He chose his words very carefully, but U.S. President-elect Barack Obama nonetheless made big news in India with this exchange from today's press conference:

[Question:] During the campaign, you said that you thought the U.S. had a right to attack high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan if given actionable intelligence with or without the Pakistani government's permission. Two questions on that.

One, do you think India has that same right?

And, two [...] some people up there on the stage took issue with your saying that. They have strong opinions about issues ranging from Pakistan to the surge. And while they're all committed to have a successful United States, what private assurances have they given you that they will be able to carry out your vision even when they strongly disagree with that vision as some of them have been able to do in the past? [...]

OBAMA: I think that sovereign nations, obviously, have a right to protect themselves. Beyond that, I don't want to comment on the specific situation that's taking place in South Asia right now. I think it is important for us to let the investigators do their jobs and make a determination in terms of who was responsible for carrying out these heinous acts.

I can tell you that my administration will remain steadfast in support of India's efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and bring them to justice. And I expect that the world community will feel the same way.

I don't think this is what Obama intended to communicate, but here's how the Times of India is reporting it -- as if the president-elect had issued a "tacit endorsement" of India "bombing terrorist camps in Pakistan" under certain circumstances:

Sovereign nations have the right to protect themselves, US President-elect Barack Obama said on Monday, when asked if India could follow the same policy he advocated during his election campaign — of bombing terrorist camps in Pakistan if there was actionable evidence and Islamabad refused to act on it.

Although Obama said he did not want to comment on the specific situation involving India and Pakistan, his tacit endorsement of New Delhi adopting the same policy was circumscribed by two caveats: first, let the investigators reach definite conclusions about the Mumbai carnage, and second, see if Pakistan will follow through with its commitment to eliminate terrorism.

That's a bit of a stretch. Now, for the good news: Despite the palpable anger in India and word that India's security status has reached a "war level," no troops are moving to the border with Pakistan as they did after the attacks on the Indian Parliament in late 2001.

Pop quiz: What's the name of the lone surviving attacker from Mumbai?

It's a bit of a trick question. Reports in the Indian press and elsewhere have ascribed various names to the terrorist captured along the Mumbai waterfront, who seems to be the same fellow captured in this chilling photo:

Here's my count of the names in use:

• Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasab
• Amjad Amir Kamaal
• Ajmal Amir Kamal
• Ajmal Qasab
• Ajmal Amin Kamal
• Ajmal Amir Kasab
• Mohammad Ajmal Qasam
• Azam Amir Kasav
• Mohammed Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasav

Some of these are just differences in transliteration (Kasab vs. Qasab, for instance), but the rest would seem to be the product of a sloppy media culture and bad press management by Indian officials.

All the reports I've found, however, agree that he is from Faridkot, Pakistan, he is 21 years old, he admitted being a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and he has only a fourth-grade education.

It's amazing how quickly India appears to be falling into the terrorists' trap.

It seems obvious that Pakistan's civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, has no interest in stirring up trouble between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. And it seems equally obvious that any elements of the ISI, Pakistan's notorious intelligence service, who might have been in some way involved in the attacks in Mumbai would have done so in order to undermine rapprochement between Islamabad and New Delhi.

As for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmir-focused militant group has made clear that it aims to provoke conflict between India and Pakistan and stir up a pro-Islamist backlash among Muslims in India.

Yet one can already see public anger in India leading political developments in a direction the terrorists wanted. Some Indian politicians have been less than careful in saying the terrorists were sent by Pakistan, the state, rather than that they came from Pakistan, the country (which hasn't even been confirmed yet, anyway). India is considering halting talks over Kashmir and ending the five-year cease-fire along the Line of Control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to "go after" those responsible for the attacks, which could box him into the dangerous step of taking action against Lashkar-e-Taiba within Pakistan-held territory.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's hackles are up, its military leaders raising the alert levels of their forces and threatening to divert troops from the Afghan border to the eastern border with India. Zardari's about-face on sending ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha to New Delhi is clearly a response to domestic pressure after Indian newspapers said Pasha was being "summoned." Similarly, the more vocally India calls on Zardari and Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kayani to crack down on militancy, the tougher politically it will be for them to do so lest they be seen as doing New Delhi's bidding.

In India, the same sort of perverse dynamics are at work. Already, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is making political hay out of the terror in Mumbai. The party has been running newspaper ads saying, "Fight Terror. Vote B.J.P." Instead of rallying behind Singh's government, the BJP has instead called for its resignation and accused Singh of being soft on terror. These tactics may well backfire, but based on the BJP's history of populist, anti-Muslim rhetoric, we should be concerned about its return to power.

