Daily Times

It’s been a bit of a mixed bag recently for Donald Trump. He spent the latter half of the week boo-hooing the failure of the US military to quick fix it to victory in Afghanistan. And to top it all off Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was sworn into office for a second-term. It gets worse. A North Korean delegation was right there in Tehran for the swearing-in ceremony. Which sort of puts in the shade the fresh wave of economic sanctions that the apprentice-president had imposed on those pesky Iranians.

Nevertheless, the Iranian side used the opportunity to do its own bit of talking tough, perhaps performing for the hawks in Washington, with threats of appropriate response and vowing never to accept isolation.

Given that the gloves are now fully off, Pakistan would do well to keep its own geo-political interests in mind. And that means not ganging up with Riyadh against Tehran. For this is not Pakistan’s battle and it will not end well.

There is a double standard at play here. It goes back to 2003. When North Korea left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Three years later it tested its nuclear capability. None of the tough talk in response to this provocation materialised into concrete action of any sort. During this same period, Iraq was invaded illegally and the regime there toppled on the basis of faulty intelligence of ‘suspected’ chemical weapons. At the time, certain dissenters on the US think tank circuit felt that the Bush administration knew this to be a smoking gun. And that this is precisely why it went in. The warmongering against Iran has been going on for more than a decade. Thus Pakistan should keep in mind that this relentless American belligerence may well suggest the absence of an active weapons programme and that war is not as yet off the table.

But above and beyond all this Pakistan must think of its own security and energy needs, the two being linked. Its focus, in short, must be on CPEC and the investment opportunities for the region. Additionally, there is the issue of a shared border with Iran and of sectarian unrest in this country. More recently, Tehran has accused Pakistan of harbouring anti-Iran state elements launching cross-border attacks from this side. If Pakistan has the stomach for it — it should try and reassure Iran that the Islamic Alliance is not an anti-Shia military bloc. Though Islamabad might be hard pushed to even convince itself of this.

Being unable or unwilling to end the stalemate on both its eastern and western borders doesn’t mean that Pakistan should give up on trying its best to secure peaceful borders elsewhere. Indeed, this would in itself be a goodwill gesture to both India and Afghanistan that we can be a partner for peace, if given a patient push in the right direction. And last but not least — such moves would send a strong signal to all the unquiet Americans that the era of US regional hegemony is on the wane. If this were to happen, we could pat ourselves on the back — quietly, of course — for giving poor Donald Trump even worse weeks ahead.  *

Published in Daily Times, August 6^th 2017.