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The Mumbai Terrorists' Other TargetHow they hoped to destabilize Pakistan.

By Daniel BenjaminUpdated Monday, Dec. 1, 2008, at 5:02 PM ET

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In the wake of the events in Mumbai, Christopher Hitchens called India our most important ally while Anne Applebaum evoked the lessons of 9/11 to aid our understanding of the attacks. Applebaum also analyzed the effects of Islamist terrorism in India after the bombing of the Indian parliament. Brendan I. Koerner explained how Kashmir became a source of endless conflict between India and Pakistan. In 2005, Miranda Kennedy surveyed the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake and found the two countries no closer to each other.

To the radicals of Lashkar-e-Tayyba, as well as to al-Qaida, Kashmir is a core grievance on which there can be no compromise. Any effort that prevents progress on the issue and delays normalization between Pakistan and India is worth the energy. From the terrorists' perspective, there are other benefits, too: Indians now will become more suspicious of their 130-million-strong Muslim minority, tension that may win the terrorists adherents among this huge—and increasingly restive—community. The unraveling of social peace in India is among the worst nightmares that country could face.

There are too many dead in Mumbai to be glib about anyone else being a "real victim" of this terror. But it is nonetheless true that Pakistan was also a target of the attackers. This episode, much like the killing of Benazir Bhutto, was meant to eviscerate the movement to stabilize this failing state and put it on a course toward moderation.

Indeed, part of the motivation may have been to retaliate against the Zardari government for its efforts to rein in ISI. The relatively new chief of the army staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani—himself a former head of ISI—who had been close to Benazir Bhutto, recently replaced the head of ISI, and Zardari had ordered a part of the agency that dealt with domestic intelligence closed. (None of this rules out the possibility that elements within ISI, operating on their own, had a hand in Mumbai. It has been a symptom of Pakistan's dysfunction that the government has often had little control over ISI—hence the embarrassment that came earlier this year when the U.S. intelligence community confirmed Indian accusations that the agency was behind the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.)

The Pakistanis will pay a price, too, if the resulting tensions between Islamabad and New Delhi lead to military redeployments along the countries' long border, as Kayani has warned. That will draw troops away from the counterinsurgency efforts to roll back the Pakistani Taliban and other radical groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North West Frontier Province—a setback for the United States, which is urging Pakistan to get more serious about its rebels, and for Afghanistan, which must deal with cross-border infiltration. It will also reconfirm the Pakistani army's instinctive belief that it exists to confront India, not strengthen a state in disarray. The less pressure on al-Qaida and other extremists in the FATA, the more danger the United States will face.

All this will make it harder for Pakistan to pull itself back from state failure, which is where it is headed despite the efforts of the new government. Under pressure from the Indian government—which is taking heat for its initially ineffective response to the attack—and the United States, Pakistan will look more and more like that other great disappointment at counterterrorism, the Palestinian Authority. Too weak to meet the demands of its neighbors and friends, it will continue to lose credibility and find itself in an ever-deeper crisis. Demilitarizing groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyba—which has armed thousands over the years and has hundreds of thousands of supporters—has long been in the "too-hard-to-do category" for Islamabad. That hasn't changed, except now the United States and India will, understandably, demand it more loudly.

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Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff in 1998-99 and is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror and The Next Attack.

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