Cranking up the pressure on Pakistan may fit the public mood in India -- and it may be smart politics for Singh and his ruling Congress Party -- but it is folly as policy.

Who benefits in Pakistan when tensions with India rise? Precisely the anti-democratic hardliners in the military and intelligence services, and the Islamic hardliners who are their sometime allies, that India should want to see marginalized. As one South Asia analyst told Reuters, "The forces that are threatening the West, the forces that are threatening the civilian democracy in Pakistan and the forces who are acting against India are all interlinked to each other."

We should pray that Singh has the wisdom and the political acumen to navigate this minefield more skillfully than he has thus far.

A few more supposed details from the interrogation of Ajmal Kamal, the militant who was captured, are trickling out in the Indian press. It seems pretty clear from all of the reports that 10-12 bad guys entered the city by inflatable boat. (The New York Times has some good color on their arrival at the Mumbai docks.) Beyond that, accounts differ widely.

Some stories say that there were eight terrorists already waiting in the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels. The Times of India claims that all of the terrorists were Pakistani citizens, and that they had expected to make it back on the fishing trawler they hijacked. This was not a suicide mission.

To give you an idea of how disparate the accounts can be, the Times names the skipper of this purloined vessel as Amarjit Singh, while The Hindu says his name was Balwant Tandel. Rediff says there were two fishing boats. The Times says the terrorists left from "an isolated creek near Karachi," while Rediff reports that "Intelligence Bureau officials are trying to verify if the terrorists came in through the Persian Gulf." Rediff also mentions that its information comes from the interrogation of "Abu Ismail," while according to the Times a terrorist named "Ismail" was killed at Girgaum Chowpaty, a local beach.

All of the Indian press accounts I've read, however, point explicitly to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group. NDTV even claims that one of the terrorist's phones was "used to call Lashkar commander Yusuf Muzamil in Muzaffarabad," the group's headquarters in Pakistan.

UPDATE: The Washington Post clears up some of the mystery:

On the basis of preliminary inquiry, we know that there were a total of 10 terrorists. Nine have been eliminated, one is caught," said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. "They split into teams of two for action, and there were four at the Taj."

The Hindu reports on the latest from Mumbai:

Maharashtra Police investigators say they have evidence that operatives of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the fidayeen-squad [suicide-squad] attacks in Mumbai — a charge which, if proven, could have far-reaching consequences for India-Pakistan relations.

Police sources said an injured terrorist captured during the fighting at the Taj Mahal hotel was tentatively identified as Ajmal Amir Kamal, a resident of Faridkot, near Multan, in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Highly-placed police sources said two other Pakistani nationals had also been held in the course of intense fighting on Thursday.

All three, the sources said, identified themselves as members of a Lashkar fidayeen squad.

Based on the interrogation of the suspects, the investigators believe that one or more groups of Lashkar operatives left Karachi in a merchant ship early on Wednesday. Late that night, an estimated 12 fidayeen left the ship in a small boat and rowed some 10 nautical miles to Mumbai’s Gateway of India area.

The investigators say the fidayeen unit of which Mr. Kamal was a part then split up into at least six groups, each focussing on a separate target: Mumbai’s Nariman House, which is home to a large number of Israeli families and a Jewish prayer house; the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus rail station; the Cama hospital; the Girgaum seafront; and the Taj and Trident Oberoi hotels.

As usual, treat such early, anonymous reports with caution.

An interesting article by Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald in today's New York Times reveals an inconvenient truth about analysts who study terrorism: they often have wildly divergent views about the same events.

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.

There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades." By contrast, Mr. Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."

Fair goes on to make the point that India has a lot of angry Muslims of its own, and has a history of telling the world, "Our Muslims have not been radicalized."

I would point out that the two main competing theories -- a domestic group and outside involvement -- are not mutually exclusive. Extremist groups have been known to share logistical networks (for safehouses, weapons procurement, etc.), and there aren't always bright lines between them. So, it could be that domestic perpetrators of the attack conceived and executed the idea, but operatives turned to Lashkar-e-Taiba or some other group for logistical help and expertise.

UPDATE: Here's a pretty strong clue that points to Kashmir:

A militant holed up at the center phoned an Indian television channel to offer talks with the government for the release of hostages, but also to complain about abuses in Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars.

"Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages," the man, identified by the India TV channel as Imran, said, speaking in Urdu in what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.

"Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims. Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?"

On the other hand, a senior Indian military official seems pretty confident the militants are from Faridkot, Pakistan. One captured terrorist had a Punjabi accent.

