The aftermath of Mumbai

INDIAN security forces have captured alive several perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It should not be hard to trace the assault on India's commercial center to the masterminds behind the operation. Indeed, Indian officials have already said they have evidence pointing to Pakistan as the place of origin.

Consequently, there is a grave danger that the carnage in Mumbai could provoke much higher levels of violence across a wide arc of South Asia. This is what will happen if Indian and Pakistani leaders allow the Mumbai atrocities to undo the recent rapprochement between their two governments.

Those leaders will come under intense pressure to stoke nationalist passions. They need to do the opposite: to exercise restraint and practice prudent statesmanship.

The terrorists' barely concealed ties to Pakistan suggest that a key objective of the Mumbai assault was to fan the dying flames of Indian-Pakistani conflict. Which is all the more reason for both governments to avoid falling into that treacherous trap.

For the government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the first priority should be to make a crucial distinction for the Indian public. Singh has already blamed the murders in Mumbai on "external forces." What he ought to explain to his people is that even if there were Pakistanis among the terrorists, and even if the killers set out from the Pakistani port of Karachi, that does not mean they were acting on orders from Pakistan's elected civilian government.

India's leaders know that extremist Pakistani groups as well as Al Qaeda have a strong interest in provoking fresh hostilities between Pakistan and India. A revival of India-Pakistan tension could relieve much of the domestic pressure on those groups; it could justify a renewal of support for the local and Afghan Taliban on the part of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence; and it could return the domestic focus in Pakistan to the plight of Muslims in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

For their part, Pakistan's leaders need to cooperate unstintingly with India's investigation into the Mumbai attacks. The early signs from Pakistan's Prime Minister Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmoud Qureshi have been encouraging. They have said the right things. But the key determinant of the effect that the terrorist attacks will have on India-Pakistan relations will be the extent of honest cooperation extended to Indian investigators by Pakistan's intelligence agency.

And if it turns out that the ISI - which sponsored the Taliban and other Islamist militants in the past - was implicated in the Mumbai savagery, Zardari's government will have to come clean and punish the criminals in its midst.