Robert Kagan, your colleague at Carnegie, recently wrote in The New York Times that maybe it was time for the US and other world powers to internationalize the response. Is that a viable option?
I believe it is certainly an idea that will occur to people, because what are your choices? You have the option that the Pakistanis clean up their own house, and that is the best of all worlds. Again, you can have the Indians go in and do the job, but then you face the prospect of an all out war between two nuclear armed nations.
You can have the United States do it and in a sense, we are already doing some of it, but the magnitude of the US invading Pakistan and cleaning it up is so mind-boggling that it's really not worth a second thought.
That brings up the final option, that if it is not feasible for any of these players to do individually what must be done, then the international community comes together and does it as a body.
I think these are all ideas that have been tabled and will receive a lot of attention in the next few months. My preference, for a variety of reasons is the first one -- that Pakistan cleans its own house, not as a favour to India but as a favour to itself.
The US is already using unmanned drones to attack terrorist targets in Pakistan territory. What is so unthinkable about extending that to attacks on Lashkar bases in Muridke and elsewhere? After all, the US too has much at stake; it too lost its citizens on 26/11.
The problem is that it's not simply about attacking Muridke. Granted that is where the Lashkar is headquartered, and where it has some static facilities. The real Lashkar operations are conducted way outside Muridke, however; there are training camps strewn through the length and breadth of Pakistan. To go after all of them is to contemplate a large-scale attack on Pakistan itself.
I don't think anyone at this stage is comfortable with these kinds of solutions because there is a fact that has to be taken into account -- that there are elements within Pakistan that are really struggling to take their country in the right course.
Image: A file photograph of Glide Bomb Units, the first-ever armed, unmanned drones that the United States used in combat. Photograph: Lance H Mayhew/Reuters
Also read: India will have to fight in its own way
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