In announcing his national security team, Barack Obama responded to the murder of six Americans in Mumbai with words that sounded firm and resolute.

Last week, we were reminded of this threat once again when terrorists took the lives of six American among nearly 200 victims in Mumbai. In the world we seek, there is no place for those who kill innocent civilians to advance hateful extremism. This weekend, I told Prime Minister Singh that Americans stand with the people of India in this dark time. And I am confident that India’s great democracy is more resilient than killers who would tear it down.
And so, in this uncertain world, the time has come for a new beginning – a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century, and to seize the opportunities embedded in those challenges.

I say sounded firm and resolute, because he didn’t actually say much. Perhaps he felt the need to not step on the outgoing president’s toes, but from both his and President Bush’s statements, it appears the Mumbai Massacre will not actually change any aspect of U.S. policy towards either India or Pakistan.

This style of attack might never be repeated, or we may see this as the new model for mass-casualty and mass-chaos attacks. The number of attackers appears to be shockingly small, a not insignificant number may have escaped, and they paralyzed a major city for forty-eight hours, terrifying citizens, killing hundreds, and humiliating Indian authorities. If you were an aspiring terrorist, this would seem like a tempting playbook.

Robert Kagan offers his idea:

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Rather than simply begging the Indians to show restraint, a better option could be to internationalize the response. Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas. This would have the advantage of preventing a direct military confrontation between India and Pakistan. It might also save face for the Pakistani government, since the international community would be helping the central government reestablish its authority in areas where it has lost it. But whether or not Islamabad is happy, don’t the international community and the United States, at the end of the day, have some obligation to demonstrate to the Indian people that we take attacks on them as seriously as we take attacks on ourselves?
Would such an action violate Pakistan’s sovereignty? Yes, but nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched.

Ed Morrissey has an objection, that the proposal “stands the Bush doctrine (the real one) on its head. After the 9/11 attacks, we made it clear that government harboring terrorists on their soil shared responsibility for the actions of those terrorists because they have sovereignty over their own territory. The U.S. would consider such attacks an act of war and would respond accordingly — which gave nations a lot more incentive to exercise that sovereignty.”

The problem is that since 9/11, the Pakistan government has bet that the Bush Doctrine was a bluff; they gambled that as long as they looked like they were trying to help, the U.S. would not hold them accountable for terror attacks planned and launched from their territory. We’re pretty sure bin Laden, Zawahiri and his deputies are in Pakistan, and we’ve just witnessed a terror attack that killed Americans that was almost certainly launched from Pakistani soil. Yet we’re not at war with Pakistan.

The temptation for the incoming Obama administration is to muddle on through – some firm words here, some additional foreign aid there, maybe some joint training and another bit of shared intelligence that we hope isn’t instantly leaked by some ISI figure with dual loyalties. And most often, muddling on through is what governments do. We effectively “muddled on through” in regards to the Taliban and al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.

But eventually you reach a point where you can’t muddle on through. In that case it was the 9/11 attacks, and it became clear America could no longer muddle on through with half-measures. The next time Pakistani-based terror massacres Indian citizens, the Indian government will feel enormous pressure to strike back hard, no matter what the cost or risk. And thus the seeds of a conflict between two nuclear powers are sown.

What is preventing a military conflict between nuclear states worth? I came across an old Ronald Reagan column from April 1975, in which he asked, “Will it be said of today’s world leaders as it was of the pre W.W.II. leaders that they were better at surviving the catastrophe than preventing it?” The Obama Administration has to start asking itself some hard questions about what they’re willing to do to prevent a catastrophe.