What the Iran-Israel war means for Pakistan

“What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of Earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states.”

—William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Act 1; Scene 3

PROLOGUE

Following a US attack on Iran’s three nuclear sites and a series of bizarre postings on Truth Social by US President Donald Trump the next day, the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, started by the latter, has ended with a ceasefire on June 24. Questions abound, beginning with what this war was about in terms of its politico-strategic objectives, whether they have been met or the seeds of another have been sown by this one.

A few facts need to be flagged before we proceed further. The Israeli attacks, as also the US attack on Iran, were illegal under several provisions of International Law. Two, statements by the European governments and the European Union that Israel has the right to self-defence, are not only disingenuous, they are downright perfidious. Three, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under its current Director-General, the Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi, has proved to be devious, acting as a political, not a technical body, to make a case against Iran.

This is also proven by any lack of condemnation of US-Israeli actions by Grossi, who has merely shown “concern” over the attacks. All these points can be treated in detail but they are beyond the scope of this article.

We are too close to the event at this point to know granular details, but on the basis of broad constants, I intend to analyse US and Israeli actions, Israel’s long-term strategy of regime change in Iran, Pakistan’s concerns with reference to instability in Iran and Iran’s options going forward.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS TIME?

Trump started the negotiation process with Iran but also gave a 60-day deadline. Negotiations don’t work with pre-conditioned deadlines, but that’s Trump’s modus operandi. ‘You gotta do this or else.’ Sometimes it works; other times it doesn’t, as it didn’t with North Korea in his first term in office, or with Russia in this term.

Iran wanted to return to some form of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement that would (a) bring sanctions to an end, giving it economic relief while (b) keeping its enrichment programme on track and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This wasn’t acceptable to Trump. He wanted a rollback: zero enrichment. This was the sticking point on which every round made shipwreck.

Wilfully or otherwise, the policy was designed to fail. The demand, meant to have an anchoring effect, was not a negotiating point for Iran. It was a non-starter. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Article IV of the treaty is silent over whether non-nuclear weapon states can enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium, the two technologies used to produce reactor fuel as well as fissile materials used in nuclear weapons, depending on the levels of enrichment. But it does give states the inalienable right… to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. This cannot be done without mastering the enrichment process.

This is why, like other non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS), Iran interprets Article IV as inclusive of uranium enrichment and maintains that it will not give up its right to enrich under any nuclear agreement.

Iran’s enrichment red line is grounded in several factors: it wants to be treated as other non-nuclear NPT member states; two, it has an ambitious civil nuclear programme for which it needs enriched uranium (currently, it imports 20 percent of its enriched uranium from Russia’s state-run nuclear company, Rosatom); three, given its relations with the US, Iran does not trust supply from foreign sources, which can be stopped; four, it wants the capability as a lever against the US; five, while it has a 2003 fatwa [religious decree] against nuclear weapons, there’s enough evidence to suggest that it wants to have the capability to enrich uranium to weapons-grade level, which is different from actually making a bomb.

The last point is important and is key to the question of why Iran was found in violation of its NPT safeguard provisions in 2003, which led to closer scrutiny of its programme and for which reason the IAEA reported it in 2006 to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for non-compliance with its safeguards agreement.

The Security Council then passed a series of resolutions requiring Iran to cooperate with the agency and suspend certain nuclear activities, including its uranium enrichment programme. The requirement for enrichment suspension was intended to push Iran to negotiate over its nuclear programme and was superseded in 2015, when the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2231, which endorsed the nuclear deal known as the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].

Trump walked out of the deal in 2018 and applied a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. US President Joe Biden tried to get back to the JCPOA but it didn’t work because Iran demanded that the US lift sanctions as a precondition for Tehran to return to the talks.

This time too, enrichment has become the bone of contention. This is why, by most evidence, Trump okayed an Israeli attack on Iran just two days before the sixth round of talks in Muscat on June 15. The 60-day deadline ended on June 12, the same day Grossi choreographed a vote in the IAEA Board of Governors, and the Israeli attack came the next day.

After the Israeli attack, Trump came on record to say that he had given a 60-day deadline and “they [Iran] know what happened on the 61st day. Iran should now return to the table.” When pressed further, Trump said that Iran was stonewalling the process. Yet, until the Israeli attack, Trump had not spoken about Iran’s filibustering or that the sixth round had been called off because talks weren’t going anywhere.

