- A top Russian counter-terrorism expert on Sunday underlined that the Mumbai attackers were not "ordinary terrorists" and were probably trained by the special operations forces set up in Pakistan by the US intelligence prior to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
- "People from the streets, without any planning and training are simply not able to hold four big complexes in a city so long," Soviet special services veteran was quoted as saying by largest Russian Interfax news agency. He also presumed that there were at least 50 attackers given the geography and scale of the strikes. He said for such guerrilla operations at least two-three years of preparatory work with the involvement of experienced instructors is required.
- The commando-style terror attacks that killed around 200 people in Mumbai, India, last week have been compared to the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. eight years ago. "It's war," The Times of India proclaimed in an editorial.
- Like 9/11 did for America, the Mumbai attacks could boost India's involvement in foreign military missions. Particularly, in Afghanistan. To defeat terrorism, "India should seek international help now to upgrade its own security apparatus, but also to stabilize the entire region stretching from Afghanistan to Bangladesh. There is no time to waste."
- Officials in Washington said Friday that there was no evidence that the Pakistani government had any role in the attacks. But if evidence were to emerge that the operation had been planned and directed from within Pakistan, that would certainly further escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, bitter, nuclear-armed rivals. It could also provoke an Indian military response, even strikes against militants' training camps.
- Security officials in Islamabad said Pakistan would move troops from its western border with Afghanistan, where forces are battling al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as part of the U.S.-led campaign against militancy, to the Indian border if tension escalated.
- Tensions between India and Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks and threats to move troops to the border between the nuclear rivals are unlikely to lead to a flashpoint, analysts said on Sunday. But the United States could get ensnared in the row and it may prove to be a setback in the war on Islamic radicals on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, they said.
- According to one Indian intelligence official, during the siege the militants have been using non-Indian cellphones and receiving calls from outside the country, evidence that in part led Indian officials to speak publicly about the militants' external ties.
- Lashkar-e-Taiba denied any responsibility on Thursday for the terrorist strikes. American intelligence agencies have said that the group has received some training and logistical support in the past from Pakistan's powerful spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., and that Pakistan's government has long turned a blind eye to Lashkar-e-Taiba camps in the Kashmir region, a disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars.
- A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west. That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.
- The US military's top strategic officer warned Friday that terrorists or other nations may try to take advantage of the transition period between the administrations of President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack Obama to strike or otherwise threaten the U.S., but he said the Defense Department is being vigilant against that possibility.
