I called back again. No response. By now the international phone lines were buzzing with the news. The Pakistanis were calling everyone--the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Chinese. Finally Mukherjee called back. I told him what I'd heard," Rice wrote.
''What?' he said. 'I'm in my constituency. (The Indians were preparing for elections, and Mukherjee, who was a member of Parliament, was at home campaigning.) Would I be outside New Delhi if we were about to launch a war?'" Mukherjee asked.
Rice said Mukherjee explained that the Pakistani foreign minister ( Shah Mehmood Qureshi) had taken his stern words in their recent phone call the wrong way.
"'I said they were leaving us no choice but to go to war', he said," Rice recalled adding "This is getting dangerous, I thought."
On her emergency visit to New Delhi after the Mumbai attacks, Rice said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the foreign minister both categorically told her that they were against war, despite increasing public pressure, but wanted Pakistan to do something.
And when she arrived in Islamabad, the Pakistani leadership were still denying what the world knew by then that the attackers were from Pakistan.
"The Pakistanis were at once terrified and in the same breath dismissive of the Indian claims. President Zardari emphasised his desire to avoid war but couldn't bring himself to acknowledge Pakistan's likely role in the attacks," Rice writes.