A Pakistan-Iran War?

Asia Times Online today has a guest column by one Raja Karthikeya arguing in full seriousness that war between Iran and Pakistan is possible. He writes,

Far from the headlines of the mainstream media, the border between Iran and Pakistan is heating up to epic proportions. In recent months, cross-border raids by a Balochistan-based terrorist group, Jundullah, targeting Iranian security personnel and civilians, has plunged bilateral relations to unprecedented depths...Further, a repeat of the Zahedan attack inside Iran would almost certainly bring Iran and Pakistan to the brink of war. For the Iranian regime, which is still reeling from the post-election protests, such a causus belli (with all its sectarian connotations) would also help consolidate its control on the country.

I am not an expert on the region, but Karthikeya’s argument seems very credible.

Regional chaos is a likely outcome of the across-the-board policy failure of the Bush as well as the Obama administration. The power vacuum left by this administration’s incompetence has worried me for some time; in the linked Asia Times Online essay June 29, I asked,

What will the administration do now? As all its initiatives splatter against the hard realities of the region, it will probably do less and less, turning the less appetizing aspects of the fighting over to local allies and auxiliaries who do not share its squeamishness about shedding civilian blood. That is the most dangerous outcome of all, for America is the main stabilizing force in the region. The prospect of civil wars raging simultaneously in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq is no longer improbable.

We will learn soon enough how misguided Obama has been to begin with the Arab-Palestinian issue. There are far more pressing problems, such as

1) Pan-Turkic agitation in Central Asia, specially in Western China (“East Turkistan”), about which I wrote earlier this week;

2) The Afghan civil war, which tends to become a Shi’ite-Sunni proxy war; and

3) The Balochi border problem between Pakistan and Iran. As Karthikeya observes in AToL,

The Shi’ite-Sunni sectarian divide between Pakistan and Iran, which was obvious during the Afghan civil war in which both sides ran/supported proxies (the Taliban by Pakistan and the Hazaras by Iran), persists to date and Jundullah is seen by Iran as an extension of it. 

America is the only real stabilizing force in the region, and America is becoming irrelevant. By way of contrast: Obama went to Turkey last April and talked about his respect for Muslims; Putin went to Turkey this week and came away with a pipeline agreement. After years of  American efforts to route hydrocarbons around Russian territory, Putin has persuaded the Turks to support Russia’s monopoly on natural gas shipments from Asia to Europe, in return for a promise of Russian help in building nuclear reactors in Turkey.

Russia is using a combination of carrot and stick with Turkey, whose Islamist government is seeking to project its power across Central Asia through pan-Turkic proselytization. 

There are two many possible variants to guess about outcomes at this point. But one no longer finds the interesting issues raised in American media, not even the blogs; we have to go to strange venues like Asia Times Online to find a discussion of what really concerns the region. It’s disconcerting.