Iran and Pakistan

Security, Diplomacy and American Influence

Alex Vatanka

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784532147
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857739155
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The respective policies of the governments of Iran and Pakistan pose serious challenges to US interests in the Middle East, Asia and beyond. These two regional powers, with a combined population of around 300 million, have been historically intertwined in various cultural, religious and political ways. Iran was the first country to recognise the emerging independent state of Pakistan in 1947 and the Shah of Iran was the first head of state to visit the new nation. While this relationship shifted following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and tensions do exist between Sunni Pakistan and Shi'i Iran, there has nevertheless been a history of cooperation between the two countries in fields that are of great strategic interest to the US: Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation and terrorism. Yet much of this history of cooperation, conflict and ongoing interactions remains unexplored. Alex Vatanka here presents the first comprehensive analysis of this long-standing and complex relationship.

CHAPTER 1

ON THE ROAD TO INDIA:
IRAN’S AND PAKISTAN’S
INTERTWINED HISTORY

The extent of Iran’s once significant standing in Pakistani society is still evident in a multitude of aspects of life in that country, ranging from language and culture to religion and even its basic expression of nationhood. Pakistan’s national anthem, ‘Qaumi Taranah’, is almost entirely written not in Urdu but in the Persian language. The anthem was officially adopted in 1954, at a time when Pakistanis were still busy establishing the basic structures of a nation state following independence from Great Britain in 1947.

In May 1949, Iran became the first United Nations member to recognize Pakistan’s independence. In March 1950, the Shah of Iran became the first foreign head of state to visit the new country, and it was for his visit that the Pakistani national anthem had been hurriedly completed. Shortly before, on 18 May 1950, the Iran–Pakistan Friendship Treaty had been signed in Iran.¹

Over the course of the next 29 years while he was Iran’s absolute ruler, the Shah, would devote considerable attention to Pakistan. Within the Pakistani political elite, the Iranian monarch found plenty of admiration for his country but also high hopes for regional collaboration and receptiveness to Tehran’s overtures. These included an acceptance of the Shah as a dependable and resourceful mediator when Pakistan faced down challenges from what it saw as two bothersome neighbours, Afghanistan and India.²

Iranian diplomatic cables from the late 1940s shed light on the extent to which newborn Pakistan looked to Iran for guidance. One dated 13 September 1947 describes a request by the Pakistani parliament for ‘a book or any papers about [the] constitutional laws of Iran’. The Iranian diplomatic transcripts show that the Pakistanis ‘wanted to prepare the correct [constitutional] laws’, and hence they looked to Tehran for advice and as a model.³

Early defining personal ties

In those early days following Pakistan’s independence, personal relations between the leaders of the two countries were also a major diplomatic factor. Iskander Ali Mirza, the first president of Pakistan, in many ways epitomized the elite-to-elite friendship that characterized ties.

Born into a prominent Bengali feudal family in then East Pakistan [now Bangladesh], Mirza belonged to the Shi‘a branch of Islam, which is the majority religion in Iran. In fact, the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Quaid-i-Azam, or Great Leader), was himself a member of Pakistan’s minority Shi‘a population – albeit of a ‘heterodox’ kind.⁴ If solely based on the sectarian background of key personalities, then the early post-independence period in Pakistan can be termed the ‘heyday’ of the country’s minority Shi‘a elite. But in those days sectarianism in Pakistani society between the majority Sunni and the minority Shi‘a Muslims was nowhere near the dividing factor that it is today.

Mirza had other ties to Iran. His second marriage was to an Iranian woman, Nahid Afghamy. Nahid had been the wife of Colonel Mehdi Afghamy, the Iranian defence attaché in Karachi.⁵ She was also the daughter of Amir Teymour Kalali, a highly respected Iranian politician who first came to prominence in the 1930s when he was elected to Iran’s national parliament.⁶ She fell in love with Mirza after meeting him in the early 1950s, and the two subsequently wed in 1954. The beautiful Nahid was the cousin of Nusrat Ispahani, who would herself later marry another future leader of Pakistan, Zulfikar Bhutto.⁷

Nusrat might have followed in the footsteps of her distant cousin by marrying into the Pakistani elite political class, but her political stature in her own right would eventually reach unprecedented heights. With her husband’s execution in 1979 at the hands of Zia ul-Haq, Nusrat would become the matriarch of the Bhutto political dynasty, which to this day plays one of the most prominent roles in Pakistani politics through its command of the Pakistan People’s Party, one of the country’s principal political movements.

