Iran election results pose challenge for Pakistan

By William Maley - The Friday Times - Vol XI, No. 52, March 3-10, 2000

Iran's parliamentary elections are likely to prove a landmark in the transformation of the political system of the Islamic Republic. Ever since the election of Mohammad Khatami as President in 1997, it had been clear that winds of change were sweeping through Iranian society, reflecting the entrance into public life of a generation of post-revolutionary youth for whom the reign of the Shah was no longer even a memory. But the rout of conservatives in the Majles (parliament) poll could well presage a much more radical set of political shifts. So stunning was the reformers' victory that the conservatives will have to think very carefully before even attempting to exploit the levers of power which they still manage to control.

The political shifts in Iran have major implications not only for the social and political aspirations of the Iranian people, but for Southwest Asia more generally. The gulf between the increasingly outward-looking Shiite Khatami regime in Iran and the increasingly isolated Sunni Taliban regime in Afghanistan is extremely deep. This in turn poses challenges for Pakistan.

Iran has been touched by the Afghanistan problem for nearly as long as Pakistan, but in different ways. From the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan sought to occupy a frontline role in resisting the spread of communism, and promoted its favourites among the Afghan Mujahideen, notably the Hezb-e Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. With the failure of the Hezb to make any ground in post-communist Afghanistan, despite brutal attacks on the civilian population of Kabul, Pakistan shifted its support to the nascent Taliban movement. Iran, while it hosted nearly as many Afghan refugees as Pakistan, was limited in its ability to promote surrogates because only a minority of the Afghan population were Shia. Thus, while it prompted the coalescence into a single 'Party of Unity' (Hezb-e Wahdat) of diverse Shiite groups, its leaders knew from the beginning that Iran would never be in a position to dominate Afghanistan, but simply to assert minority rights.

The militant anti-Shiism of the Taliban, combined with the knowledge that Pakistan was giving them vital support, played a major role in poisoning relations between Islamabad and Tehran. And these reached their nadir in August 1998 when, just as the Taliban were slaughtering Shia in the suburbs of Mazar-e Sharif, a group of Sunni radicals from Pakistan invaded the Iranian Consulate in Mazar and massacred eight consular staff. As a result of these killings, Iran and the Taliban found themselves on the brink of a war, and Pakistan found itself the target of widespread anger as the result of the behaviour of its unruly clients.

At the time, it was the Iranian conservatives who were the keenest to adopt a military solution to the Taliban problem. The consequent militarisation of Iranian domestic politics would have put President Khatami's reform agenda on ice for an indefinite period. It was for this very reason that Iranian reformers were keen to avoid a war with the Taliban, and supported the diplomatic endeavours of the UN Special Envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to prevent a war from occurring. But to conclude that the electoral triumph of the reformers points to a likely thaw in relations with the Taliban is altogether premature.

President Khatami is pursuing a reform policy with a number of important dimensions. At the most fundamentally political level, he is moving to wrest control of the instrumentalities of the state from the hands of ultra-conservatives, with a view to reinventing the entire character of Iran's Islamic revolution. At a social level, he is moving to provide a secure foundation for these institutional reforms by empowering a new generation in an 'Islamic civil society' in which individuals increasingly interact in organisations and networks which enjoy high levels of autonomy from the command structures of the state. This involves a major change in state-society relations, even if both remain suffused by an Islamic spirit. To complement these developments, he is also moving to establish normal relations between Iran and the wider world, starting by the promotion of 'people-to-people' diplomacy. The end-point of this process, although of course it cannot yet be expressed in these terms, is the normalisation of relations with the United States.

And since 1998, there has been a massive shift in the position of the United States towards the Taliban. In the very month in which Iran's consular staff were murdered, large numbers of American citizens were killed in the bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, allegedly at the instigation of Osama Bin Laden, who financed the Taliban drive against Kabul in September 1996 and continues to enjoy Taliban hospitality. This led to Washington's imposition of unilateral sanctions against the Taliban in July 1999, and to the imposition of further sanctions against the Taliban by the UN Security Council four months later. Every bizarre eccentricity on the part of the Taliban serves simply to emphasise the relative moderation of the agenda which President Khatami is advancing, something which Iranian reformers obviously relish. In the circumstances, Iran has nothing to gain by seeking to improve its relations with the Taliban, and potentially much to lose.

For Pakistan, this poses a difficult choice. In the long run, good relations with Tehran are potentially of much greater value than good relations with Kandahar. Yet the latter, to which key circles in Pakistan seem almost obsessively committed, largely preclude the former. But Pakistan faces a further problem. Washington's stated distaste for coups, its fear of 'Islamic fundamentalism', and its exasperation at the Kashmir crisis of 1999 all mean that its patience with Islamabad has worn thin. Up to now, Pakistan has been able to count on US antagonism towards Iran as a source of leverage in Washington, providing space for its own regional machinations. But as the parliamentary elections make clear, Iran is no longer the Iran of twenty years ago. Islamabad will need to tread with care if it is not to be the next pariah state.

Dr William Maley is Associate Professor of Politics, University College, University of New South Wales, Australia. His most recent monograph is "The Foreign Policy of the Taliban" (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2000).