I’ve reviewed the wiki on the 2008 Mumbai attacks and it seems pretty clear that the Pakistani Intelligence service authorized this attack. The question unanswered by the wiki (at least in my reading of it) was the real politick rationale for Pakistan doing this.
Why would a state level governmental entity engage is this type of thing? Operationally such a small scale operation (from a state vs state perspective) would do nothing substantive to blunt India’s offensive capability and would only stir up antipathy toward Pakistan once the source of the attackers was discovered. It seems in hindsight like an insanely stupid thing to do strategically and militarily.
What was the projected upside for Pakistan supposed to be in this terror attack?
To force consessions from the Indian govt. The ISI holds the leash on a number of different terror groups and the only way to keep them from doing stuff like mumbai is to pay protection money. Normally I would have put money in quotes, but with the ISI, you never know.
I don’t think that they expected to be busted so fast, signals intelligence was able to trace the cell phone calls back to Pakistan in real time, otherwise it would be suspected but never proved beyond a shadow of doubt.
So what did they do, exactly. The sent the indian govt into paralysis for a number of days, they exposed weakness’s and venerabilitys , and they held the iniative. If your planning a hot war, imagine flooding all of india’s major citys with those disposable fanatics, and it was a reasonable test case.