The two beautiful cousins were members of an Iranian merchant community with a long history on the Indian subcontinent, including a prominent presence in those regions that later emerged to make up the state of Pakistan. Nusrat’s Kurdish–Iranian parents had migrated to Bombay from Persia, as Iran was known then, and she was born in British-controlled India on 23 March 1929. In Bombay, Nusrat’s early childhood would be passed in a city where many Iranian Shi‘a businessmen had, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, settled down and produced notable families such as the Shirazi, Namazi, Shustri, Yazdi and Ispahani. They became noted patrons of religious life there, and some scholars consider them pioneers in the growth of Shi‘ism in western India.⁸

When Hindu–Muslim communal violence erupted following the departure of the British from India in 1947, Nusrat’s father was unnerved by the death of a number of Iranian Muslim friends in Bombay. He opted to give up the family’s lucrative soap factory and subsequently resettled in Karachi, the ‘City of Lights’ and the first capital of the new Muslim-majority state of Pakistan.⁹ They thrived in their new homeland, and the Ispahanis rose to become one of Pakistan’s leading families.

The legacy of Persian conquests

The flow of ideas, people and trade between Persia and the Indian subcontinent dates back millennia. A considerable amount of this intertwined history is still readily visible in everyday life across the subcontinent. War and Persian conquest also played an important role in shaping perceptions.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s own beloved Peacock Throne was war booty from India. In the spring of 1739, the Persian Nader Shah sacked Delhi at the Battle of Karnal and looted a vast part of the treasures of the Mughal Dynasty, including the ‘fabled Peacock Throne and the Kuh-I Nur [Mountain of Light] diamond’.¹⁰ For the Iranians, Nader Shah’s swift defeat of Muhammad Shah, the Indian Mughal Emperor, became a national legend that still stands. For the peoples of the subcontinent, that momentous battle passed into the popular psyche as a moment of national humiliation.

Persia’s infatuation with the Indian subcontinent has an equally long track record. Over two centuries before Mohammad Reza Pahlavi championed the idea of an economic union of Indian Ocean rim countries, with Iran and India at its heart, Nader Shah is said to have forced a marriage between his son and the daughter of Muhammad Shah to sustain a ‘treaty of union’, which he was pressing on the Indians.¹¹

But the ‘tyrannies and cruelties of Nader Shah’ had greatly upset the Indians, and the idea of a union did not outlast the withdrawal of his army from India.¹² The gate where the Battle of Karnal took place would for centuries be known as Darvazhi-khun (Gateway of Blood), and in India the term ‘Nader Shah’ became synonymous with ‘massacre’.

While the swords of the Persian conqueror’s army were resented, India could not, over the centuries, resist Persia’s soft-power reach. In his fascinating study, Juan Cole points out that at one stage there were perhaps seven times more Persian readers in India than were in Persia itself. Cole notes that:

the centrality of the Persian language to chancery and bureaucratic practice in South Asia contributed to the creation of a large Persophone population which would transmit Iranian cultural achievements in poetry, philosophy, theology, mysticism, art, travel accounts, technology ethics, statecraft, and many other fields from one area to the other.¹³

Historically, the Persian-speaking heartland in pre-Partition India comprised the coastal regions of Sindh adjacent to the Indian Ocean running north to today’s modern Pakistani city of Multan.¹⁴ The rulers of the Mughal Empire had made Persian the official language of their court. Its use at official levels began to decline only after the British colonial power in 1843 made English the official language of its Indian colony.

Persian expatriates

Not only their ideas and influence but Iranians themselves have, through the centuries, emigrated in large numbers to the subcontinent.¹⁵ According to Cole, ‘because of the ways in which [the Muslim Iranians] could rise high in Indian Muslim courts, these Iranian migrants played a significant role in Indian political and economic life’.¹⁶

Over the last five centuries, Iranians have left Persia for the Indian subcontinent for various reasons. Some did so in order to find economic opportunities, while others sought religious freedom in India. From the early sixteenth century, when the Safavid Dynasty took power in Persia and zealously adopted and enforced Shi‘a Islam as the official faith, many Persian Sunni Muslims chose to settle in India.¹⁷

But not all Persian immigrants to India in this period were Sunnis. One prominent religious leader who settled in India was the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, a small sect of Shi‘a Islam. In 1843, after an unsuccessful rebellion against the Qajar rulers, the first Aga Khan moved from Persia to Bombay. His grandchild, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, or Aga Khan III, would in 1908 become one of the founders and the first president of the All-India Muslim League, and the movement would by 1947 ultimately establish the independent and Muslim-majority state of Pakistan.¹⁸

