Very interesting but not all that surprising to know that Iranian intelligence has such a hold in Balochistan. Our very own ISI is too busy flirting with the Taliban and political parties to notice anything amiss. Though I think a revolt is perhaps not likely to happen, there will be some major shia-sunni violence and protests if Iran is attacked.
Pakistan fears revolt if U.S. hits Iran
America called ‘mother of all evils’ in Baluchistan; Tehran fans flames
By Kathy Gannon
Associated Press
Associated Press photos
Goods from neighboring Iran are loaded on vehicles from the Pakistan market at Pakistani border town of Taftan in February. The long Pakistan-Iran border is wide open to smugglers, despite Pakistani officials’ insistence to the contrary.
A Pakistani loader carries bottles of Iranian soft drinks smuggled from Iran at the Pakistani border town of Taftan. Most Iranian goods available in Pakistan are smuggled through Taftan.
Iranian-smuggled gasoline is available for sale on road side shops in Dalbandin on the way to Iranian border in Pakistan.
Pakistani Shiite leader Allama Hajji Ghorband Ali Tawassuly, center, arrives at a mosque under tight security in Quetta, Pakistan. Tawassuly calls the United States “the mother of all evils.”
QUETTA, Pakistan – The look and rhetoric are pure Iran. On the wall hangs a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the robed and turbaned speaker is a powerful Shiite Muslim leader.
America? “The mother of all evils,” says Ghorband Ali Tawassuly, sitting beneath the late Iranian revolutionary’s picture.
What if America attacks Iran? “God forbid,” he replies. And if Iran’s leader sends an order to Tawassuly and his men to rise up? “We will obey it.”
This is not Iran but Pakistan, specifically its rugged, violence-wracked province of Baluchistan, where discontent with the central government 900 miles away in Islamabad feeds a long-running guerrilla war that some fear could get a lot worse if the United States should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Tawassuly, who lives in a high-gated home in Quetta, Baluchistan’s dusty capital, is the leader of Tehrik-e-Jaffria, which claims to represent Pakistan’s 25-percent Shiite Muslim minority and was outlawed by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf three years ago.
He’s not alone in warning of an explosive response to any attack on Iran.
In Islamabad, retired army chief of staff Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg says: “If Iran is attacked it won’t be like Afghanistan. Here in Pakistan there will be a revolt. It will be very different this time around. Overnight there will be 50,000 more jihadis created.”
Iran, which has a 545-mile border with Baluchistan, is fanning the insurgency with money and radio propaganda to keep Musharraf’s government preoccupied and deny the United States a base from which to prod and possibly attack Iran, say experts in Islamabad and residents of the Montana-sized province of 6.5 million people.
**“In Baluchistan now, everyone is active including the Iranians,” says Tanvir Ahmed, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to Iran between 1987 and 1989. “The Iranians have kept the lines open to the big sardars (tribal leaders), and even though they are not particularly fond of them they have supported them. They have a tacit understanding that their brand of Baluch nationalism will be kept to their side of the border. Tehran is keeping a finger in every pie.”
Those fingers were evident when an Associated Press reporter visited the border town of Taftan.
According to Barakat Ali, a security officer, it took only an hour for phone calls to start coming from Tehran asking “Who is the American asking questions? Why was she there?”
The Iranian government has intelligence agents inside Pakistan and among the traders operating at the border, Ali said. “Their intelligence is very good.”**
At the government-funded Islamabad Policy Research Institute, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema says Iran, along with longtime enemy India, are the “foreign hands” the government claims are firing up insurgents in Baluchistan.
“We are Iran’s strategic backyard,” he says. “They care what happens here.”
U.S. intentions suspect
Suspicion of American intentions runs high in Baluchistan.
Iran also has a Baluch province, and the United States has an eye on it, says Mohammed Sasool, deputy secretary general of the Baluch National Movement who lives on the border with Iran.
“We think that the Americans want to use our land against Iran and to train Iranian Baluch to use them against Iran,” he said.
“The Baluch in Iran are deprived. They are among the poorest and the government in Tehran is like a dictatorship and the Americans are thinking to incite the Baluch in Iran to use them against Tehran. America, step by step, is trying to put pressure on Iran,” Sasool said.
Baluchistan also has a long border with Afghanistan, and during the 2001 Afghanistan invasion, the United States used the airport at Dalbandin to give its forces logistical support. The airport, 170 miles from Iranian territory, is still closed to civilian air traffic.
The long Pakistan-Iran border is wide open to smugglers, despite Pakistani officials’ insistence to the contrary. Men and boys, doubled over by the loads on their backs, pass through the checkpoints unchallenged and untaxed. Contraband Iranian gasoline outstrips the official Pakistani supply, selling at less than half the official price of about $3.80 a gallon.
Drugs, guns and people are also smuggled across this border.
Complex relationship
Beyond everyday commerce, legal or illegal, Pakistan’s relationship with Iran is complex and often contradictory. On the one hand, Beg and Ahmed both talk about Iranian efforts to acquire Pakistani nuclear weapons technology. On the other hand, they say, many in the Pakistani military have never forgiven Iran for opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan when it was allied with Pakistan.
“They are very skeptical of Iran,” Ahmed said.
S.M. Rahman, secretary general of FRIENDS, Beg’s privately run think tank, says: “Even though the relations between Iran and Pakistan are seemingly cordial, beneath the surface there is a mistrust.”
“The thinking in Iran is that Pakistan is too much a lackey of the West. … yet they can’t afford to ignore Pakistan,” Rahman said.
One big reason is natural gas. It is one of the forces stoking the internal Baluchistan insurgency. Baluch gas fills more than 40 percent of Pakistan’s needs but the royalties paid to Baluchistan are low and have barely risen since they were set in 1952, the year the gas field was discovered. The sardars want a royalty hike.
Gas is also a key to the future relationship with Tehran.
Iran is pushing to build a 1,730-mile, $4.6 billion pipeline from its oil fields at Assaluya to Pakistan and India, and is facing U.S. resistance because Washington doesn’t want its two South Asian allies to be dependent on Iranian energy.
It’s part of a bigger shift by Iran, eastward and away from Europe’s oil markets, said Dr. Hadi Semati, public policy scholar at the U.S.-based Woodrow Wilson Center on leave from Tehran University.
“Iran is looking to the east in general in its policy, that is China, India,” he said, “and in that direction Pakistan is crucial.”
Allied with the United States but desperate for energy, former ambassador Ahmed said, “Pakistan really is caught between a rock and a hard place. Pakistan keeps hoping for some miracle to happen.”