Our guest bloggers are Caroline Wadhams, National Security Senior Policy Analyst, and Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Tensions between the governments of India and Pakistan are dangerously high following the Mumbai terrorist attacks in India last week. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen traveled to the region in an attempt to forestall further escalation. Growing evidence indicates that the attacks were conducted by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Kashmiri militant group based in Pakistan. While Indian and U.S. intelligence agencies have not found any direct links between this attack and the government of Pakistan, indirect links may exist and are being seized upon by the Indian government.

The Pakistani government banned LeT in 2002, but members of its charitable political arm, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) continue to fund-raise and provide social services in Pakistani-administered Kashmiri. It is believed that the relationship between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the LeT has continued at some level.

Following the Mumbai attacks, India demanded that Pakistan turn over some 20 suspects, including the leaders of LeT and JuD, as well as fugitive Mumbai crime boss Dawood Ibrahim, reportedly a financier of the group in hiding in Karachi. Pakistan has thus far said India has offered no proof of the individuals’ involvement, denies that some suspects are even within its territory, and, despite condemning the attacks, has yet to officially acknowledge any culpability by Pakistani nationals.

The tragedy is that India’s understandable anger over the attacks and the increasing pressure on Pakistan threatens to worsen the militant problem. Pakistan’s fears of India have stalled its counterterrorism efforts for years. Despite more than $11 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since September 11, 2001, the Pakistani military has continued to train and equip itself to face its conventional foe, India, rather than focus on its growing internal militant challenge.

The Pakistani government has already threatened to move some of their 100,000 troops based in northwest Pakistan to the eastern border with India. Reports that representatives of the Taliban offered to raise a three million-strong tribal militia to fight any Indian military action suggest that these groups would in fact embrace the opportunity for such a conflict. The Taliban are already increasing attacks on NATO supply routes going into Afghanistan, and a shift of Pakistani pressure away from the region would have exactly the opposite result from what both India and the United States desire.

The Center for American Progress recently published a report recommending that the United States focus on alleviating the tensions between these two countries in order to address the militant issue. President Zardari of Pakistan is correct to describe this as a shared threat to the whole region. His country will have to do more to combat militant groups basing themselves within their territory, just as India will have to temper calls for vengeance for the Mumbai attacks that only serve to strengthen hardliners and terrorists at the expense of regional stability and security.

Our guest blogger is Moran Banai, U.S. editor of the Middle East Bulletin.

Following the surprise Israeli evacuation of a disputed building in Hebron, the next few days will be an important test of how far Israel’s rule of law applies, and whether the Israeli government is willing and able to ensure that extremist settlers do no further harm to Palestinians in the West Bank or their property after a day of rampages.

For the first time in two years, the Israeli government yesterday ordered its police and military to carry out a large-scale evacuation of an illegal outpost in the West Bank in a 20-minute surprise raid. The House of Contention, as it is known by some, is a house in Hebron that has been occupied illegally by settlers since last year. The Israeli High Court ruled that it must be evacuated over two weeks ago and the government had promised to comply and had then attempted to negotiate its evacuation, to no avail.

Talia Sasson, the author of a report on illegal outposts written at the behest of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has argued that outposts are a threat to Israel’s rule of law. Dov Weisglass, a former aide to Sharon, has said that while the Israeli government is committed to freezing settlement growth and evacuating outposts as part of its Road Map obligations, “illegal outposts have been added and construction in existing settlements has not stopped even for a moment.”

Meanwhile, as the controversy over the Hebron house grew, the fissures within the Israeli settler community became more evident. The extremists who were holding the house and their supporters condemned the more mainstream governing body of the settlers, the Yesha Council, for negotiating with the government. Council members denounced the extremists for undermining their cause. This rift has been growing since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the evacuation of an outpost in Amona in 2006. The extremist settlers have attempted to kill a prominent peace activist, and adopted a “price tag” policy to make costly every government effort to remove outposts or stop settlement growth. This has prompted a warning from the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, who suggested that the extremists may eventually bring their violence inside the Green Line.

The evacuation of the House of Contention is an important, if overdue, first step. Israel’s ability to control extremist settlers, which Middle East Bulletin explored in its December 4 edition, will have serious implications for the future of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Today, President Bush defended his foreign policy over the past eight years in an address to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, DC. At one point, he acknowledged that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks but justified using such a connection to push for the Iraq war:

It is true, as I have said many times, that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the 9/11 attacks. But the decision to remove Saddam from power cannot be viewed in isolation from 9/11. In a world where terrorists armed with box cutters had just killed nearly 3,000 people, America had to decide whether we could tolerate a sworn enemy that acted belligerently, that supported terror, and that intelligence agencies around the world believed had weapons of mass destruction. It was clear to me, to members of both political parties, and to many leaders around the world that after 9/11, this was a risk we could not afford to take.

Bush has repeatedly stated that Saddam was not connected to 9/11. However, those statements came only after the war. Prior to the war, Bush and other administration officials repeatedly strove to create the impression that the Iraqi dictator was directly involved in the attacks:

“We know that Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy: the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.” [Bush, 10/14/02]

“The use of armed forces against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” [Bush’s Letter to Congress, 3/21/03]

“If we’re successful in Iraq … we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” [Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press, 9/14/03]

The effect was a public who supported Bush’s Iraq invasion based on this false premise, along with the equally false claim that Iraq had WMD. A Sept. 2003 poll found that seven in 10 Americans believed Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, Bush has tried to rewrite history and claim that he never made that connection in the first place, saying in May 2006, “First, just if I might correct a misperception, I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say — that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein.”

Bush still embraces his pre-war lies, as he admitted in his Saban address today, because without them, the public wouldn’t have supported his case for war.

It seems that NRO’s Michael Rubin is upset (again) by the quality of discourse on this and other blogs:

At ThinkProgress, some authors at TNR’s The Plank, and NiacInsight, a few folks often name call rather than argue substance; utilizing labels to substitute for debate is always a clear sign that of a weak argument.

I think this is unfair. We don’t utilize labels to substitute for debate. We name-call in addition to arguing substance. There’s no reason that Rubin should treat my referring to him as one of Doug Feith’s oompa-loompas as an excuse not to respond to my dismantling of his blatant misrepresentation of the Islamic concept of taqiya. Unless, of course, he has no response.

Rubin apparently does have, however, a very specialized — some might say transparently self-serving — notion of what constitutes legitimate debate. In an August op-ed in the Washington Post, Rubin called Joe Biden “Tehran’s favorite senator” by way of blaming Biden for the Bush administration’s lack of a coherent Iran policy.

In October, Rubin suggested — without any evidence whatsoever — that Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi was ideologically sympathetic to Saddam Hussein’s attempted genocide against the Kurds.

Rubin also serves as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, helping right-wing polemicist Daniel Pipes warn Americans about the Islamic terrorists lurking underneath their beds, and attacking various Americans deemed insufficiently pro-Israel or inappropriately pro-Arab.

And, of course, Rubin worked in the Office of Special Plans, helping Doug Feith shape intelligence to produce bogus arguments for the invasion of Iraq. But at least he was polite about it!

With a record like this, it’s kind of ridiculous that Rubin would choose to take issue with a little bit of name-calling. But the punks always start calling fouls when they’re getting beat.