move
Possibility of another attack stressed
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MANAMA: The Mumbai terror attacks are directly linked to the military situation along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, says Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani writer and security analyst .

In an interview with The Hindu on the sidelines of a security conference in Bahrain, Mr. Rashid said groups behind the attacks wanted to relieve the pressure that was being mounted on them by the Pakistani Army along the western border with Afghanistan.

“I think one of the major reasons of this attack by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban — all the groups that are active — was to relieve the pressure on the western border by creating a crisis on the eastern border.”

Mr. Rashid, who authored ‘Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords,’ pointed out that these groups had adopted similar tactics earlier by mounting an attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. “This is exactly what they did in 2001-2002 and they were totally victorious. They created a crisis by attacking the Indian Parliament. Pakistan Army was then lining up around Tora Bora in Afghanistan. The moment this crisis happened, the Pakistani Army moved from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan border and headed towards the Indian border. Nobody could touch the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Afghans and others for the next four years.”
Full Story: Mumbai attacks a diversion tactic: analyst
Pakistan's opposition fears another division

Diplomatic offensive against terror attacks
The point is, the Mumbai terrorists did not get a visa from the Indian high commission in Islamabad, before they set off on from Karachi and landed at Badhwar Park in Mumbai.

The Congress-led government has ruled out a military strike against Pakistan in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks, preferring instead to mount a worldwide diplomatic offensive hoping that this will ensure that Pakistan finds itself between a rock and such a hard place that it is forced to deliver on its anti-terror promises.

This is the essential difference between the India-Pakistan standoff in 2002, after the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on Parliament on 13 December 2001, and now. Earlier, the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled coalition ordered that the army be moved to India’s western border where it stood, eyeball-to-eyeball with the Pakistani army for nearly ten months.

To draw a parallel with the Mahabharata, a well-loved Indian epic in which two families fight a war in which both are almost destroyed, the BJP’s action was akin to a warrior pulling out a particularly deadly arrow from his arsenal, placing it against the skein of his bow, then stopping short, yawning, and indefinitely resting under the shade of the nearest tree.
Diplomatic offensive against terror attacks