NEW YORK, Nov 30: As against 2002 when the Bush administration prevailed upon the Indian government not to attack Pakistan, the US government might not be able to “prevent an Indian military response, which could lead to a conflict between the bitter enemies”, the New York Times said on Sunday.

In December 2001, when militants attacked India’s Parliament, and again this summer, when militants bombed the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan, the Bush administration used aggressive diplomacy to dampen anger in New Delhi.

The newspaper said: “This time, however, the Indian government might not be so receptive to the American message — and that could derail the coming Obama administration’s hopes of creating a broader, regional response to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Should it become clear that the men who rampaged through Mumbai trained in Pakistan, even if the Pakistani government had no hand in the operation, what would stop the Indians from adopting the same position?” the newspaper asked.

“In some ways, it doesn’t even matter whether this attack was hatched in some office in Islamabad,” Paul Kapur, a South Asia expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and Stanford University told Times.

“The provocation in this case is greater in magnitude than anything that’s happened before.”