Jundallah and relations with Iran

Daily Times

On Sunday, a suicide-bomber in the Iranian province of Sistan shockingly killed seven commanders of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard and up to 42 other people. Iran's President Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the attack was planned inside Pakistan where an anti-Iran terrorist organisation named Jundallah has been active for the past several years. The Pakistani chargé d'affaires in Tehran has been called to the Foreign Ministry in connection with what can be called the most serious terrorist incident in Iran for some years.

Despite some understanding between Iran and Pakistan over the activity of Jundallah inside Pakistan - Pakistan has been surrendering arrested anti-Iran terrorists to Tehran - regional geopolitics is bound to trigger unfriendly speculation. Needless to say, Jundallah, the Pakistan-based Iranian-Baloch terrorist organisation, has acknowledged the latest attack in Sistan. Iran says Jundallah leader Andolmalik Rigi is in Balochistan; Pakistan says he is not. Both however know that nothing can be said for certain.

The map of hostilities in the region is extremely complicated and it doesn't matter that President Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani have both condemned the attack. Baloch nationalism on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border threatens both nation-states, and solutions on both sides are complicated by the nature of the centralised states and their ideological content. The Iranian speaker of parliament has accused the United States of having instigated the attack on Iran's most powerful Revolutionary Guard. The Iranian press quotes leaders saying the United Kingdom too is involved.

Pakistan is in trouble because it had its own Jandullah operating in Karachi for the Taliban of South Waziristan till 2004. It is now quite clear that Pakistani "Jandullah" is not the "Jundallah" outfit that is attacking inside Iran, but the modus operandi of the latter borrows much from the terrorism of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. For instance, the use of suicide-bombing carries the signature of madrassa-based indoctrination even though the Sunni Baloch of Pakistan are strictly secular and take no part in killing the Shia in Balochistan.

Iran has a complex code of interpretation when it comes to explaining to its people certain developments on its eastern border. At the higher level of statesmanship, it is engaged with Pakistan on what can be called the biggest energy project of South Asia, called the Iran-Pakistan Gas Pipeline project. At the domestic political level, it looks at Pakistan as a state that favours the Taliban - at the top of the list of enemies in Tehran - and aligns with Iran's arch-enemy, the United States. This in itself gives rise to a complex imagined network of intrigue and double-dealing.

Hanging from this is the accusation that the US is funding Jundallah to create trouble in Sistan to "balance" the trouble Iran is supposedly making in Iraq. Many Pakistanis buy into this. But at the same time, Iran becomes unhappy when the US and Pakistan start thinking of "talking" to their separate Talibans. It cannot help thinking that both will somehow bring the Taliban back to power in Kabul and thus endanger the non-Pashtun population of Afghanistan as well as endanger Iran's security on its eastern border.

There is a clear break here between what the world thinks and what Iran thinks. The world thinks that the US unwittingly strengthened Iran's regional position by destroying two regimes: Saddam Hussein's in the west and the Taliban's in the east. But Tehran continues to think that the US and its allies are trying to get Iran into a challenging regional pincers movement. Unfortunately, Pakistan can hardly reassure Iran in this regard because of its declining writ of the state in Balochistan and elsewhere.

Within this extremely murky strategic thinking, Iran has acted in its own national interest. It has given shelter to "actors" from Pakistan who promised to create difficulties for the US. It has provided safe haven to runaway warlords from Afghanistan it thought could at least temporarily damage the unity of the Taliban. It is known to have "facilitated" the passage of Al Qaeda terrorists from Pakistan to Iraq in 2003, which then actually led to the massacre of the Shia there.

But in many ways, Iran promises to become as important an ally of Pakistan as China, mainly because of its role as a supplier of energy. At the same time, however, Pakistan has to retain the option of international support, including that of the Arabs - something for which Iran's current government doesn't care much. Hence a measure of tolerable bilateral tension.