Welcome to the President's inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boy's Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council in Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the India-Pakistan Crisis.

With me to discuss the origins of the recent military clash between nuclear powers India and Pakistan and the durability of the current ceasefire is Shumit Ganguli.

Shumit is a senior fellow and directs the Huntington program on strengthening

U.S. India relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A specialist on the

contemporary politics of South Asia, he has written and edited 20 books on the region. He recently

wrote a piece for foreign policy titled, What is the Risk of a Conflict

Spiral between India and Pakistan? Shemit, thank you for joining me on the President's inbox.

Thank you very much, Jim, for this opportunity.

Shumit, the clash between India and Pakistan came two weeks after five armed terrorists

attacked and killed 26 people, mostly tourists, near Pahagam,

in the Indian-administered portion of Jammu in Kashmir.

What do we know about the attackers?

What we do know about the attacks is that based on their own admission, it was an organization called

the Resistance Front that carried it out. It is also known that the Resistance Front is an offshoot

of a well-known Pakistan-based terrorist organization, the Lashkari Taiba.

And since they claimed responsibility, there is no reason to believe that they were not

behind this attack. What was particularly striking about this attack is that they segregated men and women and then proceeded

to ask the men to recite certain key verses from the Quran. And if they failed to recite these

verses, they were shot in cold blood. Okay, so it was clearly a religiously motivated attack,

and you mentioned Lashkaa-Taiba. That was the same group responsible for the 2008 terrorist

attack in Mumbai that killed 166 people, correct? That is correct. It is the same organization

that was responsible for the November 2008 attack.

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