* Iran-Pakistan Restive Borderlands
* Israel’s War in Gaza & Repercussions
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
Iran-Pakistan Brotherly Conflict?
A brief shooting war between Iran and Pakistan was the least expected at the beginning of the year 2024.
However, as sprawling set of conflicts roil the Middle East, tensions are flaring on myriad fronts, which could get out of hand and be difficult to contain.
This includes the arid wastes of Baluchistan, a region which straddles the Iranian-Pakistan border and has long been a source of friction between the two heavily armed neighbours in South-West Asia atop the Arabian Sea [one of them heavily nuclear – Pakistan].
Last week Tuesday, Iranian missiles suddenly struck targets belonging to Jaish al-Adl , a Sunni fundamentalist militant group that has historically found sanctuary in Pakistan and which Iran says is linked to an Islamic State terrorist strike on a high-profile gathering in the city of Kerman that killed at least 91 people earlier this month.
Tehran said it hit strongholds belonging to the group, but Pakistan authorities reported civilian casualties, including the deaths of two minors.
Then, amid howls of outrage among the Pakistan public and political class, Pakistan struck back last Thursday – after two days of intense deliberations.
It said it hit targets on Iranian soil ascribed to the separatist Baluchistan Liberation Army and Baluchistan Liberation Front “using drones, rockets, loitering munitions and standoff weapons.”
Iranian state media reported the deaths of at least nine people, including three women and four children.
Hostilities between the two countries periodically flare up over the perceived presence of rogue actors on either side of the dusty border.
According to Washington Post commentators, Ishaan Tharoor and Sammy Westfall, however, the current round is striking – Pakistan’s attack on Iranian territory is the first declared strike on the country’s soil by a foreign power since the bloody Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s (Jan. 19).
Iran’s earlier missile bombardment saw Pakistan withdraw its ambassador from Tehran.
The analysts maintain that a full-blown crisis may not be in the cards.
Given the many geopolitical headaches facing both countries, neither is in the mood for an intensifying dispute.
Pakistan’s statement that followed its retaliatory measures closely mimicked Iran’s own language earlier in the week – a sign, some analysts reckoned, of Islamabad’s eagerness to draw a line underneath the sudden spat.
Other regional actors are already working behind the scenes to calm tensions.
“Neither side wants further escalation and China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who have stakes in the stability of south-west Asia have been busy mediating,” Val Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said. The crisis will not likely escalate but it has damaged Iran-Pakistan relations.
Mohammad Taqi, a Pakistani columnist and commentator, noted the careful cjoreography that surrounded the incident. “impeccably curated statements from both Iran and Pakistan,” Taqi wrote on social media. “Neither one seems interested in anything more except killing Baloch on the opposite side.”
Smoldering in the background is this shared conundrum.
For both Iran and Pakistan, Baluchistan – whose unforgiving terrain and temperatures nearly wiped out the returning armies of the Macedonian world-conquerer Alexander the Great more than 2,000 years ago – presents a thorny security challenge.
The parallel Baluchistan provinces on either side of the border are vast and sparsely populated.
Pakistan’s Baluchistan province comprises more than a third of the nation’s landmass but only 5 % percent of its overall population.
Iran’s Sistan & Baluchistan province is the second largest in the country, but is home to just 3 % percent of Iran’s population.
In either province, local communities live with a long, complex history of rebellion and grievance against the central state.
“Both Iran and Pakistan have for years portrayed the insurgencies in the border region as at least in part rooted abroad,” Washington Post commentators reported.
“While Pakistan accused Tehran of turning a blind eye on militants operating from Iran, Iranian officials have in the past said that Jaish al-Adl was hiding out in Pakistan and receiving Israeli support.”
Both Tehran and Islamabad see the borderlands on the other side as potential hotbeds of anti-state activity , pulling in the clandestine assets of various external hostile powers – from Israel to India to the United States. Jaish al-Adl and its predessor, al-Qaeda-linked Jundullah harp on Shiite Iran’s supposed repression of minority Sunnis to rally locals to its militant cause.
“The only thing we ask of the Iranian government is to be citizens. We want to have the same rights as the Iranian Shiite people. That’s it. We do not want discrimination between Sunnis and Shiites in this country,” Jundullah founder Abdolmalek Rigi said in an interview with al-Arabiya in 2008. Two years later, he was captured and executed.
However, none of the groups targeted by Iran and Pakistan can claim to represent a majority groundswell of Baluch public opinion.
In the early 20th century, the Iranian monarchy crushed multiple uprisings from various Baluch tribes and sought to undermine their political identity by redrawing provincial borders and forcibly resettling certain Baluch communities.
The modern Pakistani state also grappled with waves of Baluch rebellions starting just a year after Pakistani independence in 1947.
Cash-strapped Pakistan, meanwhile, is desperate to establish some stability and calm in its restive Baluchistan province, which is the site of major Chinese-backed infrastructure projects , including a landmark port and imagined trade corridor which would help jump-start Pakistan’s sluggish economy. The initiatives have been dogged by delays, some of which are due to the impact of a long-running separatist insurgency.
