Foreign devils in the Iranian mountains

Tehran accuses the US of staging covert operations from Pakistan to provoke ethnic and religious violence, and even the breakup of Iran. Tehran is also angered by what it sees as a US-Pakistan nexus manipulating the Afghan situation. Iran could retaliate against NATO in Afghanistan, or try to make Pakistan accountable. Both are bad options.

Feb 24, 2007

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 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 US administration asked Congress for US$75 million last year for promoting "democratic change" within Iran. But the main drawback for US 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 US 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 US for sponsoring terrorism directed against Iran, when the raison d'etre of the US 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 US 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, US President George W Bush's speech at an AEI function on February 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].

"US 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 US 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 US 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 US (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 US 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 US 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).

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.