Barack Obama, 47, will soon become one of the youngest presidents in U.S. history, but that's nothing compared with Bhutan's Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. Today, the 28-year-old -- who quite fittingly has a master's degree in politics from Oxford -- officially became the world's youngest reigning monarch when he received the coveted raven crown. In December 2006, his father, the former king, abdicated and handed many responsibilities of the throne to his son, but it wasn't until today that the official coronation took place.

Bhutan became a parliamentary democracy in March when people went to the polls for the first time ever. The country now has a prime minister as head of government, but the young, handsome king remains head of state.

In July, FP compiled a list of "The World's 10 Youngest Leaders." At the time, those youngsters were:

1. Bhutan's King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (Feb. 21, 1980)
2. Dominica's Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit (June 8, 1972)
3. The DRC's President Joseph Kabila (June 4, 1971)
4. Macedonia's Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski (Aug. 31, 1970)
5. Nauru's President Marcus Stephen (Oct. 1, 1969)
6. Swaziland's King Mswati III (April 19, 1968)
7. Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili (Dec. 21, 1967)
8. Togo's President Faure Gnassingbe (June 6, 1966)
9. Bulgaria's Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev (May 5, 1966)
10. Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev (Sept. 14, 1965)

Earlier, in March, we also compiled "The World's 10 Oldest Leaders." John McCain would have been a spring chicken compared with some of these guys:

1. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe (Feb. 21, 1924)
2. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud (1924, exact day unknown)
3. Nepal's Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala (Feb. 20, 1925)*
4. Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade (May 29, 1926)
5. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak (May 4, 1928)
6. Kuwait's Emir Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sahab (June 6, 1929)
7. Cuba's President Raúl Castro (June 3, 1931)
8. Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki (Nov. 15, 1931)
9. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Sept. 26, 1932)
10. Burma's Than Shwe, chair of the State Peace and Development Council (Feb. 2, 1933)

*Koirala is no longer prime minister as of Aug. 18, 2008, likely making Cameroon's President Paul Biya, born Feb. 13, 1933, the new addition to the list.

Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

I got a military press release on this story yesterday, and it seems little else is known about the incident:

An Afghan national in Meywand, Khandahar province, reportedly doused a U.S. civilian working with the U.S. military with a flammable liquid and lit the worker on fire. Another U.S. civilian then shot and killed the attacker.

The burn victim sustained serious injuries and was transported to a Coalition forces medical facility for treatment.

That's pretty horrible. The interesting bit, however, is this detail:

The U.S. civilians were working with teams of anthropologists and psychologists that help the U.S. military with cultural awareness.

There's a fierce debate among anthropologists about the morality and practical effects of working with the U.S. military, a topic we addressed a few months back in a debate between Hugh Gusterson and Peter D. Feaver.

One aspect of the discussion we didn't really delve into was the military's controversial "human terrain teams," in which social scientists actually embed with military units to advise them on cultural issues. It sounds like the civilian was a member of such a team; I imagine this incident in Afghanistan will make it even harder to recruit qualified folks.

This autumn, an ancient trade route that crosses the disputed Kashmiri border between India and Pakistan opened after being closed 61 years ago, when the two countries broke free of the British Empire. Many hope the opening of the trade route, in a bitterly disputed Himalayan region, will boost the economy on both sides of the “Line of Control” that divides the territory. In the photo above, the first truck carrying goods from the Pakistani side rumbles across the bridge to the Indian side.

For Kashmir's artisans, famed for their rugs, copper bowls, and other handicrafts, the opening of the trade route is a sign of hope. Check out some of their beautiful creations and learn more about the trade route in this week's photo essay, "Making Peace, One Trinket at a Time."

TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images

I'm pretty sure it would be illegal for Barack Obama to accept these funds. And perhaps a nonpartisan appeal to the next president would be wiser at this point. Still, it's a very enterprising idea from a bunch of young teens in Peshawar -- give us "books and pens," not "bombs and missiles":

A group of schoolchildren in Peshawar collected 261 US dollars for 'Uncle Obama’s election campaign' in a bid to help restore peace in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and Frontier province of Pakistan.

Holding placards and charts inscribed with slogans for peace and 'No more war and bombings,' the school children, mostly aged between 10 and 13 years, denounced increasing incidents of blowing up of schools, bombing of residential areas and displacement of families in the Fata and the volatile Swat district of the Frontier province.

"Uncle Obama we expect peace from you," read one placard held by a 10-year-old boy. Another chart, shown by an 11-year-old girl, stated: "Let us smile and play." They appealed to Barack Obama, the Democratic party's nominee for office of the US president, to give them books and pens instead of bombs and missiles.

