Mumbai madness

Indian police have come out a stated, quite flatly, that the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, planned the Mumbai bombings of July 11. Pakistani officials have denied, quite flatly, the charge and say that the assertion is "baseless."

Now, that word would indicate a whole cloth fabrication on the part of Indian investigators but one of the accused groups, Lashkar-e-Tioba, the militant wing of a Pakistani religious seminary in the province of Punjab, has close ties to the ISI and has conducted attacks on Indian forces in Kashmir. The other, The Students Islamic Movement of India or SIMI, has the stated desire to turn Indian into an Islamic theocracy.

Nonetheless, the incident and this subsequent official statement by Indian authorities is going to add yet more tinder to the mounting pile of nuclear fuel-fired aggressions between these two countries, countries the Bush administration insists needs more weapons to protect those countries ... from each other.