Thursday October 22, 2009

Terrorism spreads more easily than it can be stopped

MIDWEEK By BUNN NAGARA

SUNDAY’S suicide bombing in the Iranian city of Sarbaz poses a larger threat than even the 42 fatalities that included five leaders of the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

It happened in the long-volatile but also controllable Sunni-majority province of Sistan-Baluchistan, near Shi’ite-majority Iran’s border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The escalation in violence, for which the Jundallah (Soldiers of God) Sunni militants claimed responsibility on Monday, has been blamed on collaboration between US, British and Pakistani intelligence services.

Not insignificantly, the bombing occurred just before a meeting for Sunni-Shi’ite unity was about to begin. Iran sees the attack as aimed against Muslim unity, threatening to destabilise the region with sectarian warfare.

The United States, Britain and Pakistan have officially condemned the attack, with Britain strongly denying involvement. However, Iranian authorities say they have evidence implicating all three countries’ secret services.

Some Western countries would not mind at all if radical Islamists were split, instead of concentrating their ire on Western powers. Already fissures are becoming evident between Iran and Pakistan over the incident, at a time when Islamabad is trying to please the West after taking so much in funds supposedly for anti-terrorism projects.

Iranian officials also say that Sunday’s bombing involved Sunni al-Qaeda and Taliban elements.

For Western interests to retrain the sights of these militants in sectarian mode onto Iran, given intractable issues like Teheran’s contentious nuclear programme, would come as something of a godsend to them.

Iran this week told Pakistan that the perpetrators of the bomb attack were hiding in Pakistan, along with their al-Qaeda and Taliban allies. Teheran wants Islamabad to hand them over without delay.

Pakistan is getting crowded, particularly in its far-flung corners, as home to these indigenous and foreign militant groups. Allowing any escalation can only make an already bad situation much worse.

Jundallah is said to be fighting on behalf of Iran’s Baluchi minority, besides complaints of persecution by Iran’s Shi’ite authorities. Their Baluchi separatist allies based in Pakistan have gone further in fighting Islamabad for independence.

A degree of Pakistan-based Baluchi support for Jundallah is well established, as is Pakistani support for Sunni radicals in Afghanistan. The question is whether this has now extended to providing logistical and other assistance for Jundallah’s terror campaign in Iran, following an earlier bomb attack on a Shi’ite mosque in May.

The United States has also used Taliban and al-Qaeda elements before, deploying them to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence as conduit. If anything in Iran’s claims today rings true, terrorist acts could escalate throughout a region that includes India.

An Iranian parliamentarian this week demanded that Iran’s anti-terror forces penetrate Pakistani territory to hunt for Jundallah there. The call is likely to appeal to many Iranians with a growing predisposition to a siege outlook.

A likely argument is that if US forces can operate similarly in Pakistan, as they already do despite official complaints from Islamabad, Iran is at least as entitled to do so since it is directly threatened by terrorist groups in the border regions. How Pakistan responds is as pivotal as any reaction from within Iran.

The latest escalation in terror violence may or may not affect the outcome of talks in Vienna between Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programme. But it does give Iran new leverage, particularly when two of the other six countries have been implicated in the attack.

After the first day of talks on Monday, which depend on Iran’s agreement to send most of its uranium abroad for enrichment, nothing substantive had been achieved. A valuable lesson here is that all parties have a stake in successful negotiations and therefore cannot afford conflicting ulterior motives.

If more lessons are to be drawn from past experience for the Sarbaz bombing, distant Western powers should not meddle in political violence that can seriously backfire despite their distance.

Not only can the perpetrators be unpredictable and act beyond any country’s control, but the violence they create can spread rapidly across borders through a region.

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