Corollary: Trump let Israel attack Iran because he thought that decapitation and degradation would help bring Iran back to the table and make it more amenable to his original ask — no enrichment. Instead, Iran walked off, saying it won’t negotiate while being under attack.

For Israel, the nod was heaven-sent. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 30-year-old desire was fulfilled. This was the chance to pull America in and make it go all the way — not just destroying Iran’s nuclear programme but affecting regime change through a longer campaign of inflicting pain on Iran.

When Trump decided to order a hit on Iran’s facilities and became a direct belligerent, Netanyahu was ecstatic. But he misread Trump. Trump ordered the attack to end the war, not prolong it. He wasn’t thinking of a long campaign and certainly not of regime change. He was squaring off his persona of a tough guy with someone looking for peace.

This is where Israel and the US diverge. Israel wants to create chaos; the US, leaving aside the issue of double standards or the probity of its approach, wants a stable but definitively non-nuclear Iran.

WHAT NOW?

We don’t know if this war and ceasefire will fulfil Trump’s politico-strategic objective — ie Iran’s return to the table and acceptance of Trump’s opening demand: no enrichment. We will return to this when discussing Iran’s choices. From Israel’s point of view, the job remains unfinished. Israel’s politico-strategic objective is not just the destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability — assuming that can be done — but changing Iran. And changing Iran means regime change — assuming that can be done.

From Israel’s perspective, that is the only way to safeguard Israel from Iran’s forward defence policy, what Israel calls a “ring of fire” around it. Having taken care of the inner circle (Egypt, Jordan and now Lebanon and Syria) and the outer circle (Iraq and Libya), Israel’s last problem is Iran.

The war on Gaza allowed it space to degrade Hamas, Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But there’s still some distance to go and a strategic victory, from Israel’s perspective, requires finishing off Iran as currently constituted. Whether that can be done is a separate debate. But first let’s see, hypothetically, what Israel wants.

WHAT COULD HAPPEN IN IRAN?

Destroying Iran’s nuclear capability is neither here nor there. It’s not a single item that can be bombed out. It is not just the infrastructure nor just the processes of fuel cycles. It is essentially the knowledge that Iran has, knowledge that encompasses many disciplines in hard sciences. It can’t be destroyed, though it can be set back by killing scientists and engineers, through cyber attacks and by direct attack.

The real prize is regime change. Israel has made no bones about that. It would like to use ethno-linguistic fault-lines — Baloch, Kurds, Ahvazis — as also the disenchanted youth to bring down the regime, especially if Israel can deliver severe decapitating blows to it.

As multiple scholars have noted, many of Iranian origin, the regime is not popular, to put it mildly. The details of the growing resentment are many and beyond the scope of this article. Briefly, however, the regime, led by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), have managed to thwart all attempts at what historian Crane Brinton calls a “Thermidorian Reaction”, a term the academic Vali Nasr also uses in his latest book, Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History, and which essentially means a deradicalisation and the establishment of a more moderate and conservative order.

Since Iran’s second constitution in 1989, efforts by reformist presidents such as Akbar Hashmi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani to moderate the revolutionary zeal, bring in economic reforms and open to the West have been stymied by the hardliners. It wasn’t a linear process, but I make a broader point without getting into brief periods when Ali Khamanei gave some leeway to the reformists for immediate pragmatic reasons.

The essential point is that the hardliners have continued to control the state and are the deep state. Similarly, Rafsanjani’s and Khatami’s economic reforms, including privatisation, were co-opted and subverted by the IRGC, which now runs the largest business enterprises in the country and also subcontracts companies in the private sector, effectively controlling the state.

This has expanded the size of the black market economy and, according to Nasr, proliferated “networks of businesspeople, influential politicians, and institutions dominated by current and former IRGC commanders, aggravating corruption and income inequality on an unprecedented scale.” But this is not all. A highly educated but frustrated middle class that wants socio-political freedoms is another internal fault-line. This is what Israel wants to target and exploit.

Regime change, as we have seen with previous efforts in the Middle East, is a very tricky process, leading to costly failures, chaos and much bloodletting. For the purposes of this discussion, however, it could, in theory, result in two scenarios, though each of those scenarios can have many sub-scenarios: civil strife, or an orchestrated regime that’s pro-Israel and the US, essentially a return to the monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s time.

