Foreign affairs: a long-standing conflict

By Richard North - January 19, 2024

Since the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, sundry commenters have been quick to argue that this new “war zone” is yet more evidence of the Israel-Hamas conflict spreading into a wider regional conflict,

But now we have seen what appear to be tit-for-tat strikes by Iran and Pakistan on each other’s territories, we have seen a sharp uptick in the “conflagration” rhetoric.

So extreme has this become that we’re even seeing the Independent’s Mary Dejevsky asking whether we are witnessing “the opening salvos of World War 3”as she considers whether “small but distinct local skirmishes could trigger a new global conflict”.

Warming to her theme, she tells us that, for what seems like the umpteenth successive day, Europe has woken up to the news of overnight air strikes causing deaths, injuries and damage in one of many volatile regions further to the east.

These attacks, of course, are those launched by Pakistan on “a border region of Iran”, in reprisal for Iranian attacks on a “border region of Pakistan” two days previously.

Although the reported casualties were relatively small, Dejevsky nevertheless finds it hard to escape the impression of a theatre of military conflict that is inexorably growing – to the east and the south, if not yet to the north and the west.

To reinforce this thesis, she tells us to look backwards rather than forwards, to the Hamas massacres of Israelis on 7 October, and Israel’s all-out military response. This, she argues, can be seen as turning the tiny sliver of the Gaza Strip into the epicentre of a conflict that could embrace regions many hundreds of miles further afield.

She thus relays warnings that the Hamas attacks of October could be the spark that ignited a regional conflagration and that it was only a matter of time before Iran became directly involved – probably through its proxy, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon – conveying us to the threshold of the next world war.

Unmistakably, it is the involvement of Iran – supporter of Hamas as well as Hezbollah – with is the common thread in this narrative. And Dejevsky is by no means the only pundit to look to Iran as the common factor in the apparently growing regional instability, even if they reach different conclusions.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum, we have Richard Kemp in the Telegraph offering a different scenario under a headline “Iran is starting a war it knows could destroy it” with his sub-heading telling us that: “As the revolution diminishes internally, its leaders may now be prepared to commit suicide for the sake of their twisted ideological dreams”.

Mentioning US strikes recent in Iraq and Syria, which he says, “elicited no military response from Iran’s client governments there”, but striking inside Pakistan, he asserts, “was an altogether different prospect which was met by a retaliatory attack into Iranian territory”.

Asking why on earth Tehran would provoke a conflict with a nuclear state, fielding a massive, well-equipped army that could, if it wanted to, overrun the regime, Kemp’s explanation is that the Iranian strike into Pakistan was intended “to send messages of deterrence to the US and of strength to its proxies in the face of what looks like a dangerous turnaround in the ayatollahs’ fortunes”.

Across the Atlantic, Cassandra Vinograd writing for the New York Times, with contributions from Vivian Nereim, Salman Masood and Farnaz Fassihi, also explores the Iran thread, writing a long piece explaining: “Why Iran is the common link in conflicts from Gaza to Pakistan”.

As so often the sub-heading gives us the gist of the article as we are told that “Iran’s long history of building up proxy forces that fight its enemies around the region, as well as its conflicts with separatist and terrorist groups, have played into a spate of recent conflicts.

The Vinograd-led narrative would not be unfamiliar to either Dejevsky or Kemp as she explains how Iran ties together the “tensions” in Pakistan and Gaza. But only after she has explored “tensions” elsewhere do we eventually come to a tail piece, presumably guided by Vinograd’s additional contributors, which asks what Pakistan has to do with these tensions when “it’s not even in the Middle East”.

Only in this piece are we thus allowed to know that the area is a cockpit for the separatist group Jaish al-Adl, which we are told, “wants to create a homeland for the Baluch ethnic group out of parts of Iran and Pakistan”. This group, we learn, operates on both sides of the border, and “also took responsibility for the deadly attack last month on an Iranian police station”.

What has triggered the recent strikes, we learn, stems from the two countries accusing each other of not doing enough to prevent “militants” from crossing the border.

Then, we find that the Iranian strikes in Pakistan were not targeted against Pakistani assets but, rather, directed against Jaish al-Adl bases – despite civilian casualties. In turn, Pakistan’s response has been directed against “terrorist hide-outs inside Iran”.

