EPILOGUE
By October 2014, Iran’s nightmare on its border with Pakistan was continuing unabated. After a brief lull over the course of the summer months, violence in the volatile border region was once again on the rise.
Tehran again accused Pakistan of turning a blind eye to cross-border raids by militants operating from its soil – which Islamabad, predictably, strongly rebutted. Despite this latest public falling out, neither Iranian nor Pakistani officials appeared any closer to admitting that this recurrent violence is a symptom of broader underlying problems that continue to mar relations. At its core, as this survey of the last four decades of interaction between Iran and Pakistan illustrates, is the reality of a combination of state-to-state disengagement, conflicting foreign-policy priorities and regional competition that persists in undermining relations between the two largest countries of south-west Asia.
This particular round of hostilities began in the first week of October 2014, after attacks by anti-government militants resulted in the death of four Iranian security personnel. The group that took responsibility – Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice) – is an ethnic Baluch and Sunni faction that claims to fight for the rights of the people of Baluchistan, which still suffers as Iran’s most impoverished province.
Tehran’s reaction was to point the finger at outside players. As it had frequently done over the previous decade, Iran maintained that elements in Pakistan, with financial support from Arab states in the Persian Gulf region, sponsor the group as leverage against Iran. The Iranians claimed that they had detected foreign culprits engaged in augmenting subversion in this troubled corner of Iran, in an attempt to make Tehran bleed.
This charge against foreign rivals mirrored exactly the stance that the late Shah had adopted throughout the 1960s and 1970s in dealing with instability in Baluchistan. Back then, the foreign culprits that Iran spotted were the Soviet Union and Iraq – and the Baluch militants of the Shah’s days were communist-leaning rather than Islamists, but the same dynamic was otherwise in play. Nor were the Iranians always simply imagining plots hatched between anti-Tehran militants and foreign conspirators. As the New York Times put it following an investigation, US intelligence services had at least on one occasion, in 2007, known about an imminent attack inside Iran by Baluch militants. The newspaper claimed, ‘the unusual origins and the long-running nature of the United States’ relationship with Jundullah are emblematic of the vast expansion of [US] intelligence operations since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001’.1
Tehran’s blunder has been to be overly consumed with the violence arising from Baluch grievances and not interested enough in addressing its underlying causes. Jaish al-Adl is the successor to Jundollah, the militant group led by Abdol Malek Rigi, which the United States designated as a terrorist organization in November 2010.
Jaish al-Adl achieved its big breakthrough with an audacious operation that it carried out in February 2014, when it kidnapped five Iranian border guards. After months of acrimonious negotiations, said to have involved Iranian and Pakistani diplomats and tribal leaders from the border regions, four of the guards were released, but the fate of the fifth is still unknown. However, as this latest attack only eight months later showed, Jaish al-Adel – and Iranian Baluch militancy in general – was not a phenomenon that could be subdued with any quick remedies. Meanwhile, the roots of the failure to tackle cross-border militancy lay in the dysfunctional and wary relationship between the Iranian and Pakistani states.
Following the attack in early October, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the deputy head of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), warned that if ‘any neighboring country fails to fulfill their obligations to protect the border’ then Iran would ‘have no choice but to act on its own’. This pledge to act unilaterally was carried out on 18 October when some 30 Iranian security forces unilaterally crossed the international border, resulting in the death of a Pakistani Frontier Corps soldier.
Islamabad lodged a ‘strong protest’ and summoned the Iranian Ambassador, but its overall reaction was predictably restrained. After all, the same Iranian warnings and actions, including a few hot pursuits of militants by Iranian forces on Pakistani soil, had repeatedly taken place over the last decade. This time around, as in earlier such episodes, things went like clockwork.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry asked for ‘evidence’ from Iran that Jaish al-Adl had found sanctuary in Pakistan, and urged Tehran to stop ‘externalizing’ its problems and focus on fighting militancy at home. In reply, Abdollah Araghi, a senior IRGC commander, told Iran’s state television that his forces have documentation demonstrating that militants cross the border to stage attacks. Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour, the commander of the IRGC ground forces, slammed Islamabad for ‘allowing terrorists to use its soil as a platform’ to attack Iran. He warned that Pakistan could expect further Iranian unilateral action unless it stopped infiltration by militants. ‘Unfortunately,’ reported an Iranian news service, ‘the Pakistanis have no control over the border [with Iran], and warned that Iran might “bear terrorist acts to [a] certain threshold” but there is a tipping point.’2 The unofficial Iranian line, however, was far more incriminating about Pakistan’s role.