A civil strife is easier to achieve than installing a regime because disruptions are more prone to internal discord than a smooth transition to another system. Strife could also force Iran to lose any external focus. As happens in such situations, groups will fight each other — that fight could go on or it could get resolved in favour of the group that emerges as the strongest and establishes control. Or the country could become another Libya, Sudan or Myanmar. It’s just not possible to predict these trajectories, since nothing one can base one’s analysis on would remain stable. The big question? What would happen to the nuclear capability?

The second scenario — an orchestrated regime that’s pro-Israel and pro-US — can actually be two scenarios: a puppet government, such as the one the US installed in Afghanistan in 2001, or the one it has in Syria. Before such a government becomes too unpopular, which it would, Israel could goad the US into putting together a coalition, boots/inspectors on the ground to completely, physically destroy Iran’s nuclear capability.

The second possibility in this same scenario could be that, while the current regime falls, it makes way for a more nationalist government. Having gone through the shock of external aggression, they could naturally build on certain legacy capabilities.

We have seen this process before. It leads to strife, not peace and rebuilding. It also begets unintended consequences that can defeat the original objective of such reengineering, because human affairs are not an engineering problem. But strife does serve one Israeli purpose: a weak state that can be regularly attacked to degrade its military capabilities.

This was on display immediately after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham took control of Syria in December 2024. Israel mounted one of the largest air campaigns in its history to systematically target and destroy all military capability of Syria and is also in physical control of Syrian territory in the buffer zone. Something akin to that for Iran would be eminently in the interest of Israel.

RAMIFICATIONS FOR PAKISTAN

Now let’s come to what all this means for Pakistan.

For Pakistan, any disruption of the current socio-political structures in Iran through external shocks will be a troubling development. Geographic contiguity means it would create uncertainties that could increase security threats. A civil strife could spill over into Balochistan with economic and security ramifications. A pro-Israel government, if one could be installed, would mean Pakistan facing security and intelligence threats in the east (existing) and southwest (potential).

These are real concerns and cannot be dismissed lightly. Pakistan does not have the capacity to actively thwart external shocks to Iran, but it needs to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios while trying whatever it can at the diplomatic level to mitigate the situation.

This is also important because the current ceasefire does not resolve the issues that started this war or which underpin Iran’s long term politico-strategic objectives: regime survival, diminishing the US influence in the Middle East and the destruction of Israel’s military capabilities. In effect, this is a direct clash between two different visions for the Middle East: that of the US and Israel, and that of Iran.

Pakistan is only tangentially involved in this conflict but it has to study the way the geopolitical game is being played and how its second- and third-order effects could impact it. Instability in Iran would negatively affect Pakistan’s security through ethno-sectarian conflicts and complicate the delicate balance Pakistan has to maintain in its relations between the Arab/Gulf states and Iran.

The diplomatic challenge is exacerbated by Pakistan’s economic weaknesses, which necessitate its closer cooperation with the Gulf states and also with the US. Pakistan’s close relations with Turkiye and Azerbaijan, important in many respects, also require very deft handling because of Iran’s troubled relations with Turkiye, and especially Azerbaijan.

Instability on the south-western border would also result in operational overstretch for Pakistan. Balochistan is already restive. Iran losing control over its Sistan-Baluchistan region could mean ungoverned spaces for Pakistani Baloch groups fighting the state. Given Pakistan’s meagre resources, it has to find a balance between force employment on the western and south-western borders and in the east, the major threat.

Ungoverned territories around the world, especially when there is internal strife, also result in drugs and weapons smuggling, the inflow of refugees, and easy movement across the borders of militant groups. This is not peculiar to a particular area but a constant across borders where one or two or three contiguous states face internal strife and loss of central governmental control. In all such cases, sovereignty, the basic tenet of a state, is lost even as the state in physical terms remains.

This witches’ cauldron also invites hostile intelligence agencies like harmful bacteria. If there is one lesson of Israeli offensives against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, it is the high degree of intelligence tradecraft on display, both in terms of human intelligence and technical means.

It would be naïveté at its most naive for anyone to think that an unstable or fractured Iran would not invite Israeli intelligence operations or that such operations would remain confined to Iran. Given the close strategic cooperation between Israel and India, it will be a given for Israel to help India foment trouble for Pakistan in the west. In fact, it should be considered a foregone conclusion.

Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, in his 2017 book Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence, explores Iran-Pakistan relations in some detail. Iran was the first country to recognise Pakistan and the Shah of Iran was the first head of state to visit Pakistan. At one point in the 1950s, the Shah even proposed a confederation between Pakistan and Iran.

Relations have been somewhat fraught since the 1979 Islamic Revolution because of sectarian tensions and Iran’s closeness to India but, in recent years, the two sides have established mechanisms for border security, trade, counterterrorism cooperation and the management of refugees. Iran has also been distancing from India as the latter has gone into a close embrace with Israel.

IRAN’S OBJECTIVES

In the immediate context, Iran’s central objective was and remains to find reprieve. Its forward defence strategy has taken a beating and its own military capabilities have been damaged. The supposed internal cohesion of the IRGC has been badly compromised through Israeli intelligence penetration.

Given this, Iran needs to recoup. But recuperation requires peace. Iran’s standard policy was the strategy of the indirect approach, to use military theorist Liddell Hart’s term. In other words, no direct engagement with Israel. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s July 2024 assassination in Tehran put Iran in a terrible bind: if Iran confronted Israel directly, it would violate its longstanding policy; if it didn’t, it would betray weakness. A guest had been murdered on Iran’s watch in Tehran. That called for action.

The next Israeli move was worse: Hezbollah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah and multiple other militia leaders were assassinated September 2024 onwards. Iran’s hand was again forced. This time, Israel retaliated more pointedly, not just attacking but also probing Iran’s capabilities. Simultaneously, it prepared and planned for a sustained attack, something it has been planning for nearly 15 years.

Put another way, Israel got Iran exactly where it wanted Iran: escalate or show restraint. Escalation would beget more pain; restraint would not offset attacks but show weakness.

Will Iran get the peace it needs to recoup? That depends on Trump’s next move. Would he lower the opening price in any other round of talks? If not, would Iran bite? If it doesn’t, are we back to the possibility of resumption of hostilities?

These questions remain unanswered thus far but two factors are important: since the 1979 Revolution, the central concern for the regime is survival. Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes are grounded in that tenet. But now it might have to make some kind of compromise on nuclear enrichment for the regime to survive. Another issue is Iran’s economic woes. For the regime to remain stable, it needs to provide for the people. The middle class has shrunk from over 40 per cent to about 30 per cent. And this is just one data point.

In the three essentials, regime preservation, nuclear enrichment and sanctions relief, Iran will likely have to give up, at least for now, on nuclear enrichment. That will help safeguard its nuclear infrastructure, knowledge, capabilities and bring economic relief.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In the longer run, however, because the immediate often blinds us to the longer trajectory, US actions have not been lost on either Iran or many other states that already find that security will be increasingly scarce for them in the changing geopolitical climate. These states would do everything to acquire capabilities — including nuclear weapons — to ensure survival.

One repercussion would be further cracks in a cracked non-proliferation regime. Worryingly, these developments come at a time when (a) there is an increasing trust deficit among states and (b) emerging technologies and diffusion and commodification of existing technologies are increasing the prospect of conflicts.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described the state of nature as bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all]. That necessitated laws and balancing rights with duties. In the past eight decades, the US, leading the so-called ‘free world’ after WWII, developed international institutions that, despite the Cold War, even co-opted rivals through a shared acceptance of a post-war security architecture.

The threat of mutual annihilation and spread of nuclear weapons brought the bitterest rivals to work together to create a legal, coercive and normative framework against non-proliferation. There are many other examples of such cooperation. Superpowers often flouted international law provisions but legal-normative condemnation and fear of the other’s power kept them largely in check.

That architecture appears to be unravelling. While perhaps a case can be made for such unravelling, especially by those who were not the beneficiaries of that system, the fact remains that great disruptions bring great uncertainties.

Periods of transition are always fraught. And the absence of law makes the exercise of raw power even more likely. History has witnessed those periods as also attempts to bring peace to end bloodletting and chaos. This time, however, is different because our capability to generate violence has reached the point where we can destroy the planet many times over.

Normally, this should be the very reason for cooperation. But in a twist on the Greek parable, the foxes will continue to play while the big hedgehog idea, to save humans from humans, would likely just dissipate.

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider