Pakistan/India Update

After a week in which a prank phone call almost led to nuclear war in East Asia, it looks as if, tentatively, Pakistan is starting to act against the militants in their midst. On Sunday they raided a Lakshar-e-Tayiba camp, the first concrete action in years to crack down on the terrorist group that appears to have been responsible for the Mumbai siege. And now, they've made an arrest against a possible mastermind of the attack. Questions abound about the arrest, but this is much better than political leaders lobbing insults across the border.

According to local reports, 12 members of the banned group including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused by Delhi as being one of the planners of the carnage in India's financial centre, were arrested in Sunday night's raid in the hills above Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. A helicopter gunship hovered overhead and gunfire was heard.

Some Indian officials privately described it as "an important first step", though there was some scepticism in India about the nature of the raid. The "camp" that was stormed included a hospital, a madrasa (Islamic school) and offices. However, it was unclear whether it was a training facility for militants or just an administrative and charitable site [...]

Lakhvi was supposed to be LeT's operations chief and, according to some reports, recruited Ajmal Ameer Kasab, the lone gunman caught alive during the Mumbai assault. There was no word on what happened to Lakhvi after the arrest or on the whereabouts of Yusuf Muzammil, who has been named by Delhi as the other main planner of the Mumbai attack.

It has been reported that the Indian authorities have asked for the two men to be handed over. Some locals in Muzaffarabad suggested the raid may have been staged in some aspects, with rumours that the militants were tipped off beforehand.

Meanwhile, the former head of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, is being implicated in the attacks enough to publicly deny his involvement. We're not going to round up every bad actor in Pakistan in a week or even a year, but if the central government is motivated to at least start the process, that's very hopeful. I think we're at least off of the super red alert at this point.