The Iran War has now entered its second month, and there is no end in sight. Ostensibly, Pakistan is trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement between two of the three warring parties. The likelihood of the third party, Israel, joining the conversation is nil. As of this writing, representatives of the US and Iran have yet to show up in Islamabad. Instead, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia showed up to lay the groundwork for a negotiated settlement. Pakistan’s prime minister told the media that he had a good talk with Iran’s president, whom he called his brother.
If a peaceful settlement is not arrived at, would Pakistan intervene militarily in the conflict with Iran, its immediate neighbour in the west?
Pakistan has signed a defence pact with Saudi Arabia, which is experiencing drone attacks from Iran, as are several other Arab Gulf countries. Many Pakistanis work in the Arab Gulf countries and are living in a state of fear. At home, Pakistanis are being hurt significantly by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. LNG supplies from Qatar have stopped coming. Prices of crude oil have risen by 40-50% at various points during the war. This is having a significant effect on the economy of Pakistan. Drastic rationing measures are being imposed, as discussed in a prior column.
The US, which had initially put a five day pause on bombarding Iran’s power plants, has extended the pause to 6 April, Easter Monday, presumably to allow negotiations to proceed, possibly resulting in a ceasefire. But a new war has broken out. When the US presented a 15-point plan, Iran countered it with a 5-point plan.
With US Marines deploying to the region and peace plans stalling, the prospect of foreign boots on the ground already looms over the conflict
In the meantime, US Marines and Airborne troops are being deployed to the region, signalling a possible interest in putting the proverbial “boots on the ground,” perhaps to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main port for exporting oil.
For Pakistan, the situation will become worse if the war lasts for more than a couple of months and may become intolerable if it lasts longer than that.
Pakistan’s top leaders, both civilian and military, are right now in the good books of the US administration, much more so than they have been in a couple of decades. The Chief of Defence Staff and the Prime Minister have bonded closely with the US president, ever since they nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize and since they joined the Board of Peace for Gaza.
For nearly four weeks now, the US, in conjunction with Israel, has been hitting Iran very hard on multiple fronts. In the process, it has wiped out almost the entire top leadership of Iran. But Iran has not surrendered, let alone surrendered unconditionally, as demanded by the US. Nor has there been any public uprising on the streets of Tehran or Isfahan, despite the surge of anti-regime protests that were taking place on those very streets before the war began.
Given its past histories in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US does not want to deploy ground forces in the Iran War, but it has come to realise that the war cannot be won through air power alone, a point that Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago made as soon as the war started.
Can the US, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, cajole Pakistan politically and financially into using its ground forces to invade Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province and end Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz?
This joint article was triggered by a recent article that Julian wrote in which he argued that Pakistan could easily open the Strait of Hormuz and restore the free flow of oil, liquefied natural gas, and fertiliser to the world. Iran’s blockade has affected the global economy, but the biggest impact has been on the economies of neighbouring Asian economies.
Julian is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The two of us co-authored a paper in the Journal of Conflict, Security and Development in 2002, “Pakistan: the political economy of militarism.” But on this topic, we have somewhat different viewpoints, as explained below.
In Julian’s view, 3 divisions and 3 brigades, constituting half of the units of V Corps based near Hyderabad, could secure Bandar Abbas against two Iranian brigades within ten days, as detailed in the piece. Pakistan’s overwhelming advantages in fixed and rotary wing airpower, artillery, drone and counter-drone warfare, armour, and the largely flat terrain, make intervention relatively easy, even without US or Saudi or GCC air cover.
In Ahmad’s view, Pakistan cannot attack Iran. It is fighting terrorism at home and fighting a war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. In other words, its military is fully occupied with active combat duties at home and on the western border. And while the eastern border is quiet, one never knows when tensions might flare up with Pakistan’s bigger and long-term rival, India.
Pakistan’s economy is not in the best of shape either. It has been stuck in the doldrums for years. International debt continues to pile up. The fiscal deficit and the deficit in the current account continue to plague the financial accounts. Poverty, a chronic problem, is widespread, along with illiteracy, another chronic problem. Political unrest lingers on, since the most popular politician, the former prime minister Imran Khan, remains in jail.
