For Pakistan, much of their concern about the Karzai government has centered around their cushy relationship with India, a long-time rival, and cementing that deal will give Pakistan’s government even more reason to fear.

Traditionally, Pakistan has treated southern Afghanistan as a fallback position in the event of a war against India, and has treated India’s overtures toward the Karzai government as an act of aggression against them.

Pakistan’s media has often speculated about Indian troops being deployed into Afghanistan with designs on opening another tense front with Pakistan. This has added to President Karzai’s determination to condemn Pakistan and court India every time there is a falling out.

An email sent from a gmail account claimed the attack for the group Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), and officials say they are taking the claim seriously. The group has carried out a number of attacks across India in recent years.

Originally, HuJI was one of the groups fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but expanded into Indian Kashmir and the nation’s eastern states after the war. The group’s leader, Ilyas Kashmiri, was reported slain in a June US drone strike, but this was never actually confirmed.

The attack immediately sparked criticism of the Delhi police, which added a number of security measures aimed at avoiding terror attacks, but which in this case appears to have left large numbers of innocent civilians milling about in front of the courthouse waiting for permission to enter.

Mayawati was mentioned in several of the cables, mostly over the political implications of her caste-based party and her pledges to openly discriminate against other castes once elected. After her election the cables shift to internal political struggles, but also detail her notorious corruption.

The one that seems to have really angered her however was 08NEWDELHI2783 entitled “Mayawati: Portrait of a Lady” which noted that since her election Uttar Pradesh had stabilized “only in that Mayawati has centralized corruption in her own hands.”

Terming her a “virtual paranoid dictator,” the cable is mostly explanatory rather than aimed at revealing corruption that wasn’t already public knowledge. It did reveal some rather silly incidents which never made into the mainstream Indian press, including her demand that a State Minister who visited her unannounced do sit-ups in front of her as “penance” and her decision, when she needed new sandals, to send a private jet to Mumbai to get her favorite brand.

While these are certainly interesting Mayawati wasn’t exactly thought to be a spendthrift, ordering massive statues of herself built around the impoverished state, and the corruption within her administration was already the stuff of legends.

Still, Mayawati demanded that Assange be turned over to Uttar Pradesh officials where he would be placed in one of the state-run insane asylums. Though no one seriously expects this to happen it might raise the question of exactly how many of her local critics have already found themselves locked up in this manner.

To that end, officials insist that they intend to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice, even though they have no idea who that might be. Indeed, they have absolutely no leads whatsoever on the attacks.

Despite having no advance warning of the attacks (apart from some previous reports about something happening in Mumbai) officials say that the lack of intelligence did not amount to an intelligence failure.

The attacks have been seen by many as an attempt to disrupt the peace talks between India and Pakistan, which restarted only last month. The major 2008 Mumbai attacks ended all talks for nearly two years and left India threatening war.

Police have now put several neighborhoods in the city on high alert, setting up checkpoints as the prime minister urged calm.

It is the deadliest terrorist incident in the city since November 2008, when a three day siege killed 166 people. So far there is no indication of responsibility for the latest bombings, and officials have not speculated.

It seems the intent is clear, however. Pakistan and India have recently restarted the peace talks which stalled in 2008, after India blamed Pakistan for the Mumbai strikes, and the new attacks seem aimed at again foiling the talks. A number of militant factions are keen to keep the two nations on a hostile footing.

That is because officials now say that the peace talks will officially resume with a meeting on Thursday, the start of two days of talks in Islamabad. The talks will be followed by more talks in India next month.

The talks are not expected to address any major issues, at least to start with, but the fact that they are taking place at all suggests that, after two and a half years of virtually no meaningful contact, the two sides might finally be patching up some of their differences.

Pakistan’s government said the two sides would arrange “friendly exchanges” but would also discuss issues related to Jammu and Kashmir and the security situation along their common border.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also defended the frisking of the Indian ambassador, insisting that it was “by the book” and that diplomats have to subject themselves to the same “basic screening” as everyone else.

But the sexually-charged pat downs are not “basic screening” in most of the world, and indeed have sparked a growing outcry from opponents in the United States, though officials maintain that the policy won’t change no matter how much popular opposition there is.

In the meantime, however, the US is going to have to contend with some serious fallout over Ms. Shankar’s groping, and India’s Foreign Minister has already pledged to raise the issue with the Obama Administration.

Indians are already upset by the TSA’s policies, and many have complained they are being singled out for being suspiciously dark-colored. The issue became prominent with many Indians after the 2009 detention of movie star Shahrukh Khan.

According to officials, Bashir complaining that the US was ignoring India’s human rights issues in Kashmir and warned that adding India to the Security Council would have serious ramnifications in the region.

Britain, Russia and France have all expressed support for India taking a permanent seat, but China, a long-time ally of Pakistan, has appeared reluctant to make any such commitment. Pakistan has designs on securing its own seat in the UN Security Council, but has since come out against the expansion, insisting permanent members wield disproportionate power.

Some Pakistani analysts, however, doubted the sincerity of Obama’s support, saying it was just a cynical effort to court favor with the Indian public as he was visiting the nation and would quickly be forgotten.

In particular, Pakistanis are expressing major concern about rumors that the US is going to ask India to commit group troops to Afghanistan, a serious concern for Pakistan but also a plausible report given India’s close ties with the Karzai government.

Though never particularly stable, Pakistan has long seen Afghanistan as their “fall-back point” in the event of a major war with India, and a place for the troops to retreat to when the going gets rough.

This has led to major consternation in Pakistan as India has cozied up to the Karzai government, and has even been identified as the source of some efforts by Pakistan’s intelligence community to support the insurgency.

The rumor about Indian group troops may well be just that, a rumor, but it underscores the seriousness with which Pakistan regards the goings on in Afghanistan, and has become yet another complicating externality to the mess that is the US-led occupation.

For many in India, the Obama Administration’s support for the Zardari government has been a source of serious consternation, much as Pakistanis have continued to express annoyance at the US support for India’s involvement with the Afghan government.

But even as his administration has been publicly chiding Pakistan for not committing to ever more offensives in its tribal areas, the president found himself in the position of defending Pakistan today, insisting the country is making “slow progress” in the terror war.

By which Obama likely means that he is making slow progress in convincing Pakistan to start more and more tribal wars along its northern frontier, because despite (and in many cases because) of all those US-mandated offensives Pakistan seems to be grappling with an ever growing number of militant threats at home and has had less and less time to tackle Pakistani-based groups that focus on attacking targets in India.

A number of Kashmiri separatist groups have set up shop in Pakistan and have been blamed for a number of a major attacks in India (including the Thanksgiving Mumbai attack). The groups are officially banned in Pakistan, but as the separatist cause is generally supported it is politically unpopular for local officials to go after such groups except in extreme cases, meaning that many operate more or less with impunity.