For Iran, the strikes on Pakistan were a matter of saving face.
The blasts at the beginning of this year in Kernan targeted a gathering involving thousands of people mourning the fourth anniversary of the assassination [on the Iof influential Revolutionary Guards commander Maj.Gen. Qasem Soleiman. The powerful paramilitary institution within the theocratic state had no choice but to respond.
The attacks “were an embarrassment for the leadership” an insider source close to the Iranian government told Reuters.
The Tangled Crisis Spanning the Middle East
Israel’s war in Gaza is at a simmering regional crisis that has threatened to boil over in recent weeks.
This has seen a string of strikes across the Middle East and South-West Asia – some direct reverberations of Israel’s effort to root out Hamas in Gaza, according to Adam Taylor and Sammy Westfall of the Washington Post (Jan. 18 ).
southern Lebanon and the United States conducted a new round of strikes on what officials said were Houthi missile sites in Yemen, Iran launched strikes at what it said was an Israeli intelligence site in Iraq’s Kurdistan province and a militant site in Pakistan – prompting angry objections from both governments.
Iran has also launched strikes into Syria, and its proxy groups in Iraq and Syria have targeted U.S. troops there.
As strikes cascade, experts warn that a simple miscalculation could quickly spiral out of control.
“They’re playing a very dangerous game – it’s chicken, basically,” Joost Hilterman, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis Group, said this month of the various governments and militant groups increasingly enmeshed in regional tensions. “Any miscalculation, any miscommunication, any accidental strike could trigger a major escalation.”
Some suggest that a regional conflict is already underway.
Late last month, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told a parliamentary of the Knesset that the country was defending itself in a “multi-arena” war that went beyond Gaza and the West Bank.
“I say here in the most explicit way: Anyone who acts against us is a potential target. There is no immunity for anyone,” he said.
Some of the ‘Flash Points’ across the region
Lebanon
Last week, Israel’s military launched a barrage of strikes against what it described as Hezbollah targets deep in southern Lebanon.
Rym Momtaz, a fellow with the bInternational Institute of Strategic Studies, said that Hezbollah would likely face pressure from its from its supporters to respond, but that it also had to factor in Lebanon’s precarious economic situation.
Iraq
An Iranian-linked militia commander was killed in Baghdad in early January in a rare U.S. airstrike in the centre of the Iraqi capital.
Syria
Israel has repeatedly hit Syria since Oct. 7, with the Israel Defence Forces on Jan. 2 announcing that it had hit “military infrastructure belonging to the Syrian Army” in response to missile launches toward its territory.
Yemen & the Red Sea
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have staged numerous attacks on merchant ships passing through the Red Sea since Oct. 7.
The regular attacks on the key trade route have led some major shipping companies to avoid the Bab el-Mandeb Strait , a slim waterway near the area controlled by the Iranian-backed militant group in Yemen.
Iran
Iran was also touched by violence on its soil this month, as twin blasts in the central city of Kerman killed at least 95 people who had been visiting Gen. Soleiman’s birthplace to commemorate his death.
Pakistan
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) struck several sites in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province last week Tuesday, aiming at bases that belong to Jaish al-Adi, or the “Army of Justice.”
Risk of ‘One Big War’ in the Middle East
Because of the various bilateral and multilateral strikes in the region, the risk of a wider regional war in the Middle East is most acute.
As Israel faces multiple regional foes, the danger of escalation remains high, and the US risks being drawn in, writes The New Yorker’s Robin Wright.
Pointedly, Wright warns of the possibility that multiple conflicts – between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, between Israel and Hezbollah on the Israel-Lebanon border, between Iran and various entities it struck directly last week, and between Western powers and the Huthis – converging into one big one.
“The confluence of conflicts is dizzying,” Wright observes, taking a broader look at Middle East politics.
“The merger of multiple wars was almost inevitable,” Dan Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt noted.
“The dearth of viable ideas and –isms has created space for extremist movements to fill a void, sometimes by default.’ Those movements have gained legitimacy at the expense of very ineffective secular movements, Kurzer said. ‘One long trend is a growing sense that Islam has better answers to the problems in the region than secular non-Islamic states.’ “
Netanyahu-Biden Rift
A full-blown rift has emerged between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the need for a future Palestinian state, endorsed by Biden and rejected by Netanyahu.
A Palestinian state would simply be a launching pad for attacks on Israel and would endanger the Jewish state, Netanyahu has maintained.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues against the Israeli prime minister: “Forging a legitimate, unified, effective Palestinian partner for a two-state deal with Israel that could diffuse those threats may be impossible to achieve, but believing that abandoning any effort to do so in the long-term interest of the Jewish state is a dangerous illusion. And that is exactly what Netanyahu is peddling for his own cynical purposes”
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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