Pakistan stands isolated as the chief exporter of terrorism
Nearly two weeks after 10 Iranian border guards were killed in clashes near Mirjaveh, a town near the Iran-Pakistan border, the head of Iran’s armed forces, Major-General Mohammad Baqeri, warned Islamabad that his country would attack areas sheltering “terrorists” in Pakistan unless it tightened control over its borders and stopped what he called cross-border attacks.
Jaishul-Adl (Army of Justice), a Sunni armed group fighting for independence in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province, claimed responsibility for the attack. The comments came days after Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif visited Islamabad to discuss improving border security between the two nations.
Kidnapping
This is nothing new in Iran-Pakistan ties. Even in 2014 Iran had threatened to send troops to Pakistan to retrieve five Iranian border guards kidnapped by Jaishul-Adl. What is different today is that Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia to enhance influence in the region is at its peak. And Pakistan has turned closer to Saudi Arabia with the former Pakistan chief of army staff, General Raheel Sharif, recently being appointed the head of the Saudi-backed Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism.
Pakistan and Iran are bound by cultural, tribal and religious bonds. Iran became the first state to recognise the new nation in 1947, and the two neighbours soon developed a strong partnership, signing a treaty of friendship in 1950. Some of this was geopolitical. Pakistan found a natural partner in Iran after the Indian government chose to support Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser who sought to export a pan-Arab ideology that threatened many Arab monarchies, a number of which were favoured by the Iranian Shah.
Iran was a natural ally and model for Pakistan for other reasons as well. Both had majority Muslim populations but remained secular, centralised, and Western-oriented in practice. Both countries granted the other most-favoured nation status for trade purposes; the Shah offered Iranian oil and gas to Pakistan on generous terms, and the Iranian and Pakistani armies cooperated to suppress the rebel movement in Balochistan.
Both countries also became major bulwarks of US policy in West Asia. Both were firm US allies and members of the anti- Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1971, however, the geopolitical situation began to shift. The withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf left the US to fill the vacuum, making Saudi Arabia far more important in America’s strategic calculus. Pakistan's defeat in its 1971 war with India — and the loss of half its territory with Bangladesh’s independence — led it to court China as a means to balance India. Pakistan also sought closer ties with the Arab states in order to isolate India, and thus weakened its ties to Iran, even though Islamabad-Tehran relations remained cordial.
The Shah’s fall in 1979 was a blow to Pakistan. Ayatollah Khomeini’s anti-American posture worried the Pakistani authorities, as did the prospect of any export to Pakistan of Khomeini’s radical views. After all, in 1979, perhaps 20 per cent of Pakistan’s population was Shia and, at the same time, Khomeini’s religious rhetoric sparked radicalism across the sectarian divide. Nevertheless, Islamabad offered an olive branch to Tehran. Pakistan was among the first countries to recognise the new Islamic Republic and was among very few countries in the region that refrained from supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
Pakistan emerged as the frontline state in the US struggle to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. Here, the Pakistani military regime under General Zia-ul-Haq did try to coordinate with the Islamic Republic but, in practice, Islamabad cooperated much more fully with Saudi Arabia, which bankrolled Pakistani military programmes.
Advantage
Tehran did not want to cede the advantage to Islamabad, and continued to fight for influence in Afghanistan, even as the Pakistani- and Saudi-backed Taliban consolidated control over 90 per cent of the country. This proxy fight, however, polarised Afghanistan and brewed further Pakistan-Iran mistrust.
In 1998, after an incident in which the Taliban sacked an Iranian consulate in Mazari-Sharif and murdered six Iranian diplomats and some agents, the Iranian military massed some 70,000 troops on its border with Afghanistan and blamed Pakistan, claiming that Islamabad had assured the safety of its diplomats. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, however, helped walk Iran back from the brink of war.
Sectarian
Communities of five million Baloch tribesmen stretch across south-western Pakistan and south-eastern Iran. Balochis on both sides of the border feel neglected, on sectarian grounds in Iran and on ethnic grounds in Pakistan, and nationalist sentiments have long simmered. While the Shah helped the Pakistani army crush Baloch insurgencies in the days prior to his ouster, insurgency has again erupted with both Pakistani and Iranian officials accusing each other of aiding the insurgents.
In June 2008, Jundallah terrorists, an insurgent Balochi group operating from Pakistan, kidnapped 16 members of Iran’s paramilitary Law Enforcement Forces and, over the course of months, executed all of their hostages. Tehran blames the Pakistani government for sheltering the group even though Islamabad has also declared Jundallah a terrorist outfit.
Sectarian tension has also complicated relations. In the 1980s, several radical groups sponsored by Pakistani intelligence began a systematic assault on Shia symbols and mosques in Pakistan. Pakistani Shia groups, with Iranian assistance, responded by forming their own militias. The continued targeting by Sunni terrorists of Pakistani Shias remains an Iranian concern.
Pakistan today stands accused by its three neighbours of exporting terrorism — India, Afghanistan and Iran. New Delhi should build on this regional convergence to carve out a sustained policy against Pakistan even as it should engage Iran in Afghanistan as well as fast-tracking projects such as Chabahar and the North-South Transport Corridor.
(Courtesy: Mail Today)