The terror attacks between Iran and Pakistan are emblematic of the historical and geographical ties that have entangled them in an edgy situation. Iran’s actions have put the Islamist bloc in ferment and churn
By Subramanyam Sridharan
The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has opened old wounds and spawned newer issues, both within West Asia and its periphery. One such issue was suddenly witnessed on January 16 when the Islamic Republic of Iran attacked another “brotherly” Islamic Republic, Pakistan, with missiles and drones hitting Koh in Balochistan. Iran claimed that it was in retaliation for the deadly attack on Iranian police on December 15 that killed 11 policemen. In fact, last year alone, there has been a series of at least five such attacks on the Iranian police from across the Pakistani border. Two days later, Pakistan hit back at Iranian positions in an operation codenamed “Marg Bar Sarmachar” (Death to Insurgents).
Cross-border terrorism has long been a weapon of choice by the Pakistani State and non-State actors, prompting the Indian foreign ministry to say that though it was an Iran-Pakistan bilateral matter, India understood Iran’s “self defence”.
Pakistan is under a caretaker government in the lead up to elections and has been under severe economic stress for several years now. Its military generally overrules even elected governments. There are dozens of terrorist organisations functioning with impunity in the country. The Pakistani situation, therefore, is dicey.
For its part, Iran, which also bombed Erbil in Iraq and Harem in Syria on the same day it attacked Pakistan, has been caught in its own web of terrorism. While it has seemingly surrounded its arch enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia with Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and the Iraqi and Syrian Shi’a militia, Iran has been hemorrhaging within, due to terrorist attacks from ISIS and Jaish-al-Adl. The latter, which operates from Pakistan’s Balochistan province, is known by various names such as Jundullah (Warriors of Allah) or “People’s Resistance Movement of Iran” (PRMI). There have been a dozen attacks within Iran in 2023 alone by these two terror groups, some of them major. Besides these, the US and Israel have been targeting commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Prominent Iranian nuclear scientists have also been target-assassinated. All these humiliations had to be avenged by Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime to restore its potence which lies considerably eroded additionally by widespread internal protests.
Perhaps the immense January 3 twin-bomb attacks at Kerman were the proverbial last straw on the embattled regime’s back. After the latest missile attacks, the Iranian defence minister proclaimed: “We are a missile power in the world.” Though Iran has attacked three “friendly” countries, there are subtle differences in terms of targets. While stateless ISIS is a common target in Syria, it was supposedly an Israeli target in Iraq, but a completely Pakistani target in Pakistan.
Though it seemed that Iran and Pakistan quickly buried their hatchet within a few days under possible Turkish and Chinese interventions, the damage is done. No neighbour or world power would want further escalation between Iran and Pakistan too in the current difficult circumstances. History and geography have conspired to entangle these two neighbours in an uneasy situation for a long time.
Historically, the 1,500-year old religious divide between the Sunni and Shi’a sects is too deep to be bridged, even though the founder of Sunni Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was himself a Shi’a. As the West Asian countries became powerful in the 1970s with their petro-dollars and a security alliance with the US, their influence waxed over Pakistan especially when the viscerally anti-Sunni Ayatollahs dethroned the US-supported Shah in Iran in 1979 and the US-led Afghan jihad started simultaneously. As a result, Pakistan faced three Iran-related problems: managing its sizeable Shi’a population, handling the ingrained hatred spewed out by a Wahhabizing populace and managing a delicate relation with this neighbour.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution led to the increasing assertiveness of Shi’as in Pakistan which was put down with the help of Saudi-sponsored sectarian outfits. It is then that a Shi’a-targeting terror tanzim, the Sunni-Wahhabi Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP or Army of the Prophet’s Companions) was formed in Pakistan, with patronage from Saudi Arabia, even as the Afghan jihad ended in 1989.
SSP is universally known as the “Mother of all Terror Tanzims” in Pakistan. SSP and its offshoot, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), have been involved in several assassinations of Iranian diplomats within Pakistan. Pakistan is touchy about Balochistan because sensitive and important nuclear-weapon installations as well as missile and naval bases are located in that remote province. Its Shamsi airbase has been the CIA’s intelligence-gathering and drone hub. An unwilling Balochistan, which was forcibly and violently absorbed into Pakistan in 1948, has thus been precious for the latter.
In the meanwhile, the Waziri Taliban and Al Qaeda leader from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Nek Mohammed, founded the Sunni Deobandi terror group Jundullah in 2002 in Balochistan. Ironically, Nek Mohammed was also the first Pakistani to be killed by a predator drone from Balochistan’s Shamsi Base! Jundullah claims that the group fights for the rights of Sunni Muslims oppressed by Iran’s Shia government.
Jundullah has carried out several high-profile terror acts within Iran. Iran accuses CIA and ISI as sponsors of Jundullah. After a particularly horrific suicide bombing in October 2009 when Jundullah killed seven top IRGC commanders, Iran vowed to eliminate its leadership. Within a few months, it intercepted a commercial flight over the Persian Gulf that was carrying the Jundullah Emir, Abdulmalek Rigi, forced it to land in Iran and later executed him. After the Jundullah suicide bombing on February 13, 2019, of an IRGC convoy killing 27 soldiers in a manner eerily similar to the attack at Pulwama a day later, its commander vowed to punish them and said: “. . . whatever Pakistan sees will be the consequence of its support for them.”
Geographically, Balochistan is a harsh, impoverished and remote wilderness, sparsely populated where nawabs and sardars run their writ, not the federal government. The land is richly endowed with natural resources such as fossil fuel and reserves of various metals.
Across the border, Iran also has Balochis living in its Sistan province. They are Sunnis like their Pakistani counterparts and never accepted a Shi’a Iran. The Balochis on either side prefer an independent Balochistan. Gen Pervez Musharraf’s extraordinary violence to kill the iconic Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti gave impetus to the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) to intensify the ongoing secession. BLA operates conveniently from across the porous Balochistan-Iran border. Pakistan claims that it now targeted BLA in Sistan, implying a tit-for-tat counterattack. It is ironic that while Iran killed Pakistanis in Koh, Pakistan killed Pakistanis in Sistan!
There are two aspects to this developing situation, strategic and tactical. Tactically, the relationship between the two countries, always edgy, has hit a rock bottom. Pakistan recalled its ambassador from Tehran and indicated that it was unwilling to let the Iranian ambassador return to Islamabad either. Oddly, the surprise Iranian attack on Pakistan happened on the same day that their two navies were in a joint exercise in the Strait of Hormuz, the foreign minister of Iran met the Pakistani prime minister at Davos and Iran’s National Security Advisor was in Islamabad. Were they meant to soften the blow or convey a message? Or did the IRGC, which reports directly to the Iranian Supreme Leader and not the president, act independently?
At a strategic level, it raises multiple questions. Iran’s home-grown missile, drone and space programmes are more advanced than Pakistan’s. Though Iraq and Syria were also attacked along with Pakistan, the latter is different as it is a nuclear-weapon state. Is Iran sending a signal that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons do not deter it? Does it see space below the nuclear threshold for conventional wars and skirmishes as India has demonstrated? Is Iran sending a much larger signal regarding the maturity of its nuclear weapons programme? These must cause a deep concern for the West Asian nations.
Qatar’s proximity to Iran and its hosting of the leadership of various terror groups, already worry these nations. They had relied on Pakistan in the past to provide personal protection to the rulers and the imperial palaces. But the Saudi-Pakistan relationship has been flaky ever since the new Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, assumed office. Can they now revive?
This coordinated missile attack by Iran might unintentionally and counter-intuitively hasten Israeli-Saudi normalisation and brighten the prospects for the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, a prospect further brightened by the events in the Red Sea.
India must carefully watch the developments, even as Iran and Israel fired missiles at each other in Iraq and Syria respectively on January 20. Chinese efforts to bring together Iran and Saudi Arabia in order to diminish US influence will suffer setbacks after this Iranian aggression and China would experience the limits of its diplomacy, which was never impressive anyway. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Iranian actions in Gaza, Red Sea and the missile strikes now have put the whole Islamist bloc in ferment and churn.
—Subramanyam Sridharan writes regularly on international relations