Explaining the long-standing tensions between Iran and Pakistan

The Iranian drone and missile strike into Pakistani Baluchistan that took place earlier this week has resurfaced tensions that have complicated relations between the two states since the ayatollahs came to power in 1979. In particular, the Iranians have mistrusted Sunni-dominated Pakistan’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s rival for leadership of the Muslim world. Iran has also resented Islamabad’s support of the Taliban, which persecuted Afghanistan’s Shiite minority when it took power. Indeed, when Iran almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 after the Taliban killed a number of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif, Pakistan mobilized its own forces to support the Taliban. 

For its part, Pakistan has harbored suspicions about Iran’s cordial ties with its archenemy India. Islamabad has also resented Tehran’s efforts to politicize the country’s Shiite minority. Shiites constitute somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of Pakistan’s population. With the country often racked by instability, Islamabad cannot tolerate external meddling in its highly fractious politics. 

Crossborder terrorism emanating from both Iran and Pakistan has further complicated relations. Operating from their bases in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, the Jaish-al Adl and Jundullah militant groups have conducted numerous strikes against Iranian police and soldiers in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan. Iran executed the Jaish al-Adl’s leader in 2010, which further energized the group’s terrorist activities. 

Iran has been home to the Baluch Liberation Army, which has fought the Pakistan Army for decades. Tehran has done very little to restrain the group. 

This week’s Iranian drone and missile strike, which resulted in the death of two Pakistani children and the wounding of three others, infuriated the Pakistani public as much as it angered the government. But the attack, which took place in the town of Panjgur in Baluchistan on the Pakistani-Iranian border, reflected Tehran’s growing frustration with Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on its police and soldiers. 

Five Iranian border guards were killed in a terrorist attack last May in Zahedan, Sistan-Baluchestan’s provincial capital. Two months later, four policemen were killed while on patrol.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency claimed that its strike targeted and demolished “two key strongholds of the Jaysh al-Dhulm (Jaish al-Adl) terrorist group in Pakistan.” But in addition to the children killed, according to Pakistani reports, one of the Iranian missiles hit and partially damaged a mosque, injuring an further unspecified number of people. 

The Pakistanis were also furious that the Iranian attack took place shortly after Pakistan’s caretaker Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar had met Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on the sidelines of the Davos World Economic Forum. The timing seemed to underscore Iranian duplicity. 

Islamabad characterized the attack as a violation of its sovereignty and ominously warned that “the responsibility for the consequences will lie squarely with Iran.” Pakistan did not specify what those “consequences” might be. 

They soon became clear, however. Two days after the Iranian attack, the Pakistani Air Force employed what the military described as “killer drones, rockets, loitering munitions and standoff weapons” to attack militant facilities in Iran in what it termed Operation Marg Bar Sarmachar (“Death to Insurgents”). Nine people are reported to have been killed in the Pakistani strike.

The timing of the Iranian attack is puzzling. Tehran has ramped up its indirect confrontation with the United States, both via the Yemeni Houthis and its proxies in Iraq and Syria. This hardly seems like the time to ignite a major crisis with its nuclear-armed neighbor. 

The rift between the two countries underscores the importance of ensuring that Iran does not obtain a nuclear-weapons capability. If Tehran without nuclear capability is sufficiently brazen to launch an attack on Pakistani territory, imagine how much more aggressive it would be if it too belonged to the nuclear club. 

Washington tends to focus on the implications of an Iranian nuclear weapons program for security in West Asia, notably Israel. The implications are no less serious for the stability of South Asia. A nuclear Iran bordering nuclear Pakistan and allied to nuclear India could trigger a crisis of massive proportions. Iran’s nuclear program is forging ahead; somehow it must be stopped. 

For the moment, Iran is still not a nuclear power, nor at present is Washington involved in the increasingly tense relationship between Iran and Pakistan.

Yet America could benefit from the crisis. The Pakistani reaction could signal to Tehran that it has finally overreached. The ruling mullahs may therefore conclude that in also supporting the Houthis and Iraqi and Syrian proxies in their ongoing attacks on American forces, they have, at last, bitten off more than even they can chew. 

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.