What is not made clear with any degree of sufficiency – in the NYT or elsewhere – is that both strikes took place in territories which formerly comprised the independent Khanate of Baluchistan (spelling varies), parts of which were annexed respectively by Iran and Pakistan, with a third tranche taken by Afghanistan.

Baluchistan itself is an ancient territory with a long history. Its peoples comprise a unique ethno-linguistic group, entirely distinct from its neighbours and many of the ethnic group regard themselves as living under occupation.

The Sistan province which formed the western region of Baluchistan – and is the area in which the Pakistani strike took place – was annexed by what was then Persia in 1871, with the complicity of the British Raj for less than noble reasons.

A formal demarcation was imposed in 1896 – with the territory to the east of the line controlled by the British who had occupied the region and treated it as part of the Indian state.

With British encouragement, the northern part of the country was occupied by the Kabul government, leaving only a rump, then known as the Khanate of Baluchistan, which was recognised as an independent state with the status of a British protectorate.

Baluchi opposition to this enforced division was immediate and sustained, directed mainly against the Persians and British, with the Baluchi tribes in what became southern Helmand left largely to their own devices – a sparsely inhabited and almost entirely ungoverned region, even to this day.

The fate of Baluchistan took a further lurch for the worse in 1948 and Indian independence, when the British – in an egregious breach of faith – ceded the entire area of Baluchistan under their control, including the independent Khanate (Kalat), to the newly formed state of Pakistan, triggering the creation of a resistance movement that, in its various iterations, is still in place.

The forceful integration of Kalat into Pakistan, it is said, sowed the seeds of discontent and resistance among the Baluchi people. Many Baluchi nationalists viewed the annexation as a betrayal of their autonomy and an infringement upon their cultural identity.

Their leader in 1948 was Prince Abdul Karim, the brother of Khan of Kalat, in 1948, but this first insurgency was suppressed by the Pakistani army and Prince Karim was arrested. Another uprising was erupted in 1958, again in 1962, and once more in the early 70s. But the Pakistan state managed to suppress the resistance.

Since the late 19th Century, therefore, there have been resistance groups operating in the territories but, over the ensuing years there have been periodic surges of violence, not only in Pakistan but in the now Iranian-governed territory against what is considered (with considerable justice) a hostile and oppressive regime, with religious overtones.

However, in such a remote and obscure area, which many would have trouble locating on a map, it was never going to be the case that this continued (but essentially contained) instability was going to be noticed by the outside world, until, of course, the post 9/11 US invasion and subsequent insurgency, when Baluchi affairs became part of the bigger picture, and were more widely reported.

The situation was reported in an admirable piece in the RFE website on 20 April 2006, two years into a new surge of violence directed specifically against Pakistan. RFE followed up with another piece, this one focused on Iran as well as Pakistan, with the highly descriptive title: “The Baluchi Minority’s ‘Forgotten Conflict’”.

As an indication of the tenor of the piece, it told us that Baluchi leaders claimed to be fighting for autonomy and control over their people’s abundant natural resources, but Islamabad regarded them as revolutionaries bankrolled by regional arch-rival India. Years of armed insurrection. RFE said, have killed hundreds of Baluchi militants, Pakistani troops, and civilians.

I was even writing about the issue in October 2009 and more often in EU Referendum, especially of Indian and Chinese influence in the region.  To this day, though, the resistance continues, flaring up recently in Pakistan, where protests have been brutally supressed, and while the NYT says that Pakistan and Iran have had mostly cordial relations, these internal frictions are spilling across the border – as they have been doing for over a century.

Those frictions, the NYT concedes, have little to do with Iran’s other regional conflicts. The only difference is that Iran’s decision to strike inside Pakistan has the potential to damage its relationship with its neighbour.

There are, though, complicated reasons why this should have been the case, not least as Baluchi resistance in Iran, against the increasingly oppressive state, has also intensified of late – perhaps capitalising on the larger regional instability.

Rightly, the NYT opines that, at a time when the region is already on edge, a miscalculation could be especially dangerous. But it is wholly wrong to interpret the long-standing resistance movement in occupied Baluchistan as an extension of the Middle East conflict.