Stepped up US military posture in the Gulf threatens Indian hopes for Iran’s Chabahar port
By James M. Dorsey
The arrival of the USS
John C. Stennis aircraft carrier group in the Gulf to deter Iran
from further testing ballistic missiles is likely to dampen Indian hopes that
the Trump administration’s exemption of the port of Chabahar from sanctions
against the Islamic republic would help it tighten economic relations with
Central Asia and further regional integration.
The group’s presence in the Gulf, the first by a US aircraft
carrier in eight months, came amid mounting tension between the United States
and Iran following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015
international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program and the imposition
of harsh sanctions against the Islamic republic. It raised the spectre of a potential
military conflagration.
The deployment for a period of two months coincided with a suicide
attack on a Revolutionary Guards headquarters in Chabahar that
killed two people and wounded 40 others.
Saudi and Iranian media reported that Ansar
al-Furqan, a shadowy Iranian Sunni jihadi group that Iran claims is supported
by the kingdom as well as the United States and Israel, had claimed
responsibility for the attack.
Saudi pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat asserted that the
attack “reflects
the anger harboured by the (city’s Baloch) minority against the government.”
The paper said the Iranian government had expelled thousands of Baloch families
from Chabahar and replaced them with Persians in a bid to change its
demography. It asserted that Iran was granting nationality to Afghan Shiites
who had fought in Syria and Iraq and was moving them to Chabahar.
The paper went on to say that “anti-regime Baloch movements
have recently intensified their operations against Tehran in an attempt to deter
it from carrying out its plan to expel and marginalize the Baloch from their
ancestral regions.”
Saudi Arabia, a staunch supporter of the US’s confrontational
approach towards Iran, has pumped large
amounts of money into militant, ultraconservative Sunni Muslim anti-Shiite and
anti-Iranian religious seminaries along the border between the
Pakistani province of Balochistan and the Iranian province of Sistan and
Baluchistan that is home to Chabahar, according to militants.
The funding was designed to create the building blocks for a
potential covert effort to destabilize Iran by stirring unrest among its ethnic
minorities.
The deployment was, according to US officials in response to
Iran’s test-firing of a ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple
warheads. The US sanctions are in part designed to force Iran to drop its
development of ballistic missiles. Iranian officials insist the missiles
program is defensive
in nature.
“We are accumulating
risk of escalation in the region if we fail to restore deterrence,”
said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The spectre of increased military tension in the Gulf with
the arrival of the aircraft carrier group and of potentially Saudi and
US-backed political violence in Iran, and a troubling security situation in
Afghanistan threatened to diminish the impact of Washington’s granting Indian
investment in Chabahar an exemption from its economic sanctions against Iran.
Indian and Iranian officials fear that the United States’
stepped up military posture and heightened tensions could undermine their
efforts to turn Chabahar, which sits at the top of the Arabian Sea, into a hub
for trade between India and Central Asia rendering the US waiver worthless.
The officials have their hopes pinned on efforts to engineer
a peace process in Afghanistan. US
special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad alongside representatives of the UAE, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan met this week with the Taliban. The talks are
intended to negotiate an end to Afghanistan’s 17-year old war.
An Afghan government delegation, in what diplomats saw as a
sign of progress, hovered in the corridors but did not take part in the meeting
because of the Taliban’s insistence that it will only talk to the United
States. Talks with the Taliban have so far stalled because of the group’s
insistence on a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from
Afghanistan.
US officials said the aircraft carrier group, beyond seeking
to deter Iran, would also support the US war effort in Afghanistan where the
United States has ramped up airstrikes in an effort to press the Taliban into
peace talks.
The talks were an opportunity, particularly for Saudi
Arabia, whose utility as an ally is being questioned by the US Congress in the
wake of the October 2 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul, and Pakistan, which the United States accuses of supporting
the Taliban, to demonstrate their utility.
US President Donald J. Trump
asked Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan in a letter earlier this month to
help bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.
While Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have an interest in using
their close ties to the Taliban to help forge an end to the Afghan war, its not
immediately clear that they want to see reduced tensions facilitate the
emergence of Chabahar as an Indian-backed hub.
A Saudi think tank, the Arabian Gulf Centre for Iranian
Studies (AGCIS) renamed the International Institute of Iranian Studies that is
believed to be backed by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, argued in a study last
year that Chabahar posed “a direct threat to the Arab Gulf states” that called
for “immediate counter measures.”
Written by Mohammed Hassan Husseinbor, identified as an
Iranian political researcher, the study warned that Chabahar posed a threat
because it would enable Iran to increase greater market share in India for its
oil exports at the expense of Saudi Arabia, raise foreign investment in the
Islamic republic, increase government revenues, and allow Iran to project power
in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
Noting the vast expanses of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province,
Mr. Husseinbor went on to say that “it would be a formidable challenge, if not
impossible, for the Iranian government to protect such long distances and
secure Chabahar in the face of widespread Baluch opposition, particularly if
this opposition is supported by Iran’s regional adversaries and world powers.”
Similarly, Pakistan is heavily invested in Gwadar, the
Chinese-backed port in Balochistan that is a crown jewel of the US$45 billion
plus China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a pillar of the People’s
Republic’s Belt and Road initiative. Gwadar is a mere 70 kilometres up the
coast from Chabahar.
"Pakistan sees India as an existential threat and the
idea of India being in any way present on Pakistan's western flank in Afghanistan
will always raise alarm bells in Islamabad," said South Asia scholar
Michael Kugelman.
If the arrival of the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier
group in the Gulf heralds heightened tension, Pakistan may have less reason to
worry.
Dr.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture,
and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast.
James is the author of The Turbulent World
of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored
volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and
the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting
Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa
and just published China
and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
Nice, informative, and logical. One can conclude that ultimately whole drama is being staged to encircle Iran.
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