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Read other letters about this article
Just in case people are interested, I had put up the URLs for the Times of India and The Hindu yesterday on the previous thread, nobody responded. So be it, I was otherwise occupied yesterday too. No excuse for ignoring them today, if you want to expound, though.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
http://www.hinduonnet.com/
http://www.telegraphindia.com/section/frontpage/index.jsp
I do read the Hindustani Times still, but I only read it before because they got their web page working well when The Telegraph was crashing and The Times was misdirecting. It's a truly great source of information, and you should swear by everything it says -- as long as the information you seek is National Enquirer level gossip on Bollywood stars or Cricket players.
If you go read there, you find out, as per what Dileep Padgaonkar was saying, that there are a lot of rational steps being taken: Manmohan Singh and L.K. Advani did go together to visit and console at the hospitals, as he mentioned. Anyone who knows everything and more about the situation knew that last night, no? And the Coast Guard was out looking for, and by midnight PST was reporting had found the boat it was looking for, and by early this morning Singh and Zardari and Gillani had together agreed that Pacha (the ISI Chief) would go to India to participate in the investigation and would be enjoined to share intelligence with India, as Prime Minister Singh had demanded.
As for predictions, the minute it became obvious that General Kayani was not going to throw elections and had the ISI in his sights for a purge, it was also obvious that there was going to be trouble, it didn't matter whether or not the government was civilian. Should have been obvious as the ISI spawned terrorist groups all moved to Waziristan over the last year and consolidated, that all the tactics were going to get a lot more "professional" and the terrorism was going to get very nasty.
Another prediction that should have been easy to make on Wednesday was that with elections coming up, there'd be someone in the BJP that'd try to do something political. Gee, it's so unexpected that the bile is right on schedule out of Narendra Modi, isn't it? As if the RSS was never involved in a goddamn thing. And conveniently, we can forget that Pakistan wasn't implicated in Assam, and that the blame for the New Delhi bombings isn't really falling that way either.
We have a very blatant (and not really questioned by Pakistanis) assault on Mumbai by a group in Pakistan, and all evidence is pointing to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and has been for a day and a half now, including possible "admissions" from captured terrorists. Let's not pretend that it all comes of having civilian governments in Pakistan. Or that everybody should abandon all delving into root causes and cry havoc. In case anyone's interested, that isn't a proposal for stopping the problem. What would you like them to do? Dump the civilian government? Pull troops out of the FATA to patrol Karachi looking for Lashkar terrorists? Or maybe India should follow Modi and his RSS off the violence cliff and start a war? Lob a few Agni's into Islamabad and show 'em what a bomb really looks like?
By the way, I've been finding BBC to be actually worse than American media on this, tons of consulting "experts" who have standard formulae for all terrorist events in South Asia that they use like Procrustean beds to fit this attack into. All sitting in Britain, and all inexcusably behind on the news, given that they can read Indian primary source journalism just as easily as anyone else can on their computers. And I found Dileep Padgaonkar's article too lacking in dates and times for projecting at the American audience, although it was well thought out. Americans in general don't know that some of what he is citing goes back 20 or more years, and isn't new with Bush's war on terror.