Despite the rancour, and very predictably, officials from both countries then met on 22 October in Tehran and agreed to increase intelligence cooperation. The dust from this latest round of border skirmishes soon settled, but the underlying factors that feed Iranian–Pakistani tensions will surely continue to keep the two countries considerably apart.
Recrimination by pattern
The cyclical aspect of this state of affairs is by now undeniable. What is surprising is how little attention Iran and Pakistan continue to give to the poor state of relations between them. Security-related incidents are the ones that grab headlines, but it is the underlying political suspicions, geopolitical rivalry and a glaring economic disconnect that are at the heart of troubled Iranian–Pakistani relations.
The combined population of Iran (80 million) and Pakistan (190 million) is about 270 million people, representing a significant economic market, and yet the volume of bilateral trade is dismal. Even before international sanctions took serious effect on Iran in 2011-12, Tehran’s trade with Pakistan amounted to $300-400 million per year out of Tehran’s $100 billion international trade. In comparison, Tehran claimed trade with China, its biggest commercial partner, of $40 billion in 2013.3 Iran’s immediate neighbours have also found ways to bolster trade ties. Turkey and Iraq have, over the last decade, emerged as key trading partners, with annual trade volumes of $22 billion and $12 billion respectively. Even impoverished Afghanistan does more business with Iran (about $1.5 billion per year) than does Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan’s trade volumes with Iran mirrors those of Armenia – by far Iran’s smallest neighbour, with a population of only 3 million people. The significance of economic interdependence and trade lies in the fact that it acts as a stabilizing factor in relations, and it is conspicuously absent in Tehran–Islamabad ties.
In the case of Iranian–Pakistani relations, not only is such a stabilizing economic factor missing but the reverse trend is arguably in motion. Instead of facilitating more trade and finding areas of cooperation for mutual benefit, the Iranian side has opted instead to build its first physical frontier wall on the 909 km border with Pakistan. Following the October 2014 skirmishes, Iran’s police chief, Ismail Ahmadi Moqqadam, went out of his way to assure the Iranian public that sealing the Pakistan border is nearly complete. The border is even ‘closed to the passage of [trespassing] animals’, Moqqadam was quoted as saying. The statement was a strong example of Tehran’s security-oriented approach to all things Pakistan-related. But hard security-centric prescriptions have by now been proven to fail in reversing the spiral of instability that has beset this rugged border.
The Pakistani side is also guilty of neglect. Despite its massive energy shortage, and after years of negotiations and many false starts, Islamabad is still yet to begin physically constructing its part of a $7.5 billion pipeline deal that is meant to deliver Iranian natural gas. This is a project that would have turned the question of border security into a joint interest, and made both countries stakeholders.
The Iranians claim that they are still committed to the deal but quietly will express strong doubt that Islamabad will ever go through with it, given opposition from Saudi Arabia and the United States. A deadline to have the pipeline operational by the end of 2014 proved all but impossible to achieve thanks largely to a lack of a political commitment. Meanwhile, the project’s symbolism cannot be underestimated. This was meant to be a strategic marvel, with a potential to reverse the drift in relations that has over the years proven so destructive.
The enduring rot
An October 2014 article in Pakistan’s Times newspaper placed the deterioration of relations in a historical context. It suggested that, ‘since the advent of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) government [of Nawaz Sharif] in June 2013, perceived to be pro-Saudi Arabia, the [gas pipeline] project appeared to be in jeopardy because of Iranian-Saudi rivalry’. The paper asked for Islamabad to ‘stem the rot’ and ‘retain old friends with sincerity rather than turn them into foes’.
