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2 Foreign devils in the Iranian
mountains By M K Bhadrakumar
In a rare public criticism of Pakistan,
the Tehran Times commented last week that an
exclusive Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work
manipulating the Afghan situation. The daily,
which reflects official Iranian thinking, spelled
out something that others perhaps knew already
but were afraid to talk about publicly.
All
the same, the commentary gave a candid Iranian
insight into the state of play in Afghanistan. It
estimated that without a
comprehensive rethink of
strategy aimed at addressing the problems of weak
political institutions, misgovernance, corruption,
warlordism, tardy reconstruction, drug trafficking
and attendant mafia, and excesses by the coalition
forces, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) couldn't possibly hope to get anywhere near
on top of the crisis in Afghanistan.
The
commentary pointed a finger at Pakistan's training
the Taliban and providing them with "logistical
and political support". It highlighted that US
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who visited
Islamabad recently, chose to sidestep the issue
and instead bonded with President General Pervez
Musharraf. This is because Washington's priority -
that the "new cold war" objective
of NATO is to
establish a long-term presence in the region - can
be realized only with Musharraf's cooperation.
The Iranian outburst was, conceivably,
prompted by the spurt of trans-border terrorism
inside Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province, which
borders Pakistan. Ten days ago, a militant group
called Jundallah killed 11 members of Iran's elite
Revolutionary Guards in an attack in the city
center of Zahedan. Iranian state media reported
that the attack was part of US plans to provoke
ethnic and religious violence in Iran. Balochs are
Sunnis numbering about 1.5 million out of Iran's
70 million predominantly Shi'ite population.
Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa
Pour-Mohammadi alleged that in the recent past, US
intelligence operatives in Afghanistan had been
meeting and coordinating with Iranian militants,
apart from encouraging the smuggling of drugs into
Iran from Afghanistan. He said the US operatives
were working to create Shi'ite-Sunni strife within
Iran.
American investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh has copiously written about recent
US covert operations inside Iran. With reference
to the incidents in Zahedan, Stratfor, a
think-tank with close connections to the US
military and security establishment, commented
that the Jundallah militants are receiving a
"boost" from Western intelligence agencies.
Stratfor said, "The US-Iranian standoff has
reached a high level of intensity ... a covert war
[is] being played out ... the United States has
likely ramped up support for Iran's oppressed
minorities in an attempt to push the Iranian
regime toward a negotiated settlement over Iraq."
Iran is fast joining ranks with India and
Afghanistan as a victim of trans-border violence
perpetrated by irredentist elements crossing over
from Pakistan. Tehran, too, will probably face an
existential dilemma as to whether or not such acts
of terrorism are taking place with the knowledge
of Musharraf and, more importantly, whether or not
Musharraf is capable of doing anything about the
situation.
Iran, perhaps, is
somewhat better placed than India or Afghanistan to
resolve this dilemma, since it is the US (and
not Pakistan) that is sponsoring the trans-border
terrorism. And what could Musharraf do about US
activities on Pakistani soil even if he wanted to?
The Iranians seem to have sized up Musharraf's
predicament.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman
in Tehran, while announcing last Sunday that the
Pakistani ambassador to Iran was being summoned to
receive a demarche over the Zahedan incident, also
qualified that it was Iran's belief that the
Pakistani government as such couldn't be party to
the creation of such "insecurities" on the
Pakistan-Iran border region.
Indeed, Tehran is used to the
US stratagem. Sponsoring terrorist activities inside Iran
has been a consistent feature of US regional
policy over the past quarter-century. Tehran
seems to have anticipated the current
wave. Last May, in a nationwide television
address, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad accused
Iran's "enemies" of stoking the fires of ethnic
tensions within Iran. He vowed that the Iranian
nation would "destroy the enemy plots".
A
Washington conference last year brought together
representatives of Iranian Kurdish, Balochi,
Ahvazi, Turkmen and Azeri organizations with the
aim of forming a united front against the Tehran
regime. An influential US think-tank, American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), went a step further and
prepared a report from the neo-conservative
perspective on what a Yugoslavia-like federated
Iran would look like.
John Bradley, an
author on the Persian Gulf, has written in the
current issue of The Washington Quarterly magazine
that Balochistan province is "particularly crucial
for Iran's national security as it borders Sunni
Pakistan and US-occupied Afghanistan ... In fact,
the Sunni Balochi resistance could prove valuable
to Western intelligence agencies with an interest
in destabilizing the hardline regime in Tehran."
Bradley added, "The United States
maintained close contacts with the Balochis till
2001, at which point it withdrew support when
Tehran promised to repatriate any US airmen who
had to land in Iran as a result of damage
sustained in combat operations in Afghanistan.
These contacts could be revived to sow turmoil in
Iran's southeastern province and work against the
ruling regime."
Bradley revealed that US
policymakers are taking a great interest lately in
Iran's internal ethnic politics, "focusing on
their possible impact on the Iranian regime's
long-term stability as well as
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of NATO is to
establish a long-term presence in the region - can
be realized only with Musharraf's cooperation.
