Iran steps into enemy's
territory By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This week, with his three-nation tour of
Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, Iran's President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad will fortify Iran's regional
ties and thus achieve a milestone in his
administration's "Look East" foreign policy
orientation.
Accompanied by a high-ranking
delegation, Ahmadinejad's trip transpires at a
time of heightened US allegations of Iran's
meddling in Iraq and serves as an antidote to the
US policy of isolating Iran and castigating it as
a rogue or pariah state.
Too bad for the
US, which now places the lion's share of the blame
for its quagmire in Iraq on Iran's "destructive
influence", two key US allies in the
sub-continent, India and Pakistan, are now poised
to deepen their economic, political, cultural and even
geostrategic relations
with the Islamic Republic of Iran, irrespective of
Tehran's defiance of United Nations Security
Council resolutions calling for a halt in Iran's
uranium-enrichment activities.
Not only
that, Sri Lanka, strategically situated in the
Indian Ocean, is also about to enter into a close
economic relationship with Iran, in light of
Tehran's funding of the US$450 million
multi-purpose Uma Oya power project and its
billion-dollar investment in Sri Lanka's sole oil
refinery [1]. This is bound to enhance Iran's
regional clout as well as create new points of
geostrategic synergy between Tehran and New Delhi.
After all, India "sees Sri Lanka as a
sentinel of its security astride the Indian
Ocean", to quote a recent study on India-Sri Lanka
relations, and Iran's strong presence in Sri Lanka
has definite implications in the broader strategic
context. In addition to power and energy, Iran
looks to expand its ties with Sri Lanka by
expanding tourism, educational assistance, an
employee exchange program, supplying vessels for
Sri Lanka's shipping industry, among others.
As part of Iran's "Look East" (negahe
be shargh) policy steered by a Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki [2] who, compared to
his Western-educated predecessors, received his
education in (Bangalore) India, the new chapter in
Iran-Sri Lanka relations has been conceived in
Tehran principally as a reaction to the regime of
sanctions and limitations imposed by the West.
Ahmadinejad's "Look East" strategy, taking
a page or two from India's own eastern strategy of
the 1970s through the 1990s, pins its hopes on
building win-win bilateral and multilateral
relations and cooperation in the economic,
political and cultural spheres with the
non-Western world. This is basically a subset of
an ambitious global strategy that prioritizes ties
with various countries, for example in Asia,
Africa, Central and Latin America, that are
visibly anti-America, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and
Venezuela.
Others, such as India and
Pakistan, are considered strategic allies of
Iran's chief nemesis, the US. Yet as these two
countries forge closer connections with Iran based
on their pressing national interests, above all
energy security, they are forced into a delicate
balancing act with respect to their burgeoning US
ties, that may suffer due to US backlashes against
their willingness to defy Washington's will on
isolating Iran.
But, with their Iran
diplomacy serving as a litmus test of their
independence, both Pakistan and India have
mirrored each other by standing up to the US's
pressure: this is micro-focused on the
Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI)"peace" pipeline - a $7.6
billion gas pipeline planned to run from Iran
through Pakistan and on to India. After years of
wrangling, an agreement might soon be signed.
Recently, at a lecture at Harvard
University in the US, Nicholas Burns, the outgoing
US under secretary of state for political affairs,
cited as one of his accomplishments the US's
ability to convince India to stay away from the
IPI project that, in the words of his boss,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at her
testimony before the US Senate in 2006, is in
conflict with "the US laws". This in light of an
Iran sanctions act that penalizes foreign
corporations or governments that invest more than
$20 million in Iran's energy sector.
But,
with the IPI likely to be finalized in the coming
weeks, if not days, and with China and other
players keen to participate in the international
bidding for various aspects of this massive
project, the US faces a triple jeopardy. These
are:
Impose reprisals against its important allies
and thus alienate them.
Inaction on this project makes US laws
redundant and undermines the US's image and
prestige.
