THE STAND-OFF.

THE ATTACK

At about eleven-thirty on the morning of December 13, 2001, a white Ambassador with tinted glass and a flashing red light on top--the distinctive car of Indian officialdom--arrived at Parliament House in New Delhi. Five men were inside. They carried three pistols, four automatic assault rifles, spare ammunition, a grenade launcher, fifteen grenades, several handmade bombs of medium size, and, in the trunk of the car, a large bomb made from ammonium nitrate. A forged Home Ministry sticker had been pasted on the car's windshield; on the back of the sticker, it was later discovered, someone had scrawled a vow to "destroy" India. The men passed through an outer gate and approached Gate No. 1, a sandstone portico opposite an enormous statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Parliament House, which was designed and built in the last decades of the British Raj, is a graceful, russet oval with unusually thick walls. Twelve gates lead to a circular inner hallway, and within that ring are the two airy chambers that house the country's raucous bicameral parliament. That morning, the assemblies were in session, and among those in attendance was the country's Vice-President, Krishan Kant; his motorcade stood in the driveway, ready for a quick departure. As the white Ambassador maneuvered, it crashed into the Vice-President's car, and the five attackers, who were South Asian in appearance, scrambled out. Some began to lay wires and set up bomb detonators; others immediately opened fire.

Jaswant Singh, who was at that time India's foreign minister, was at work in his office, Room 27, just off the main hallway, about twenty-five yards from Gate No. 1. Singh, an ardent Hindu nationalist from the desert state of Rajasthan, is an elegant, white-haired former soldier with prominent black eyebrows. When he heard the shooting, he rushed toward the sound, but his bodyguards stopped him. "Sir," one explained, as Singh recalled it, "you are being targeted."

The gun battle lasted almost thirty minutes. When it ended, smoke curled above Parliament House and hundreds of empty shell casings lay scattered on the ground. The attackers shot to death eight security guards and a gardener before all five were killed themselves. They had failed to reach the interior hallway or to detonate their explosives; the Vice-President's motorcade, which had been blocking the building's entrance, was "a fortuitous circumstance," the justices of India's Supreme Court later wrote. Except for that, and strong resistance from the security guards, the raid might have been remembered as the greatest catastrophe in independent India's history--the murder of much of its elected leadership. "Had the attack succeeded," an Indian trial-court judge concluded, "the entire building with all inside would have perished."

The members of India's Cabinet Committee on Security, which was then led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, assembled late on the day of the assault. Little was known about the five attackers or their motives; a police investigation into their backgrounds and support networks had just begun. Still, the raid appeared to be part of a pattern. Brajesh Mishra, then India's nationalsecurity adviser, told me recently that he and other committee members had no doubt who was behind it: the government of Pakistan and, in particular, its external intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.

Since the late nineteen-eighties, I.S.I. has covertly funded and armed violent Islamic groups in the Indian-occupied areas of Kashmir. By 2001, two of the larger jihadi groups--Lashkar-e-Taiba, or the Army of the Pure, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Muhammad's Army--had also developed ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, mainly through shared training camps and safe houses. The evidence in similar attacks in major Indian cities, and Pakistan's ongoing support for these groups, led the Cabinet Committee to decide "that Pakistan must be given a very serious warning," Mishra recalled. "We debated, we talked, and we came to the conclusion that the threat of military action should be held up." Vajpayee ordered the country's armed forces to mobilize for war.