The fact, however, is that the ‘rot’ in relations is nothing new – nor is it the making of the likes of the United States, Saudi Arabia or any other single country. The truth is that Iranian–Pakistani relations took a decisive turn for the worse after the Indian–Pakistani war of 1971. It was not the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the pro-American Shah of Iran who then determined that Tehran should not prioritize Pakistan over India. It was the Shah who set that fundamental trajectory in motion – a policy that Tehran has followed ever since, to Islamabad’s deep resentment.
Any Pakistani bid to overturn this basic reality is bound to fail, be it though coercion or by enticing the Iranians away from India. Instead, as the Shah back in the 1970s sought to encourage, pan-regional economic and political projects should be inclusive of all three countries – Pakistan, Iran and India – if not also Afghanistan, which is likely to remain a major source for instability in years to come. The Shah used to tell Zulfikar Bhutto that keeping India out was a futile exercise in bluster, a perspective that still resonates strongly in Tehran nearly half a century later.
For now, however, it is evident that both Tehran and Islamabad are more or less resigned to accept the ongoing reality of ‘managed tensions’ in relations, not to mention considerable economic underutilization. Both sides have other overriding foreign-policy priorities. Pakistan’s national security apparatus is still India-obsessed. Meanwhile, Iran continues its quest for regional influence but it is primarily preoccupied with its interests in the West and in the Arab world, and considerably less focused on its east as a gateway to regional influence and enhanced security. The one common threat that decades ago brought Iran and Pakistan together, the Soviets to the north, is long gone, and no substitute has since emerged.
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From the perspective of the West – and particularly the United States, which has invested enormous human and financial capital to secure and promote its national-security interests in this region since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan – south-west Asia continues to be a key global battleground. And in this highly volatile region, the relationship between Iran and Pakistan is without doubt the most significant, and yet largely unmapped, affair – one that is overlooked by international observers more often than not.
This is not necessarily out of apathy but a reflection of the complexity of Iranian–Pakistani relations, which not cannot be readily captured or pigeonholed. When observers look at the interactions between these two neighbouring countries, they are confronted by a multilayered relationship that defies the typical typecasting prevalent in international relations. It is not one of outright hostility or one of constructive partnership. Instead, it is a relationship that is at times cooperative but which has, since the early 1990s, been increasingly characterized by rivalry.
These two regional powers continue to be intertwined in various cultural, religious and political ways. In Pakistan, people still fondly remember Iran as the first country to recognize the independent state of Pakistan in 1947, and the Shah of Iran as the first head of state to visit the new nation. By the late 1960s and onwards, however, the race for regional leadership had put the Shah on a collision course with Pakistan. The unease in relations only heightened following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the emergence of sectarian tensions between Shi‘a Iran and Sunni Pakistan.
Over the next two decades, Iran and Pakistan, the once erstwhile allies, engaged in a fierce competition for regional influence. The key battleground was in Afghanistan. But as history shows, Iran–Pakistan relations have throughout remained multifaceted, often contradictory and unpredictable. Today, with much of south-west Asia still in turmoil, the trajectory of Iranian–Pakistani relations is therefore a critically important factor, not to be overlooked.
As of late 2014, nothing perhaps deserves more scrutiny than respective Iranian and Pakistani policies in Afghanistan as the Western military presence in that country comes to a drawdown. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Tehran and Islamabad shared a common interest in keeping Kabul from falling into Soviet hands. That endeavour, as reactive and as incomplete as it often was, turned out to be a stabilizing factor in this tumultuous region. On the other hand, when Iran and Pakistan jockeyed for maximum influence in Afghanistan – as they did for almost the entire 1990s, at the other’s expense – then achieving an Afghan peace seemed a near impossibility. There is no doubt that the future of Afghanistan after Western forces withdraw will depend strongly on whether Iran and Pakistan will seek to engage in a zero-sum game for influence or seek a policy of accommodation that prevents Afghan soil once again becoming a battlefield for them and their respective Afghan allies and proxies.
Be it on the Afghan question, challenges linked to terrorism or anti-proliferation efforts – or simply in coping with the consequences of their geopolitical rivalry – Western policy makers ought to be far more attentive to the set of dynamics that reinforce and steer Iranian–Pakistani relations. The competing or overlapping interests of these two regional powers can be momentous, as the West – and Washington, in particular – plans and executes its future national-security strategies for south-west Asia.