Just when you thought things in that part of the world couldn’t get any more complicated . . . Jundallah claims responsibility for last week’s Pishin Bombing, which killed 42 people, including several Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers. Iran blames the UK and U.S. for supporting Jundallah. Which maybe is, you know, not entirely implausible, all things considered . . . So, apart from the liberalizing opposition led by Mir-Hussein Mousavi, it appears the Iranian regime has a whole other set of opponents . . . yawn . . .
But here’s the kicker: Jundallah is not only a Sunni insurgency against Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy, it is also an ethnic Balochi insurgency against Persian rule. The Balochs are a people who, like the Kurds, missed out on the waves of nationalism that gave so many ethnocultural nations their own nation-states in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and, like the Kurds, apparently resent that. Balochs are present in southeastern Iran . . . and in southwestern Pakistan, where they are represented by the Balochistan Liberation Front and the Balochistan Liberation Army (fucking splitters . . .) – see this map.
So . . . whom (if anybody) should the U.S. be supporting, here? Some will say any enemy of the Iranian government should be our friend. But, if we support the Balochi nationalists in Iran, that only encourages the Balochi nationalists in Pakistan – which we’re trying so desperately to keep as an ally, if only because our troops have to fly over Pakistani airspace to get to Afghanistan.
We’re already supporting Jundallah and similar groups, though obviously not officially. Pakistan really really don’t want us interfering in energy-important Balochistan (and many of their elite think we are and are greatly opposed to us being involved) and our supporting Iranian insurgent groups helps us keep pressure on the Iranian regime. But we can’t be doing it publicly, after all that would make us a state sponsor of suicide-bombing terrorism, something only other countries do.
I don’t see that the world got anymore complicated as a result of this. Baloch nationalism is not new and neither is Baloch separatism, or Baloch terrorism. They all go hand in hand and are a big part of why the Afghanistan project is a pointless clusterfuck.
There’s no question that we support anti-regime Iranian groups. We’ve publicly supported an anti-Iranian regime terrorist group for decades, we’ve covertly supported separatist movements, insurgent groups and similar in Iran since the revolution and this support has been amped up ever since we invaded Iraq and especially since Bush realised the extent of Iranian control in Iraq. Seymour Hersh probably mentioned it in an article somewhere but he also claimed it was just a matter of time till the Bush dministration attacked Iran, he’s not really credible.
And I daresay you just made that up. How many ridiculous thread did you open on this subject, all of them wrong, and yet you still cling to this idea that it was only politics that prevented Bush from invading Iran. Give it up, BG. You don’t need to make up shit to prove that Bush was a disaster of a president.
By 2005 even Bush had realised Iran had him over a barrel and any attack was impossible. There were a few people like Bolton who were pressing for action but nobody who counted was.
