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THE conclusion of the controversy that raged for seven months following a report in this newspaper last October ought to finally enable Pakistan to focus attention on some critical issues that need to be addressed on a war footing.
The country’s regional security environment is tense and, so far, a comprehensive policy response does not seem to be in place, giving the impression that various institutions are lurching from one crisis to another without a game plan.
Tension with India which, in its latest manifestation can be attributed to Delhi’s intransigence in addressing the Kashmir dispute and its preference of using brute force in an attempt to put down an increasingly widespread popular uprising, is now taken as a matter of routine here.
Pakistan’s dilemma would only have been deepened by the Saudi defence minister’s resort to unkind terms to describe Iran’s official Shia ideology.
On the long border shared with our western neighbour, Islamabad’s past folly in using extremist proxies to further its and its Western allies goals in the region are boomeranging as Islamabad’s enemies are using their own Afghanistan-based assets in undermining Pakistan.
Additionally, the Afghan government and the countries whose forces are struggling to keep the Kabul leaders in office also use Pakistan as a convenient scapegoat for all of their shortcomings and their inability to effectively deal with the military challenge of the Afghan Taliban.
And then there is Iran. Over the past week, I have read several newspaper and magazine pieces and even research papers, sent to me by my good friend and ace archivist Aamir Mughal, that form a rather longish background to why Iran has publicly taken issue with Pakistan at this stage.
The Iranian army chief’s statement was considered outrageous by many Pakistanis when he warned that if Islamabad was not willing to take action against militants who attack his country, the Iranian military could take direct action against their sanctuaries situated here.
How dare he? We are ready. These were some of the immediate responses. And expectedly so. Who would have expected proud Pakistanis to examine the context of the statement which appeared to have been made in frustration (and should not have been) after allegedly Pakistan-based militants attacked and killed a number of Iranian border guards?
When asked his views on the Iranian statement and regional security, the DG ISPR, whose press conference was mainly to announce an end to the Dawn story saga, described Iran and Afghanistan as brotherly countries with which Pakistan has proper border management mechanisms.
Maj-Gen Asif Ghafoor said this mechanism will be put to more effective use, while underlining that Pakistan was a sovereign state with robust armed forces. He also referred to the visit of the Iranian foreign minister and his meeting with the army chief.
But the operative part of his statement was: “After passing through a difficult phase over the past 10-15 years, Pakistan is on a positive trajectory … if you see LoC heating up or tensions mounting with Afghanistan due to a misunderstanding or Iran joining this … please see the designs of the enemy.”
Pakistan’s latest grouse against Iran would, of course, be that Kulbhushan Jadhav, the man Pakistani security sources describe as the RAW master planner and lynchpin of many Baloch separatist and TTP operations on Pakistan soil, was based in Chabahar. It is unlikely that Iranian intelligence were not aware of this.
That the Pakistan’s then army chief, in defiance of diplomatic protocols, felt compelled to take up the matter directly with the visiting Iranian president last year and also made his concerns public was indicative of the how strong the sentiment was in the armed forces on the issue.
At the same time, Pakistan has long been a favourite hunting ground of anti-Iran militants. Iranian cadets being trained at a Pakistani defence establishment were killed here in a terror attack several years back and one of its senior diplomats assassinated too.
Pakistan’s dilemma would only have been deepened by the most recent statement of Saudi defence minister and deputy crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, the apple of the Saudi monarch’s eye, who described the Iran’s official Shia ideology in unkind terms and said any future battles to curtail Tehran’s influence would be fought on Iranian soil.
There are new alliances forming in the Middle East, where once Israel was clandestinely supplying weapons to the theological Iranian regime to counter the aggression by Saddam Hussein, who was then viewed by Tel Aviv as its biggest enemy.
As we speak, there are several reports in the media which talk of an informal alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel as both the countries fear a common foe which can potentially arm itself with nuclear weapons and which is flexing its muscles in the region. In fact, all three are involved in the Syrian tragedy via proxies and/or directly.
To add to this lethal cocktail is the appointment of retired Gen Raheel Sharif as the head of a Saudi-led military alliance that Iran sees as a hostile force, whose primary purpose would be its encirclement rather than counterterrorism efforts.
Pakistan may have given space in Balochistan to religious extremist groups to counter Baloch separatists but some of these have already gone rogue. What’s to prevent some of these groups playing in the hands of others and carrying out attacks in Iran? Would we not be blamed for ‘battling Iran on its soil’?
Given our civil-military leadership’s proximity to the Saudis and also calculating the remittances Pakistani workers based in that country send home, which are so vital for the economy, there may be a strong argument for Pakistan to tilt the way it seems to be tilting.
One would have been perfectly at ease if there was a reassurance that this was the result of a policy where the top strategic brains of our civil and military setups had put their heads together and thought through all the consequences and chosen the best option. Did they? Or will they even now?
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2017