De facto accommodation of the project will
play into the hands of Iran in its strategic games
in relation to the intrusive superpower.
However, despite India's explicit
turnaround on the IPI after a temporary bout of
cold feet, reflected in last week's successful
meeting of India's and Pakistan's oil ministers in
Islamabad, Washington has not altogether given up
hope the Iran-benefiting project will be scuttled
at the last minute, or at least postponed further,
just as it has been during the past 15 years.
(Last week, India and Iran hammered out their main
differences, which related to the transit fee to
be charged by Pakistan for the Iranian gas going
to India.)
On the eve of Ahmadinejad's
state visit to Pakistan, where he is scheduled to
sign a gas sales purchase agreement, news from
Pakistan that a Baloch rebel group, the Baloch
Republican Army (BRA), has blown up a gas pipeline
disrupting supplies to various Punjab districts
highlights the security problems of the IPI
project that traverses 700 kilometers of Pakistani
territory, including volatile Balochistan
province.
Given the demands of the BRA for
royalties for the region's gas supplies and
job-creation for ethnic Balochis, Islamabad could
conceivably offset threats to the IPI by pledging
to use the project precisely for the economic
revival of Balochistan.
An editorial in
the Pakistan daily, the Nation, noted that the IPI
will "usher in a new economic era" both internally
and also externally by "adding new dimensions to
Pakistan-India relations", in the words of
Pakistani Petroleum Minister Khawaja Muhammad
Asif.
Pakistan will need foreign
investment and support to cover the costs of
constructing the pipeline going through its
territory and expects institutions such as the
World Bank, which has done a feasibility study on
the project and has come out in favor of it, to
provide financial assistance. [3] Yet, the US,
which wields enormous clout in the World Bank, may
play the spoiler by blocking such assistance, in
which case it will earn itself the ire of
Pakistan's newly-elected government, as well as
India, which needs to upgrade its infrastructure
to realize its dream of addressing its energy
crunch through the IPI pipeline.
Ahmadinejad's "whistle-stop" tour in
India, to echo a headline in the Hindustan Times,
will be the shortest leg of his three-day South
Asia tour, yet it has the deepest diplomatic and
symbolic significance, coinciding with a week-long
festival of Iranian culture in India that serves
to highlight the historical ties between the
countries.
According to the Iranian news
agency IRNA, Ahmadinejad's visit will deepen ties
and in his discussions with Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and Indian President Pratibha
Patil, "discussions are set to cover a number of
sectors from energy, the slow moving
Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project to
bilateral investment to civilian nuclear energy".
The Indian media, on the other hand, have
reported that last week Indian External Affairs
Minister Pranab Mukherjee sent a letter to Tehran
asserting that India "pursues an independent
foreign policy", thus assuring Tehran that Delhi's
recent "standing up to Uncle Sam" with respect to
Iran is not a one-off, but rather a manifestation
of India's "foreign policy realism".
Concerning the latter, Indian National
Security Advisor M K Narayanan recently told a
conference in New Delhi that India did not want to
be part of a "compact" dealing with Iran's nuclear
issue, that India felt it was "better placed" to
deal with Iran than many other countries, partly
because "we have the second-largest Shi'ite
population, so it's not only a foreign-policy
issue, but a domestic issue".
There is a
great deal on the India-Iran plate nowadays, and
Narayanan made a point of revealing that "a great
deal is taking place between India and Iran which
is not on the public realm".
Notes 1. According to Sri
Lanka's official reports, Iran "would cover 70% of
the required investment for the refinery's
expansion, in the form of a 10-year loan, with a
five-year exemption". Iran is expected to yield
noticeable benefits from its investment, barring
unforeseen developments, such as sabotage and
further instability in Sri Lanka from attacks by
Tamil separatists. 2. For more, see the
author's interview with Mottaki in
www.thepeoplesvoice.org, September 27, 2006, Saving the Peace
Pipeline, www.agenceglobal.com, August
17, 2007.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's
Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear
potential latent", Harvard International Review,
and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
