There is always a slip between the cup and the lip when it comes to Pakistan’s reality. What is publicly postured is seldom so. Creation of Bangladesh in 1971 was amongst the most powerful symbols of an unsustainable rationale for the only nation to be created in the name of religion. Bangladesh personified the deep complexities, irrepressible passions and identities that lurk below the simplistic and templatized framework of coreligiosity.

It is the same canvas of diversities and societal imperatives that make the superficiality of the ‘land of the pure’ at variance with neighbouring Afghanistan and Iran (let alone a proudly secular India). Even though Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan are all part of the larger Ummah or Islamic Community, they are all individually predicated on a certain commonality of prides that could be fiercely sectarian (e.g., Iran which imagines itself as the leader of Shiite sensibilities), cultural/ethnic/linguistic divergences (e.g., Bangladesh or ‘Bengali country’), or even historical/tribal codes (e.g., Afghanistan which has remained fiercely independent for eons).

All of them valourise their unique identities in equal if not higher measure than just co-religiosity of Islam, as posited by the ‘Idea of Pakistan’. Try as hard as the Pakistanis might to offer platitudinous terms like ‘brotherly Islamic relations’ with Kabul and Tehran, all sides remain extremely wary of this wishy-washy outreach. If it is the contentious nonrecognition of the invisible Durand Line for the Afghans and the underlying dream of ‘Pakhtoonistan’ ~ it is the tense habitation of 2 million Sunni Baluch in the Iranian region of Sistan and Baluchestan, on the IranPakistan border (with perceived ‘bases’ in Pakistan), that riles the two nations against Pakistan.

That Pakistan has harboured Machiavellian intent of control via ‘Strategic Depth’ in Afghanistan is also something that offends the proud Afghans. So unpalatable has been the Pakistani reality that its own creation, the Afghan Taliban, has turned rogue and attacks its progenitor. Today, the fact is that it is no longer the Line-ofControl or LoC along the Indo-Pak realm that is accounting for Pakistani blood, but the tense Durand Line (Pak-Af realm) that is witnessing incessant ‘terror’ attacks which are bleeding Pakistan. Crossborder attacks by elements based in Afghanistan are the definitive norm.

Iran indeed was the first country to recognise the independent state of Pakistan and they were on the same side during the Cold War. But the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did add a sectarian angularity that compounded issues for Pakistan given the strained, polarised and effectively ‘minority’ status afforded to Shias living in Pakistan. The fact that both Iran and even Pakistan were battling Baluch insurgents in their respective areas added a bit of commonality. But fissures emerged when Shia-Sunni tensions played out violently in an increasingly Wahhabised Pakistan. Iran in its adopted role as the global safeguard of Shiite causes, could no longer be oblivious.

This fundamental bone of contention made both sides choose different options in the killing battlefield of Afghanistan in the 1990s ~ while Pakistan backed the Sunni Taliban, the Iranians backed the coalition of minorities from the Northern Alliance (which is where the Hazara Shias of Afghanistan had reposed preference). Lastly, the emergence of Pakistan as the global ‘nursery’ of terrorism of various hues, made it even more hard to ignore or tolerate. The fact that the Pakistani State either patronized or at least tolerated sectarian groups like Laskar-eJhangvi (LeJ), Ahle Sunnah Wald Jamat (ASWJ) aka Sipha-e-Sahaba (SSP), Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) or even Jundallah (‘Soldiers of God’) made the Iranians recoil and prop up their own Shiite rival groups like Sipah-e-Muhammad; thus an uneasy and unsaid bilateral reality to the one postulated by officials in Islamabad ensued.

Today, Iran accuses Pakistan of ‘not doing enough’, be it for protecting the Shia interests in Pakistan or for taking action against Iran-facing Sunni Baluch groups like Jaishul Adl (‘Army of Justice’). This group formed from the Junallah fount has been responsible for the most deadly attacks on Iranian Police and Military. It led to the unprecedented crossborder strikes between Iran and Pakistan in January. While both sides had subsequently played down the incident, the gloves were off and it was only a matter of time before such incidents were to return to wound the Pak-Iran borders, like in the routine case of Pak-Af’s Durand Line. Some days ago, Iran yet again reported a cross-border attack into Pakistan killing a Jaishul Adl ‘commander’ inside Pakistani territory.

Implicit in Iran taking law into its own hand, puncturing Pakistan’s territorial integrity, is either complicity or willful tolerance of forces inimical to Iran within Pakistan. The hugely embarrassed Pakistanis who have had to face ‘surgical strikes’ from India, increasingly so from Afghanistan, and now for the second time from Iran were quick to issue a weakly worded statement: “Social media and some foreign media are spreading false propaganda that Iranian forces have killed a commander of Jaishul Adl on Pakistani soil. No such incident happened on Pakistani soil”.

The Iranians were equally quick and cutting in their insistent confirmation that they did indeed kill a Baluch insurgent, Esmaeil Shahbakhs, inside Pakistan. The war of words continued and deteriorated in accusatory tones with Pakistan accusing Iran of deliberately conjuring a false narrative to clear its purported embarrassment following Pakistan Air Force’s retaliatory attack under ‘Operation Marg Bar Sarmchar’. Ironically, both the sides are supposedly fighting against a common enemy (i.e., Baluch insurgents), except that a crossborder attack by one nation on the other suggests optics of emasculation and humiliation for the Armed Forces of the territorially ‘violated’ nation. It is the same sentiment that abounded when the United States had ‘taken out’ terrorist Osama Bin Laden from a compound in Abbottabad, under the nose of the Pakistani military.

There are obviously credible murmurs that the US attack would have been aligned privately with the Pakistanis (or a section thereof ) as there is no way that US Seals could have flown in and conducted an operation for nearly 40 minutes and managed to fly back without the Pakistanis reacting to the same. But whatever be the truth, even that was tantamount to a ‘surgical strike’ ~ just like the other strikes conducted by neighbouring India, Afghanistan or now even by Iran.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)