Pakistan caught in the Middle

Pakistani General Raheel Sharif walked into a hornet’s nest when he stepped off a private jet in Riyadh two weeks ago to take command of a Saudi-led, 41-nation military alliance. Things have gone from bad to worse since.

General Sharif had barely landed when Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman dashed the Pakistani’s hopes to include Iran in the alliance that nominally was created to fight terrorism rather than confront Iran.

The general’s hopes were designed to balance Pakistan’s close alliance with Saudi Arabia with the fact that it shares a volatile border with Iran and is home to the world’s second largest Shiite Muslim community. General Sharif’s ambition had already been rendered Mission Impossible before he landed with Saudi Arabia charging that Iran constitutes the world’s foremost terrorist threat.

In a recent interview with the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting television network, Prince Mohammed, who also serves as the kingdom’s defense minister, has toughened Saudi Arabia’s stance. Prince Mohammed appeared in line with statements by a senior US military official to hold out the possibility of exploiting aspirations of ethnic minorities in Iran to weaken its Islamic regime.

In doing so, Prince Mohammed and General Joseph L. Voltel, head of US Central Command, seemed to raise the specter of increased violence in Baluchistan, a volatile, once independent region that straddles both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border, as well as in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, the Islamic republic’s oil-rich region that is home to Iranians of Arab descent.

Ethnic and sectarian proxy wars could embroil rivals China and India in the Saudi-Iranian dispute. The deep-sea port of Gwadar in Baluchistan is a lynchpin of China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, and a mere 70 kilometers from the Indian-backed port of Chabahar in Iran, viewed by Saudi Arabia as a potential threat to one of the most important sea routes facilitating the flow of oil from the Gulf to Asia.