(CNSNews.com) – Indian officials have not ruled out the possibility of a military strike against Pakistan-based terrorist targets in response to last week’s attacks in Mumbai.
 
The U.S. military has launched more than 20 missile attacks against suspected terrorists on the Pakistan side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in the past four months, but a State Department spokesman said Tuesday the U.S. does not give “green or red lights” to any country considering anti-terror cross-border strikes.
 
Department spokesman Robert Wood was responding to queries at a daily press briefing about whether India had a right to go after Pakistan-based terrorists linked to the Mumbai attacks.
 
Wood said the U.S. wants to work with the Indian government and other players to bring the culprits to justice and to “try to prevent these types of attacks from happening again.” Wood said the U.S. believes that the Pakistan government “is committed to this fight.”
 
The U.S. government has dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen to the region in a show of support and in a bid to defuse tensions.
 
Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday called for “restraint on both sides,” saying the U.S. wanted to see “both countries work together to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
 
More than 180 people, including six Americans, were killed during coordinated attacks by gunmen in India’s commercial capital between Wednesday night and Saturday morning
 
Rice on Wednesday said the Mumbai attacks are "the kind of terror in which al Qaeda participates." She has urged Pakistan to cooperate fully in the investigation.
 
The Indian government and numerous security experts has identified as the most likely perpetrator Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), a formally outlawed Sunni organization in Pakistan.
 
The sole surviving Mumbai terrorist, a Pakistani, confessed to being a member and said the assault was planned in and launched from Pakistan, according to Indian police. Pakistan’s government has denied any link to the attacks.
 
LeT’s founder, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, now runs an allegedly unrelated, officially permitted group called Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), and according to Pakistani media is based in the Muridke area, near the city of Lahore.
 
Muridke is less than 20 miles from the Pakistan-India border, and about 290 miles northwest of the Indian capital, New Delhi. Citing Pakistani military sources, the Urdu-language newspaper Roznama Jang reported on Tuesday that the Indian Air Force could strike JuD targets there.

In an interview with India’s NDTV Tuesday, Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee declined to rule out a military response, saying any such action was not publicized or advertised beforehand.
 
“I am not making any comment on the military option,” he said. “Every sovereign country has the right to protect its territorial integrity and take appropriate action as and when it feels necessary to take that appropriate action.”
 
India on Monday handed its neighbor a list of suspects – Mukherjee said there were “about 20 persons” on it – allegedly linked to terrorist attacks in India.
 
The list includes Saeed; Masood Azhar, head of another officially banned Pakistan-based group, Jaish-e-Mohammad; and Dawood Ibrahim, a fugitive Mumbai crime boss and terrorist financier whom the U.S. Treasury Department in 2003 declared a designated international terrorist because of links to al-Qaeda and LeT.
 
Since early 2002, Indian governments have been pressing Pakistan to hand over some 20 fugitives believed to be living in Pakistan, including Saeed, Masood and Ibrahim, wanted in connection with bombings, hijackings and other attacks dating back two decades, including serial bombings in Mumbai in 1993 that killed more than 250 people.
 
The list handed over this week is understood to be an updated version, and to include a man described as head of LeT operations, who police say was in phone contact with the Mumbai terrorists during the 60-hour assault.
 
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, facing a general election next May, is under pressure from angry citizens and the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to give a robust response to the terrorist attacks.
 
Conspiracy theories
 
On the Pakistan side of the border between the two South Asian arch-rivals, the rhetoric is rising too.
 
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), an Islamist political party with Taliban sympathies, announced in a statement it was extending its full support to the government against national security threats in the wake of the “Mumbai incident.”
 
But that support, JI said, was dependent on the government using the opportunity to consolidate national unity by withdrawing troops from the tribal belt adjoining Afghanistan, where they have been fighting Taliban and other militants.
 
JI leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad said the current situation provided “a golden opportunity for the government to unite the nation for countering the external challenges from Western and Eastern borders of the country.”
 
“He said if rulers take bold measures in national interests Pakistan will turn into an invincible country, but if they showed cowardice and apologetic attitude India will overpower the country,” the JI statement said.
 
Qazi also said the Mumbai attacks were an international conspiracy to victimize Pakistan, in the same way as 9/11 was “engineered to target Muslim movements.”
 
Conspiracy theories are not restricted to the fundamentalist fringe.
 
Kaiser Mehmood, a leading member of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party – which holds the largest number of seats in parliament after the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) – said extremist Hindus were involved in the Mumbai attacks.
 
He called the attacks a conspiracy hatched by India to malign Pakistan.
 
‘Stop trying to act like a superpower’
 
Reacting to news of India’s list of wanted suspects, a JuD spokesman, Muhammad Yahya Mujahid, said in a statement that Saeed was “a religious leader who has never, at any time, advocated or supported the use of terrorism.”
 
He called India’s demand for the handover of the suspects ridiculous. “India should not try to act like a superpower as it is only making a laughingstock of itself in the [eyes of the] whole world,” Mujahid said.
 
He said Pakistan should demand that India extradite “Hindu terrorists” including Lal Krishna Advani, a veteran Hindu nationalist politician and the BJP’s candidate for prime minister in the 2009 election. In response to the Mumbai attacks Advani has called for national “resolve to break the back of India’s enemies.”
 
According to Urdu-language newspaper reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, several Taliban and other militant group leaders in Pakistan have offered a ceasefire and to support the Pakistan army against India in the event of a war.
 
Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said in a televised statement Tuesday that his country has offered to send a team to help the Indian investigation, but he did not respond to the handover demand.
 
Washington has long encouraged the neighboring rivals to pursue cordial relations, and a peace process has been underway for several years.
 
Some in India have voiced concern about statements by President-elect Obama pointing to more direct intervention in attempting to resolve the simmering Kashmir conflict.
 
Groups like LeT were formed with the goal of ending Indian control in part of the divided Muslim majority territory. The dispute over Kashmir has sparked two of three wars between India and Pakistan since independence six decades ago.