The schoolchildren said they planned to hand the money over to the local U.S. authorities to pass along to Obama.

FILE; SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

How many generals would put meeting with development and finance experts as one of the top items on their to-do list?

My guess: not many. Which makes Gen. David Petraeus, who is gearing up to take the reins at Central Command later this month and putting together a 100-day review of U.S. strategy in the region, all the more impressive.

In what I see as a very encouraging sign, Petraeus reached out to officials at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund last week, Bank President Robert Zoellick reportedly among them. A source close to the general told Reuters that the meeting's purpose was "to touch base and note the Central Command's interest in supporting comprehensive approaches in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and others."

With Pakistan melting down and Afghanistan fast becoming a Taliban paradise, a change in strategy couldn't happen soon enough.

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

Do we need another secret intelligence assessment to tell us that Pakistan is falling apart?

No.

If anything, that country's slow-motion collapse been reported to death over the past several months. Nonetheless, it's reassuring that the situation there is getting high-level attention in Washington.

Much has been made of Pakistan's troubles with terrorists and tribal militants, and there are lots of good ideas out there for how to address them. Less discussed? The country's economic meltdown.

As Fasih Ahmed reports for Newsweek, Pakistan's economy is in "free fall." The country's credit ratings are being slashed; creditors are making runs on banks; inflation is soaring; and capital is fleeing. If things continue to get worse, we may come to find that -- while the two issues are certainly related -- the global financial crisis did to Pakistan what the terrorists never could.

Barack Obama and John McCain like to disagree about Pakistan, as they did in the debate last night. Obama says yay to cross-border raids if key terrorists can be picked up or killed. McCain says nay, arguing that the soft talk/big stick approach will work better in a country where public opinion is already dangerously set against U.S. efforts.

But no matter how much both candidates mumble about fundamental differences with their opponent's approaches, each seems to agree on one thing: They expect that results in the war on terror can come sooner rather than later.

I'm about to ruin the party.

In Pakistan, not only are results are not only a long way off, but they are looking more and more elusive. Carnegie Endowment scholar Ashley J. Tellis offered this timeline in a policy brief earlier this fall:

Even if Islamabad were to overcome the immediate problems related to terrorism, the permanent transformation of Pakistan would be decades away."

Why so long? FP wanted to get a bit more nitty-gritty. So this morning, I chatted with Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who has done sharp reporting for his book, The Forever War, in Iraq and subsequently in Pakistan.

The good news is, Pakistan is no Iraq. The bad news is, the timeline might be even longer. Sorry senators, but that might mean the victory fireworks will come long after the first term, if indeed they come at all.

Check it out.

Kristoffer Tripplaar-Pool/Getty Images

Despite all the turmoil in Congress these days, a bill authorizing the U.S.-India nuclear deal has been quietly moving forward, and yesterday it passed the Senate 86-13. This is one of the last steps in the approval process -- it follows what I and many others thought were almost insurmountable obstacles to the deal in the Indian Parliament and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The summary of the bill, released yesterday, lists several notable provisions that I want to highlight briefly. It notes explicitly that approval of the deal is based on U.S. interpretations of the terms. This means that, contrary to a declaration by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the agreement would not mitigate any penalties incurred by future Indian nuclear tests. For instance, the United States views fuel supply assurances as a political, not a legal, commitment that would almost certainly be suspended in the event of further nuclear tests.

In addition, before any licenses can be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under this agreement, India's safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency must enter fully into force. At the same time, India's declaration of civilian nuclear facilities must be consistent with the one issued by New Delhi in 2006.

This and several other provisions seem to be designed to allow the United States opportunities to prevent or halt technology transfer if circumstances call for it. Such potential loopholes also highlight one particularly important fact: The deal's approval does not necessarily mean the United States will actually sell much civilian nuclear technology to India. It is now legal to do so in most cases, but political, bureaucratic, economic, or diplomatic barriers may nonetheless end up being too problematic to overcome. Indeed, the Bush administration secretly told Congress it would not sell "sensitive" nuclear technologies to India in a letter earlier this month. For those unhappy with this deal, the details of the bill leave America with plenty of wiggle room.

In India, where monkeys are a menace, one man is getting paid $7 per day to rid a train station of its loitering monkeys. The man dresses as a monkey and scares away the simians, who are known to snatch bananas from passengers.

Watch the video here:

The Japanese sure could have used this man in August when a monkey created a commotion at a Tokyo subway station.

I was amused to see the BBC misquoting the new Central Command commander, Gen. David Petraeus, on the "existentialist threat" facing Pakistan:

You have heard the newly elected President Zadari. You've heard the army chief and others all recognise that this is in a sense an existentialist threat, this is a threat to Pakistan's very existence," the general added.

Of course, Petraeus actually said "existential threat," as the accompanying video shows, without the "-ist." He was referring to the Taliban and other militant groups.

But I wonder, what would an existentialist threat to Pakistan consist of? Suddenly, madrasa students are reading Sartre and Camus instead of memorizing the Quran and the Sunnah? Nihilism replaces Islamism as the reining ideology of tribal militancy? That, to me, sounds like positive change.

You know the situation is bad when people are fleeing to Afghanistan:

Fighting between Pakistani troops and militants in a tribal region has forced some 20,000 Pakistanis to seek refuge across the border in eastern Afghanistan, the U.N.'s refugee agency said Monday. [...]

According to Pakistani officials, the fighting in Bajur has displaced as many as 500,000 people. Most have found shelter with relatives across northwestern Pakistan, though about 100,000 have taken refuge in camps set up by Pakistani authorities.

I didn't watch the debate last night. But I did read parts of it, and I was particularly interested in the candidates' exchange about Pakistan:

In one of the more heated moments of the debate, Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, argued that he would take the war to Osama bin Laden’s cave door, whether Pakistan cooperated or not. And it was Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, who argued that without Pakistan’s cooperation, any such operation was doomed.

I have to say, McCain gets the better of the exchange. 

I've become convinced that Obama is making a huge mistake in endorsing the Bush approach, which will lead to disaster if it is allowed to continue. When FP asked five top Pakistani experts to tell us how to get Osama bin Laden, they all stressed passionately that the United States is heading down the wrong path by escalating a campaign of airstrikes in the tribal areas and, on at least one occassion, sending U.S. ground troops across the border.

There doesn't appear to be any genuine counterinsurgency strategy in place to do what General Petraeus did in Iraq -- protecting the local population from Taliban and other militant groups and seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Pashtun people. Instead, it's bomb, bomb, bomb. I understand the political appeal of getting bin Laden. But if you get the al Qaeda leader but turn Pakistan into a failed state, that is a strategic defeat, not a victory in the war on terrorism. 

Nor is there any apparent effort to rein in what Pakistan sees as India's attempt to encircle it in Afghanistan, or a major push to make progress on Kashmir. Many people seem mystified and frustrated by Pakistan's "double game" in the war on terrorism. Fear of India is the root cause.

Does Obama get all this? I understand the politics here. But as policy, the Bush approach to Pakistan is sheer folly.

Pakistan: just the kind of stable, responsible country we'd like to see expanding its ability to produce nuclear weapons. The Institute for Science and International Security reports:

 ISIS has obtained commercial satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe taken on September 3, 2008, May 18, 2008 and February 9, 2008 of the Khushab plutonium production reactor site in Pakistan. The imagery shows further construction of the second and third plutonium production reactors at Khushab (Figure 1), and that construction of the second reactor may be nearing completion. The images show a clearly visible row of cooling towers, typically built in the later phase of reactor construction (Figure 3). Given this state of construction, the second reactor could start in a year.

Once completed, these reactors will increase several-fold Pakistan’s ability to make weapon-grade plutonium for nuclear weapons. The wider implication of Pakistan increasing its plutonium production capacity must not be overlooked—there is a real risk that it will exacerbate an India-Pakistan nuclear arms race and increase tensions more broadly between the two.

FILE; JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

There's a fascinating article in today's New York Times about India's controversial practice of using electronic brain scans for lie-detection in interrogation. Two Indian states have been using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to interrogate criminal suspects since 2006, but this summer was the first time a judge handed down a conviction based on the data. Here's how the procedure works:

This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals’ defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

Based on this scan, a woman who claims to be innocent was convicted in June of poisoning her fiancé.

Neuroscientists have widely condemned this application of EEGs, which has not been sufficiently peer-reviewed to have gained wide acceptance. It's not too far-fetched, though, to see it as the future of criminal investigation. Officials from Singapore and Israel have expressed interest in the Indian program and similar procedures have been developed in the United States.

Before we condemn India for using such an unproven technology in murder trials, it's worth pointing out that U.S. law enforcement agencies still regularly administer polygraph tests even though the Supreme Court ruled them unreliable a decade ago. And of course, there's bullet lead analysis, which the FBI used for four decades before it was discredited.

Let's just be sure these new technologies really work this time around before we start putting them in front of juries.