By Tommy De Seno
Attorney/Writer

When it comes to the War on Terror, India has always thought locally, not globally.

Condoleezza Rice at a joint press conference in India on Dec. 3 (AP)

In 1998 India asked the U.S. and Great Britain to stop bombing strategic targets in Iraq.

In 2002 when the United States was considering invading Iraq over weapons inspections and Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, India’s Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said that no country should “force it’s will on another.”

It’s time for India to choose sides.

After the American invasion of Iraq, India claimed there was no justification for it, while at the same time expressing belief that Iraq actually did have weapons of mass destruction.

Think about that last paragraph. While hindsight may be 20/20, foresight is blind and requires judgment. Any country (like India) that believed Hussein had WMDs but still didn’t want to invade showed horrid judgment about security around the world.

What’s puzzling about India’s ambivalent position on the U.S. fight against world terror is that India has many more terror attacks on its soil than we in the US have on ours.

Nuclear power India sits next to historic enemy and fellow nuclear power Pakistan. Their tensions focus primarily on Kashmir, currently controlled in 3 districts by India, Pakistan and China.

Terror attacks in India, mostly, seem to focus on the country’s regional problems with Pakistan.

Adding to that tension is that the India’s most recent terror attacks are believed to have been the work of a group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is thought, by some, to have historical connections to the Pakistani government.

To the contrary though, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned in India today not to discount the possibility that Al Qaeda may have been involved in the Mumbai terror attacks. She believes India, and all countries, should cooperate in a more thorough investigation of the terrorists’ identities.

If Rice’s Al Qaeda theory pans out, India’s terror problem is no longer local but global.

It’s time for India to choose sides and thoroughly commit themselves to American and British efforts to fight terrorism all over the world.

With the Chinese breathing hot fire down their neck as the Dragon grows stronger, India should want to make sure its Western ties don’t become frayed by ambivalence to the world terror problem and America’s attempt to stomp it out.

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