Last week’s terrorist siege of Mumbai has created a new geopolitical crisis, with many angles and complications that will make President-elect Barack Obama’s life even more complicated as he attempts to keep things in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India on an even keel. Here are some important things to keep in mind about it.

** The attackers were Islamic jihadists, and Pakistani-connected. This isn’t what we want to hear, but even the Pakistanis are not denying this. What they do deny is official Pakistani involvement in the attacks.

** India and Pakistan had been having a slight rapprochement. The two countries have been at sharp odds since the British partition after World War Ii. The disputed, mountainous region of Kashmir has been the most frequent flashpoint between the two countries, though there have been others.

A terrorist bomb killed more than 20 people today in Peshawar, in Pakistan’s northwest frontier.** Pakistan is key to Afghanistan. It was central in the US war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan during the not so Cold War, when it was a safe haven for Afghan rebels, a staging area for the CIA, and the funnel for US aid to the insurgency. Now it’s key to the US and NATO effort to hold back the Taliban resurgence. Even as it provides safe havens for Taliban and Al Qaeda cadres.

** Elements of the dread Pakistani intelligence outfit, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) played major roles in creating the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. The ISI has always had a heavy Islamist influence. The Taliban were developed to bring a fundamentalist Islamic sense of order to the chaos of Afghanistan left in the wake of the Soviet defeat and America’s always wavering attention span.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba, working hard to end Indian rule in Kashmir, have the goal of establishing Islamic rule over South Asia.

Years of fighting over Kashmir have accomplished nothing.** Both the Indian and Pakistani governments are shaky. Last year’s assassination of Pakistan’s returned opposition leader, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, hastened the end of General Pervez Musharaff’s regime. But the new government is shaky, trying to balance between modernist reformers, Islamic fundamentalists, the ISI, and the most stable institution in an unstable country, an army founded on British traditions.

The Indian government has been under fire for past security lapses, particularly related to Kashmir, and closely pressed by its conservative religious-oriented opposition.

** There’s a discrepancy about the number of terrorists taking part in the Mumbai attacks. The reports from the first few days referred to 25 to 30 gunmen, perhaps 40. That made sense, given the amount of havoc they were wreaking simultaneously at multiple locations around the city. But the official number ended up at 10, with nine killed by Indian security forces and one captured and talking about his Pakistani connection.

However, other evidence suggests there were at least 15 attackers. With all the chaos and anger, Indian authorities wouldn’t want to admit that some of the attackers had escaped. Although it’s embarrassing to claim that it took two-and-a-half days for Indian police and elite military units to defeat 10 terrorists.

The Mumbai attacks were very disruptive to India’s commercial and financial capital.** Whatever the facts, India was always going to blame Pakistan. India’s home minister has been sacked in the wake of the attacks, along with the provincial governor. Calling it a homegrown attack, even if that were true, would be devastating for the government’s tattered credibility. The siege of Mumbai was very disruptive to India’s commercial, financial, entertainment, and tourist capital.

** Pakistan’s civilian government has been trying to rein in the army and the ISI. With only limited success. In the wake of the attacks, Pakistan’s prime minister announced that the ISI director would go to India to cooperate with Indian authorities in the investigation.

The ISI then announced that that was wrong, that an assistant would go later on. Yesterday, the former head of the ISI met with the prime minister and informed him that it is far more important for the prime minister to defend the integrity of the institutions of Pakistan than to open the country up to inspection from the outside.

The tactics used in the terrorist siege of Mumbai were not as unique as originally portrayed.

** The Mumbai plan looks just like a 1993 plan against New York. At first, the terrorist tactics employed in Mumbai were said to be novel. But it turns out that what took place looks a lot like an Al Qaeda plan from the early ’90s, employing water-borne transportation and assault weapon and grenade attacks against luxury hotels and well-known landmarks to create large numbers of casualties and a general sense of havoc in the major commercial city of a country.

That doesn’t mean that Al Qaeda is behind this, even if an Al Qaeda plan is. The attacks also bore great similarities to those made by Chechen rebels, according to Russian security services.

** The Clintons have been very close to India, which may make it hard for new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to deal with Pakistan. When President Clinton made a farewell tour of the region in 2000, he spent five days in India and seven hours in Pakistan. Hillary has raised so much money from Indian-American interests that an Obama campaign document described as “Senator Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab).”

** It should not be a surprise that resurgent Russia is playing in this as well. The two countries earlier this year announced that they had created the world’s fastest cruise missile. Now they have just announced that they are collaborating on a new multiple-role fighter aircraft. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev visited India the day after Secretary of State Condi Rice. The Soviet Union was very close to India during the Cold War, and was certainly no friend to Pakistan while that country helped create the Soviet Vietnam.

** There are no easy solutions. If the Indians don’t retaliate militarily against targets inside Pakistan — whether official, rogue official, or private — they risk looking weak. If they don’t demand the hand-over of terrorist suspects, they risk looking weak. But the first option could lead to outright war. The second option could further destabilize Pakistan. Or it could lead to a military confrontation if Pakistan did not comply.

And this President was tested by a lot of different issues and I think he’s taken those issues head on, and we can be proud of how we’ve addressed them. Everybody would like to be popular. You can all remember that back in high school, everyone really wanted to be popular. Some of us just weren’t. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have principles and values that you stay true to. And that’s what this President has done, and it’s what he’s taught a lot of us, including me.

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In a Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president. While fewer whites, about two-thirds, said they would be “entirely comfortable” with it, that was more than double the percentage of all adults who said they would be so at ease with someone entering office for the first time at age 72, which McCain (R-Ariz.) would do should he prevail in November.

But the good news may stop there. “As Sen. Barack Obama opens his campaign as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice,” according to the same poll.

Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations “excellent” or “good,” about the same as said so five years ago. That is a relative thaw from more negative ratings in the 1990s, but the gap between whites and blacks on the issue is now the widest it has been in polls dating to early 1992
More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as “not so good” or “poor,” while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.

Moreover, the Post reports in a separate story that Obama’s historic primary victory “has also sparked an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet, according to leaders of hate groups and the organizations that track them.”

Neo-Nazi, skinhead and segregationist groups have reported gains in numbers of visitors to their Web sites and in membership since the senator from Illinois secured the Democratic nomination June 3. His success has aroused a community of racists, experts said, concerned by the possibility of the country’s first black president.
“I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time,” said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. “Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president.”

Watch the American News Project’s recent piece exploring the phenomenon of “white nationalism”:

Feeling confident with his current momentum in the campaign, Senator Obama takes the mic and tells some jokes about the Clintons.

In this exclusive video, Inside Minnesota Politics’ Mike McIntee shows how the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln has apparently been crudely cropped out of the video.

Watch the video below …