Mumbai attack: India, Pak need to be sober in their reactions, says editorial

Islamabad, Dec.9 (ANI): Pakistan will have to measure its capacity to withstand the prospect of a multi-pronged conflict raging both within and without in the wake of last month's terror attacks in Mumbai.

Even as Islamabad awaits evidence from India on who from Pakistan may have had a role in perpetrating the November 26-29 massacre, or who was behind the decimation of NATO supply trucks in Peshawar, an editorial in the Daily Times says "No country in the world can afford to succumb to passion when its economic and political moorings have been snapped. Wisdom recommends that Pakistan take a sober view of the situation and act with flexibility rather than Quixotic bravado."

It further goes on to say that the Pakistani media would do well to follow this mantra, "and begin to show caution in place of challenge."

The editorial appears to reject the dominant view in Pakistan, most of it expressed by former military officers in the media, that Pakistan should block NATO supply convoys going through Pakistan.

It says that if this step is taken, it will certify to the world that the Pakistan Army is incapable of - if not unwilling to - putting down such elements and keeping its side of the commitment made to the US on NATO supplies.

It says that the movement of these supplies overland from Pakistan gets Islamabad the funds it needs to mobilize itself against the terrorists.

As far as the terror strike in Mumbai is concerned, it says the "question is not whether the Indians are right or wrong. What is important, in real terms, is whether the world believes India or Pakistan."

The evidence provided by a Pakistani journalist working for London's Observer that the surviving terrorist hails from Okara District in Pakistan's Punjab's province, it warns will "make Pakistan's spirited defence irrelevant. The world is going to believe the Indian version. And that is where trouble is going to come from."

The clean-up operations that are going on are fine, but it might be too late, says the editorial.

It concludes by saying that passions and internal political pressures can do much damage, and it is for both countries to back off from verbal saber rattling and regain the ground lost because of the Mumbai attack. (ANI)