The China-India Link to Iran-Pakistan Air Strikes

Pakistan’s Gwadar Port is in construction on Feb. 12, 2013. The Chinese regime has 40-year rights to manage the port. (Behram Baloch/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

Separatist groups from Baloch areas on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border have been attacked recently by Iranian and Pakistani missiles. But Iran did not hit Baloch groups in Iran, and Pakistan did not hit Baloch groups in Pakistan, as one might expect.

Rather, Iran hit the Pakistani Balochs, with Pakistan hitting the Iranian Balochs in “retaliation.” Both sides accused the other of harboring terrorists. In the process, Iran reportedly killed two children and injured two others. Pakistan reportedly killed nine persons.

Pakistan’s former human rights minister, Shireen Mazari, raised an important question about the attacks. On Jan. 18, she wrote, “One of the many disturbing questions arising is why both supposedly friendly ‘brotherly’ Muslim countries, with deep historical & social ties, allowed space creation for these militant groups in each other’s territories?”

Is each capital trying to weaken the hold of the other on its most distant Baloch regions?

Ms. Mazari might also have raised China as a common denominator. Beijing has immense influence in both Tehran and Islamabad. If the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wanted to target the Baloch groups, including the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), why didn’t it just ask Tehran to target the Iranian groups and Islamabad to target the Pakistani groups? It probably did and got less than it wanted.

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The difficulty for Beijing, as often with support for terror groups and drug cartels, is that a third actor could be pulling Baloch strings. Pakistan alleges that the actor is India, which is a geopolitical adversary of both Pakistan and China. Some Balochs target China’s business and cultural operations in Pakistan, including attacks on its infrastructure projects and one attack in 2022 on a Confucius Institute in Karachi.

However, the Pakistani Baloch groups that engage in cross-border raids could also have Pakistani or Indian sponsors, and the Iranian groups could have Iranian or Indian sponsors. If the region’s complicated history is any indicator, that could be because Pakistan and Iran are also in geopolitical competition with each other, including over Afghanistan. If they sponsored Baloch groups against each other, those sponsors would likely be in these countries’ military forces or intelligence agencies, which might explain why faraway Beijing’s influence is not powerful enough to defeat the groups.

Baloch separatism could thus have provided the opportunity for a complex four-way fight for power and influence. The CCP, for its part, could be trying to hit back at the Balochs by encouraging additional security or intelligence elements in Iran and Pakistan to attack each others’ Baloch groups, if they will not target their own.

Similar dynamics can be found in Afghanistan, where Pakistan, Iran, China, and India compete for influence. Foreigners paying militants in the region as proxies to defeat their geopolitical adversaries is not unprecedented. The United States paid the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s to attack the Soviets. Pakistani military and intelligence entities paid the Afghan Taliban to attack U.S. and allied forces during the most recent war there. Pakistan complains that the Afghan Taliban supports the Pakistani Taliban.

The CCP has a lot of influence in Iran and Pakistan. China exports $8.3 billion to Iran annually and imports $5.9 billion. China’s imports from Iran make Beijing especially influential there, as Iran’s sanctioned goods have few other outlets. Iran exports $2.5 billion of ethylene polymers annually to China—its biggest bilateral export. Ethylene polymers are a byproduct of oil refining and used for the Chinese plastics that find their way into finished products consumed in the United States and European Union, for example.

China’s influence in Pakistan is well known, especially for its $62 billion investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). China exports $23.5 billion to Pakistan annually, and Pakistan exports $3.3 billion to China.

India is a smaller trade partner of Iran and Pakistan. It exports $1.3 billion to Iran and $535 million to Pakistan. Its imports from these countries are even smaller. So should we expect Beijing to have more influence in Tehran and Islamabad than New Delhi? Perhaps this gives it a reason to support Baloch militants.

Accusations and counter-accusations of funding terrorism and separatism in the Baloch regions of Pakistan and Iran are difficult to substantiate. But the increasing instability in the Middle East and Central Asia is a global risk, not least because the competitors in the Baloch regions, Pakistan, Iran, and China, are already nuclear powers, and Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon.

The United States and allied governments should declassify more information for the public about any state-sponsored terrorism in the region, especially by two of our most dangerous adversaries: Iran and China.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.