Persian Shi‘a immigrants in India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not only sought after as advisors but ‘played a key role, both in founding new [local] dynasties in South Asia and in encouraging the conversion of newly established regional rulers [to Shi‘ism]’.¹⁹ From Bengal in the east to Kashmir and Punjab in the west, many landed nobles on the subcontinent converted to Shi‘ism – an act emulated in many cases by the peasants who lived on the lands of their overlords.²⁰ Feudal landed Shi‘a families in Pakistan today include those of former President Asif Ali Zardari and of his deceased wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

The legacy of these conversions is evident in the estimates of the size of Shi‘a populations in India and Pakistan. In the case of India, the Shi‘a population is today estimated at some 24 million from the total Indian Muslim population of some 161 million people.²¹ In Pakistan, Shi’as are estimated to make up about 20 per cent of the population (35 million) of some 180 million people. Only in Iran can one find a larger Shi‘a population than those in India or Pakistan.²²

The historical affinities and present-day statistics reflect more than merely the religious legacy of the subcontinent’s centuries-long interaction with Persia. The Islamist regime that took over the reins of power in Tehran in 1979 has had a particular political interest in cultivating the Shi‘a communities of the subcontinent, and especially those found in Pakistan, as conduits for expanding its influence.

Ties born in the shadow of the Cold War

However, it was during the rule of the Shah of Iran, which spanned the period from 1941 to 1979, that Iran’s modern relations with Pakistan took shape. The policy legacy from this era still lives on more than three decades after the fall of the Shah. During his reign, Tehran’s top priority was to keep the Soviet threat at bay in south-west Asia. That overriding objective informed the bulk of Iranian calculations involving Pakistan for decades. On the question of Pakistan‘s future and independence, the Shah was even willing to raise the stakes in the shifting geopolitical environment of his time. He would repeatedly come to Pakistan’s rescue, but over the years his doubts about the country built up.

Islamabad’s defeat in the 1971 Indian–Pakistani war and the loss of East Pakistan (which emerged as Bangladesh) particularly alarmed the Shah, and made him acutely aware of Pakistan’s many predicaments and its colossal needs as Islamabad faced the Soviet-leaning Indians. The Shah would become gravely concerned that Pakistan could simply fall apart as a nation state, and thus weaken the anti-Soviet forces in south-west Asia.

In December 1971, as Pakistan’s military defeat at the hands of the Indians had become a certainty, the Shah proclaimed in reference to Pakistan that a ‘weak ally often turned out to be a burden’. The British, the former colonial power on the subcontinent, shared his analysis and concerns, which undoubtedly heartened the Iranian ruler who considered Western backing pivotal in keeping the rest of Pakistan from disintegrating.²³ Over the next few years, the Shah often had the fate of Pakistan as a key item on his foreign policy agenda.

In a July 1973 meeting with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at Blair House in Washington, DC, the Shah was categorical. He said he had informed the Soviet leadership about Iran’s ‘commitment to Pakistan’s security’. Kissinger was informed that the Shah had told the Indians too that ‘that an attack on Pakistan would involve Iran’, and that Iran would ‘go to Pakistan’s aid’.²⁴

Iran, the Shah said, ‘could not tolerate the [further] disintegration of Pakistan’. Meanwhile, the United States played a prominent role in his thinking on the defence of Pakistan. This led the Shah to tell Kissinger that ‘It is in the interest of Pakistan to have US moral support and Iranian physical support’, by which he meant military supplies.

As the Pakistani author Hafeez Malik has put it, the Shah had by this time ‘developed a paternalistic attitude towards Pakistan’.²⁵ But this attitude had been long in the making. From the moment that bilater...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. On the Road to India: Iran’s and Pakistan’s Intertwined History
• 2. 1947–1958: Early Hiccups, as Iran and Pakistan Both Look to the US for Protection
• 3. 1958–1965: Regional Turbulence and an Unlikely Union
• 4. 1965–1969: The Northern Tier: A Fluid Fault Line
• 5. 1969–71: Iran’s Intervention over the Pakistani Defeat of 1971
• 6. 1971–77: The Shah and Pakistan’s Reluctant Dependence
• 7. 1977–1988: Zia, the Shah and the Coming of the Ayatollah
• 8. The Arrival of the Shi‘a–Sunni Schism in Relations
• 9. 1988–2001: Geopolitical Foes, Sometime Partners
• 10. 2001-Present: Afghanistan, the Arab Challenge and Iran’s Soft Power in Pakistan
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover