Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Pakistan, Again

The Asia Times describes US pressure on Pakistan's President Musharraf to get tough on the Taliban -- and to to aid in the covert campaign against Iran. The goal, according to the Asia Times, may be to break up Iran.


The main point is that US covert operations from Pakistani soil directed against eastern Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province have burst into public view. The administration of President George W Bush has earmarked US$100 million for bringing about "regime change" in Iran. But in the implementation of this state policy, Washington has chosen not to count on the sizable Iranian expatriate community living in the US and Europe. The Iranian exiles have virtually no credibility within Iran. Washington knows that propaganda apart, Iranian revolution enjoys a social base. ...

Edward Luttwak, consultant to the US National Security Council, the White House chief of staff and the Pentagon, recently wrote, "Viewed from the inside, Iran is hardly the formidable power that some see from the outside. The natural outcome of ... widening ethnic divisions ... is the breakup of Iran.

Commentary

Any connection with this Foxnews video report that suddenly, the trail of Osama Bin Laden, once thought cold, has warmed up?

6 Comments:

Blogger Pierre said...

Counterinsurgency

It is comforting to think that we
"might" actually be hindering Iran from achieving its goals...but I dont think its realistic.

3/06/2007 07:29:00 PM  
Blogger Pyrthroes said...

Just a query: Would "breaking up" Iran revert this quite large country to a melange of former satrapies, or would such fragmentation entail a whole new set of "Germanies"?

If not based on former political boundaries, would ethnic or other enclaves have sufficient cultural/linguistic/doctrinal identities to be other than convenient fictions?

One, two, many Caliphates-- Wretchard for Grand Mogul!

3/06/2007 07:31:00 PM  
Blogger Pierre said...

US Helicopter shot down…lucky shot or inside job? LATEST UPDATES FOX NEWS

Course its illustrative to ponder where Saudi Arabia is actually the center of all evil.

3/06/2007 07:31:00 PM  
Blogger Fat Man said...

Thank God for my history file. I found the ethnic map of Iran I saw a couple of days ago.
It is here.

The ethnic groups most likely to split off -- Kurds, Azeris (turks who also live in the national homeland of Azerbaijan), Arabs, and Balochs (tribal people who also live in south-western Pakistan) all live around the edges of Iran.

The Arabs, who are shia, may be the most strategicly located because therr is oil under their land (the portion of Iran adjacent to Basra).

The Kurds and the Azeris live in the northwestern corner of Iran, and would probably be just as happy to bid the Persians goodbye. But their loss to Iran would probably not be strategic. The lands occupied by the Balochs in southeastern Iran are pretty desolate and are probably not strategic either.

3/06/2007 09:26:00 PM  
Blogger Elijah said...

The Asia Times has touched on this theme before...

Iraq’s sectarian bloodshed is “Made in the USA” say Erik Leaver and Raed Jarrar. Writing in ...Asia Times they say, “Iraq never had a history of sectarian conflicts. U.S. policy choices provided a perfect road map for starting one.” The authors propose the policy choices appear to have been calculated, and deliberate.

Pepe Escobar writing in ...Asia Times says, “Pentagon financing of these myriad [Iraqi] militias and the active involvement of Allawi in all these operations suggest that the Pentagon itself is destabilizing the country it is supposed to control. Destination: civil war.“

A similar theme was put forth by Ralph Peters in Armed Forces Journal - Blood borders:
How a better Middle East would look

It is an interesting perspective -

...The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

...As for those who refuse to "think the unthinkable," declaring that boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).

Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history...Ethnic cleansing works.

....Iran - a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's Afghanistan — a region with a historical and linguistic affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab Shia State.

3/06/2007 09:50:00 PM  
Blogger Elijah said...

Bandar Abbas, popular city

- Ralph Peters, June 2006:

with the most difficult question being whether or not it should keep the port of ...Bandar Abbas... or surrender it to the Arab Shia State.

- Kenneth R. Timmerman, March 1, 2006:

The kill zones run from the low-lying coast just to the east of ...Bandar Abbas...Iran's main port that sits in the bottleneck of the Strait of Hormuz, to the ports of Jask and Shah Bahar on the Indian Ocean, beyond the Strait.

Iran's naval strategists believe the U.S. will attempt to land ground forces to the east of ...Bandar Abbas.

- Retired Colonel Andy Finlayson, 12-16-06:

I think it was 1979, General Jim Maddis was a captain in the Marine Corps. And he did a study on how Iran could be brought to its knees, simply by capturing
...Bandar Abbas, and closing the Straits of Hormuz, because all of their foreign reserves, all their money, their entire economy is the result of oil exports. And if you shut off oil exports from Iran, you can really bring them to their knees in about six months. Now you’ll have all kinds of people telling you oh, you can’t do that, that’ll be a shock to the world economy, the Western Europeans will howl over that. But that will definitely work, because they know that their survival, political survival, is based on the support of their people. And their people get all their services and all of their money from oil revenues. And if that’s denied them, they are going to be in very, very serious trouble. They’re very vulnerable on that point.

- DEBKAfile, October 30, 2006;
US-Led Military Thrust Focuses Heavily on Broad Naval Deployment

3/06/2007 11:04:00 PM  

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