Where Iran is different from Pakistan

Indian Punchline

The US president Barack Obama has announced that all American troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by end-2011 as per the status of forces agreement negotiated by the George W. Bush administration. Obama made it sound as if he took a statesman-like decision he made, as if he is keeping his 2008 electoral pledge. But the reality, as Tony Karon of Time magazine points out in a factual chronicle of events, the US forces are virtually being kicked out from Iraq. Obama tried his level best to get Baghdad somehow allow some US contingents to stay back in Iraq on the pretext of “training” the Iraqi forces. But Iraqi opinion overwhelmingly rebuffed the US pleas.
On the contrary, Obama is meeting with remarkable success in getting Kabul to accept long-term military presence in Afghanistan.
The deal negotiated by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton in Islamabad on Friday on the one hand accords primacy to Pakistan in an Afghan settlement, while on the other hand it takes on board Pakistan’s insistence on the political accommodation of the Haqqani group. At the same time, Pakistan is acquiescing with the long-term US/NATO military presence in Afghanistan. Clinton said in Islamabad that “we [US] will still have a presence in Afghanistan for many years to come.”
Of course, the Iraqi leadership of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is much more nationalistic than Hamid Karzai. He is also better placed to withstand US pressure, whereas, Karzai is barely surviving and is beholden to US backing. The main difference, however, has been the preponderant influence of Iran on the Shi’ite groups who form the ruling elite in Baghdad. Tehran has categorically refused to play ball with Obama’s design to keep a long-term US military presence in Iraq and, conceivably, did all it could to frustrate the US game plan to perpetuate the occupation of Iraq. And it has succeeded, as Obama’s ‘announcement’ shows.

In Afghanistan, on the contrary, Pakistan is going to prevail upon the Taliban not to make an issue of the US military bases. That is the least it could do for the US in return for the deal Clinton stuck. What matters most for Pakistan is that its “strategic assets” are catapulted into power in Afghanistan. The US presence in Afghanistan is something that may even suit Pakistan so long as Washington accepts Pakistan’s primacy in Afghanistan. Arguably, Pakistan may even benefit from the US presence in terms of continued American engagement with the region. Pakistan factors in that the US’s ‘New Silk Road’ project ensures a key role for it in the American regional strategies for decades to come.
In comparison, Iran’s approach was to passively cooperate with the US to ’stabilise’ Iraq and once that objective was achieved, it began working for the expulsion of the Americans by the Iraqis. Iran is not harbouring illusions of dominating Iraq. It settles for a level playing field where it is confident that Baghdad will always accord the pride of place to friendship with Tehran. Pakistan, on the contrary, has done everything possible to subvert the US policies so that Afghanistan remained weak and in a state of acute instability - and thereby creating the conditions for the projection of power into that country. Pakistan won’t settle merely for a level playing field in Kabul. It will push for a regime in Kabul that it can dominate.
The ideal state of affairs for Pakistan would be if there is a Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the US remains a stakeholder. Pakistan tried hard to get such an arrangement worked out in the late 1990s but failed. To my mind, it is now an achievable objective.