Former national security adviser Brajesh Mishra said the policies on Pakistan pursued by the United States and China were harming India's security interests.

“While China is supporting Pakistan’s military for reasons well known, India’s friend, the US, has also been pursuing policies for the past eight years which have the same adverse impact on India,” he said at the HT Leadership Summit.

Mishra called for raising the level of police infrastructure in the country and pointed to the stridency in China’s approach on Arunachal Pradesh over the past two years.

“The situation has changed in the last two years. India has fought many wars, but two fronts were never simultaneously alive in the past. In the next five years, however, I will not rule out that possibility (of China and Pakistan opening fronts against India),” he warned.

Efraim Halevy, former chief of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and head of the Shasha Centre for Strategic Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Shaun Gregory, founder-director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit, Bradford, were the other panelists at the discussion on “Lessons from Mumbai 26/11: Securing India against Terror”.

Halevy said governments would have to change the rules of the game that bury security forces under a mountain of laws and regulations. "Countries like India, the US and Israel cannot defend themselves within their own borders. We have to have rules of hot pursuit to pursue attackers and those who give safe havens to them," he said.

Congress MP Manish Tewari cited India’s success in dealing with Mizo insurgency and Punjab militancy within the existing legal framework to argue that the overhaul suggested by Halevy may not be necessary.

Gregory did not see an end to the Pakistani army’s support for terrorists as long as it sees them as an instrument to achieve its policy objectives.

K. C. Singh, noted strategic analyst and former secretary in the External Affairs Ministry, moderated the discussion.