These internal problems need attention. And then comes the diplomatic question -- why would it want to attack Iran, a Muslim country with whom it has long ties?
And that is followed by the military question. In ground battles, Pakistan has failed to prevail against India. It does not have a great track record of winning wars, such as during the war of September 1965 over Kashmir, which Pakistan has coveted since its founding in August 1947, continues to be a disputed territory. I wrote an extensive critique covering several of its wars.
Several others have also documented Pakistan’s military failures, including Brian Cloughley, Christine Fair, Shuja Nawaz, and Aqil Shah.
There is little evidence that it will prevail militarily over Iran, even if it musters the political will to invade Iran, and even if the campaign is funded by the US and the GCC countries. It will be fighting an enemy that will unleash drones on it, along with guerilla fighters. The warfare will not be conventional but asymmetric.
It is not just the Shia population in Pakistan which would resent the attack. So would millions of Sunnis. This is not a sectarian issue. Most people in Pakistan have no admiration for Israel and regard its actions in Gaza as a war crime. They also know that Israel coerced the US into attacking Iran, a country which did not pose a military threat to the US. The invasion of Pakistan will stir a revolt not just in Balochistan, which borders Iran but also in the KPK to the north, and perhaps also in Sindh and Punjab.
However, there is another option that may work, but even that is not guaranteed. Pakistan could look the other way as US ground troops land in Pakistan, perhaps at the port of Gwadar, and then proceed to invade Iran from Baluchistan.
Julian has a different viewpoint. Firstly, since the end of the Cold War, the numerical strength of European and US armies, most of which is to be found in the infantry divisions has shrunk enormously. It cannot put too many “boots on the ground.”
Asian democracies never had large armies designed for expeditionary operations. Western countries no longer afford to have a large reserve army, unlike what they had deployed in Germany during the Cold War. It is not possible to mount a 1991-style operation like Desert Storm against Iraq. While the US has a sizable force of Marines that could seize the Kharg Island in the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian coast, they lack the numbers to be able to resist a mass Iranian mobilisation.
Deploying a Corps-sized unit from Pakistan will have the political costs cited above by Ahmad, both within Pakistan and regionally. A much better option, which would also appeal to countries in Europe and Asia, would be for Pakistan to deploy a garrison on the Straits of Hormuz. This would be much better than deploying Indian troops there, since they may never leave.
Giving India control of the Straits would cement its Indian Ocean and even global hegemony and represent a menace to the global order. New Delhi enjoys particularly good relations with Tehran, which would make such a move suspect in any event. Also, the Iranian ports of Chabahar and Konark have been cited as smuggling points for weapons to the Baluch tribal bandits, and interdiction of which would ameliorate governance in that province.
Secondly, the Israeli-US bombing campaign was designed to rupture Iran as a functioning state and not instigate liberalising regime change. In that context, a Pakistani garrison in Iran’s Baluchistan would be a guardian force preserving the integrity of Iran, not dismembering it. Iran and Pakistan share territorial interests that will remain in place long after this crisis is past.
Thirdly, Pakistan’s willingness to safeguard the passage of oil will significantly enhance its prestige and visibility to European and Asian democracies, the principal customers of Persian Gulf oil, and to China, its close ally and protector, and to much of the developing world in East Africa, which are of geopolitical value to Islamabad. The US is a net oil exporter, so any damage it inflicts on Persian Gulf oil is to its obvious advantage. The influence of Tel Aviv on America's middle eastern foreign policy means that at some point Pakistan will inevitably end up in the US crosshairs. Thus, establishing itself as an indispensable ally of the rest of the world’s democracies should be Islamabad’s priority.
Finally, once Pakistan is seen as acting on behalf of the Western and Asian democracies and of China, it will increase the receptiveness of the IMF to Pakistan and grant it free trade access to the European Union. It will also reduce Pakistan’s exposure to retaliatory efforts by the US against the BRICs and may potentially open up European arms exports to Islamabad. Pakistan’s manoeuvre may also pre-empt an American seizure of the Straits with its dire consequences for states opposed to Israel’s regional policies.
Of course, too many factors are at work now. No outcome is guaranteed. Only time will tell whether Pakistan will deploy troops towards Iran. Wars lie in the domain of uncertainty.