clipped from: www.stratfor.com It has been seven hours since AK-47-toting gunmen started shooting up five-star hotels in a cosmopolitan district of Mumbai, India. This has now evolved into an attack where the lives of high-value targets, whether they be diplomats or Western corporate executives, are being threatened. With general elections nearing and a global economic crisis in full effect, this is a nightmare situation for India’s already weak and fractured government as it attempts to hold onto the Western investment that has fueled the country’s growth for more than a decade. For the more immediate future, however, this attack has the potential to spin up into a crisis of geopolitical proportions along the Indo-Pakistani border.