The
Tehran Times commented last week that an exclusive
Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work manipulating the Afghan
situation.
By M K Bhadrakumar -- Information Clearing House
Feb. 24, 2007 -- 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. covert operations inside Iran. With
reference to the incidents in Zahedan, Stratfor, a think-tank
with close connections to the U.S. 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 U.S. (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 U.S. stratagem. Sponsoring terrorist
activities inside Iran has been a consistent feature of U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 impact on its short-term domestic and
foreign policy choices." He specifically cited a classified
research project sponsored by the US Department of Defense that
is examining the depth and nature of ethnic grievances in Iran's
plural society.
"The Pentagon is especially interested in whether Iran is prone
to a violent fragmentation along the same kinds of faultlines
that are splitting Iraq and that helped to tear apart the Soviet
Union with the collapse of communism," Bradley wrote.
The U.S. administration asked Congress for US$75 million last year
for promoting "democratic change" within Iran. But the main
drawback for U.S. policy is that with the possible exception of
the Kurds, none of Iran's ethnic minorities is seeking to secede
from the Iranian state. Also, it is not a situation where ethnic
minorities are subjected to persecution or discrimination in
Iran. The majority Persian community and ethnic minorities alike
feel the alienation endemic to the problem of poverty, economic
deprivation, misgovernance, corruption and lawlessness.
Indeed, the U.S. policy to light the fire of ethnic and sectarian
strife could well end up creating an "arc of instability"
stretching from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Even
right-wing Iranian exile Amir Taheri, who is usually a strong
backer of the Bush administration's interventionist policy in
the Middle East, has warned that although fanning the flames of
ethnic unrest and resentment is not difficult and that a
Yugoslavia-like breakup scenario might hasten the demise of the
Iranian regime, it could also "unleash much darker forces of
nationalism and religious zealotry that could plunge the entire
region into years, even decades, of bloody crisis."
The irony is that Afghanistan is being put to use as a launch
pad by the United States for sponsoring terrorism directed against Iran,
when the raison d'etre of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan
during the past five years has been for the stated purpose of
fighting a "war on terrorism". Besides, Iranian cooperation at a
practical level went a long way in facilitating the U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan in 2001. Even Iran's detractors would admit that
during the past five years, Tehran has followed a policy of
good-neighborliness toward the Kabul government, no matter
Washington's dominance over President Hamid Karzai. In fact,
Iran figures as a major donor country contributing to
Afghanistan's reconstruction.
From this perspective, U.S. President George W. Bush's speech at an
AEI function on Feb. 15 outlining his new Afghan strategy
assumes great importance. The fact that Bush chose a citadel of
neo-conservatism to unveil the "top-to-bottom review" of his new
Afghan strategy was symbolic. In essence, Bush underlined the
imperative of a long-term Western military presence in
Afghanistan. There was a triumphalism in Bush's tone that he
brought NATO into Afghanistan -- as if that was a strategy by
itself. He couldn't hide his glee that NATO had been brought by
the scruff of its neck into the Hindu Kush -- where it was going
to slouch along the soft underbelly of Russia and China for the
foreseeable future.
Bush summed up his sense of achievement: "Isn't it interesting
that NATO is now in Afghanistan? I suspect 20 years ago if a
president stood in front of the AEI and said, 'I'll make a
prediction to you that NATO will be a force for freedom and
peace outside of Europe,' you probably never would have invited
the person back. Today, NATO is in Afghanistan."
In his entire speech, Bush didn't refer even once to the role of
the United Nations in Afghanistan. Also, Bush's speech
completely sidestepped the urgent need to pressure Pakistan to
clamp down on the Taliban. Actually, Bush ended up praising
Musharraf's "frontier strategy" in the tribal agencies. To be
sure, the Tehran Times was right in concluding that Washington,
with the "cooperation of regional powers like Pakistan," is
realizing the long-term NATO military presence in Afghanistan.
Soon after Bush spoke at the AEI, spin-doctors in Washington
began spreading word in select media that al-Qaeda was back in
business in the Pakistani tribal areas. Self-styled
counter-terrorism officials in Washington who refused to be
named will now have us believe that the al-Qaeda "leadership
command and control is robust" and "the chain of command has
been re-established."
As the New York Times put it, "Until recently, the Bush
administration had described Osama bin Laden and [Ayman]
al-Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from
operational control of al-Qaeda." But all of a sudden the
picture has changed. The daily said, "The United States has
identified several new al-Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan,
including one that officials said might be training operatives
for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan [emphasis added].
"U.S. analysts said recent intelligence showed that the compounds
functioned under a loose command structure and were operated by
groups of Arab, Pakistani and Afghan militants, allied with
al-Qaeda."
In other words, the "war on terror" in Afghanistan has come full
circle. A few things stand out. First, as Bush pithily summed
up, Musharraf "is an ally in this war on terror and it's in our
interest to support him in fighting the extremists." The
restoration of democracy in Pakistan will have to wait. Second,
the U.S. and NATO military occupation of Afghanistan is for the
long haul. The specter of al-Qaeda's resurgence is sufficient to
justify it. Third, the U.S. military presence in the Central Asian
region will also continue for the foreseeable future, no matter
what Russia or China feels about it.
Fourth, regional powers must appreciate that it is the United
States that stands between them and the deluge of Islamic
extremism. They must therefore cooperate with the United States (and NATO)
and trust Washington to represent their best interests in the
devilishly obscure Pakistani tribal areas. Finally, this is a
long-term ideological struggle -- freedom and democracy versus
extremism and obscurantism. And wherever there is "democracy
deficit" -- be it oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan
-- the United States has a right to intervene.
Meanwhile, what does Tehran do about the Zahedan incident? Does
it retaliate against NATO in Afghanistan? Should it hold
Musharraf accountable for the covert U.S. operations staged from
Pakistani soil? In chess, this is called a classic zugzwang --
having to choose between two bad options.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian
Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
LINK: Information Clearing House