Iran flexes its muscles, and Pakistan pushes back

Iran’s clerical regime has been stirring trouble in the Middle East for years, usually using armed proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. Over the last few days, it launched direct strikes inside three countries ostensibly friendly toward it — Syria, Iraq and Pakistan.

The goal might have been to project Iran’s power ahead of Iranian legislative elections, scheduled for March 1. But Pakistan’s decision to strike back has left Iranian diplomats scrambling to point out that the Islamic Republic does not intend to make an enemy of its nuclear-armed Muslim neighbor.

Iran — as self-professed champion of anti-Israel and anti-U.S. sentiment — has made significant political gains from Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and the ensuing war in Gaza, which has resulted in massive Palestinian civilian casualties. But Iran’s decision to launch missile attacks in Syria and Iraq on Jan. 15 and in Pakistan the next day was risky. It involved violating the sovereignty of countries that are not overtly hostile toward Iran.

Iran claimed it was targeting the Islamic State, which operates from parts of Syria and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, whom Iran blamed for a Jan. 3 terrorist attack in the Iranian city of Kerman. In what was described as Iran’s worst domestic attack since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, two bombs had killed 84 Iranians gathered on the fourth anniversary of the assassination by the U.S. of the Qasem Soleimani, the notorious Revolutionary Guard general.

Iran’s drone and missile attack inside Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province was meant to target Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice), a Sunni militant group that operates against Iran and is believed to have a base in Pakistan. The attack killed two children. Pakistan’s air strikes two days later targeted alleged hideouts of the Baluch Liberation Front and the Baluch Liberation Army, two separatist groups based in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan, and killed at least nine people, including six children and two women.

Pakistan’s air strikes were the first assault inside Iran by a foreign country since the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988. If Iran’s goal had been to avenge the terrorist attack in Kerman, lobbing missiles into Pakistan made little sense — and ended up inviting retaliation.

Since Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Pakistan has tried hard not to let its differences with Iran turn into conflict. For decades, both countries have faced insurgencies from their ethnic Baluch populations that straddle their 900-kilometer border. Between occasional cooperation in the fight against Baluch militants, Iran and Pakistan have also accused each other of harboring insurgents involved in attacks on each other.

There was, however, no recent provocation along the Iran-Pakistan border, and Iran has not offered a credible explanation for why it added Pakistan to the list of countries where it sought to flex its muscle. Iran’s action put Pakistan in a position where it had to hit back. Allowing the Iranian strike to go unanswered would have had consequences for the prestige of Pakistan’s armed forces, which are already facing criticism at home for political reasons. If anything, decisive action against Iran’s incursion has helped restore some of the Pakistani military’s domestic prestige.

Allowing a missile strike inside Pakistani territory by one neighbor would have set a bad precedent for Pakistan’s other neighbors, India and Afghanistan, with whom Pakistan’s relations are far from cordial. Pakistan’s decision to retaliate might also have been driven by suspicion of collusion between Iran and India, seen by Pakistan as its traditional adversary.

If Iran wanted to give a message to Pakistan to restrain Sunni Jihadi groups operating from its soil against Iran, the message has been received. Pakistan has given its own message to Iran that it will not sit back and accept violations of its sovereignty without a response. Pakistan-Iran relations have been bruised by the episode, but are unlikely to break. Neither country seems eager to escalate.

Pakistan’s pushback has shown Iran the limits of its power and its strategy of calculated chaos in the greater Middle East. After exchanging missile strikes, both sides have gone back to talking about their “brotherly” ties and will most likely reengage after a brief pause in diplomatic relations.

As Iran and Pakistan look for an off-ramp in their tensions, China has offered mediation, given its good relations with both countries. The U.S. should be wary of letting China play that role and should encourage its erstwhile ally Pakistan to manage ties with Iran without China’s help.

America has a reduced footprint in the region due to the Trump-Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan and relative American disengagement from the Middle East. China already surprised the U.S. by negotiating normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Letting China be the principal conciliator between Iran and Pakistan would further erode whatever is left of U.S. prestige in the greater Middle East.

Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., is Diplomat-in-Residence at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi and director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute.