Back from the brink

After an exchange of missile attacks on alleged Baloch subversive elements in each other’s territory, Pakistan and Iran have been quietly rowing back from the brink of a breakdown in the longstanding friendly relations between the two neighbouring countries.

Although both Islamabad and Tehran have longstanding complaints against each other about Baloch militants fighting their respective governments in both countries enjoying safe havens across their mutual border, Iran’s decision to strike an alleged Jaish al-Adl presence in Panjgur district in Pakistani Balochistan bordering Iran’s Seistan Baluchistan province took most observers by surprise.

Not the least amongst these was Pakistan’s military and security establishment. Although few have raised the issue in Pakistan, questions do arise about a possible vulnerability to surprise aerial attacks on Pakistan. An accompanying worry must be possible holes in the country’s air defence system.

Pakistan’s military felt compelled to retaliate for the unprovoked attack so as to send a message not only to Iran, but to all its neighbours with whom it has problems that any infringement of Pakistan’s aerial or territorial integrity would be responded to in equal measure.

Although Pakistan has a troubled relationship with Afghanistan over the presence of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) elements carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistan from Afghan soil, the real message was intended for India that any notion of such adventurism should not even be considered. It goes without saying that Pakistan-India confrontations are highly dangerous because of the nuclear weapons factor.

Given the longstanding good relations between Pakistan and Iran despite the latter being on the US-led west’s hostile radar since the 1979 revolution, why Tehran chose to include Pakistan in its list of targets (the other two, just before, being Syria and Iraq) for such attacks begs an explanation.

Jaish al-Adl is a Sunni Islamist Baloch militant group seeking greater rights for Seistan Baluchistan if not separation. It has been carrying out attacks against Iranian military and security forces targets in that province for over a decade, allegedly from bases in Pakistani Balochistan.

On December 15, 2023, it conducted an attack on a police station in Rask killing 11 police officers. On January 17, 2024, just a day after Iran’s missile attack on Pakistan, Jaish al-Adl claimed it had assassinated three Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials.

Although Iran claimed it had struck a Jaish al-Adl ‘base’ in Pakistan, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said the dead included two children, while wounding three girls. As a comparison, Pakistan’s retaliatory strike on alleged Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) ‘bases’ in Iran yielded amongst the dead three women, four children and two men.

The casualty list suggests the targets were families on either side. It could of course be assumed that the Baloch militants in both cases had their families living with them, but it does undercut Pakistan’s claim that it struck these targets because it had information of an impending ‘big terrorist’ action by the BLA and BLF.

In passing, it is not irrelevant to mention that although (since 9/11) all armed groups challenging state authority in any part of the world have been dumped in the basket of ‘terrorism’, this catch-all usage obliterates the distinction between terrorism and nationalist (and revolutionary) insurgencies.

The fact of the matter is that Iran struck out at a claimed Islamic State (IS) target in Syria and an Israeli secret service Mossad centre in Iraq in retaliation for the assassinations of its top IRGC commanders and the horrendous bomb attack in Kerman, Iran, at the commemoration of General Suleimani’s assassination.

To that extent Tehran’s actions betray some logic, since the exchanges of assassinations and missile attacks are part of the spreading regional conflict sparked by the Gaza war. But bracketing the attack on Pakistan with these retaliatory actions defies logic.

Particularly since after Pakistan’s measured response, both sides decided to come together to diplomatically defuse the crisis. Iran, besieged by the US-led west and Israel’s hostility, needs all the friends it can get in the region and beyond.

It makes little sense therefore to attack Pakistan in the same breath as Syria and Iraq, neither of which is capable at present of retaliating. But to launch against friendly, nuclear-armed Pakistan defies sense, unless it can be put down to a rush of blood by the IRGC. Be that as it may, it seems irrefutable that Tehran’s concerns about Jaish al-Adl would have been (as they now, post facto, are) better addressed through diplomacy than missile fire.

While one welcomes the turn from potential hostility to the traditional friendly ties between Pakistan and Iran after the kerfuffle of missile exchanges, one cannot but be both bewildered and amused in equal measure at the extremes of bending over backwards to justify his deserved elevation of our Balochistan’s caretaker Information Minister Jan Achakzai, which is leading one to fear for the health of his spine.

Achakzai has earlier been railing against the families of missing persons, led by women, holding a sit-in before the National Press Club, Islamabad, after marching all the way from Balochistan. Now he has enlightened us (further) regarding the ‘nexus’ between the missing persons protestors and those killed by Pakistani missiles in Iran. The thrust of his new truth is that those killed are claimed by the protestors as ‘missing’, thereby demonstrating that the whole myth of missing persons is nothing but a conspiracy to malign Pakistan, blah, blah, blah… Sometimes, in our benighted land, it is moments like this that one is left wondering whether to laugh or to cry.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024