The US’ secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, did not hesitate in stating that America and Israel will sow “death and destruction from the sky, all day long”, in Iran. Over the last week, since the start of this illegal war driven by hubris, Hegseth has kept his word and more. Enabled in secrecy by American and Israeli intelligence agencies, Iranian-Kurdish militias have launched a ground incursion in north-west Iran, and the Islamic regime’s stockpile of missiles has shrunk dramatically.
From a military operational perspective, the US-Israeli attack is a success. From a political strategic vantage, it is heading towards objective failure. Though weakened, the Iranian regime is far from imminent collapse. If Hamas could withstand Israeli bombing and ground operations for two years in the small, isolated Gaza strip, the Iranian regime has a lot more bandwidth to maneuver and resist. But it is also true that an ethnic, sectarian civil war is likely to balkanise Iran.
Iran’s destruction will be a strategic shock to the Indian subcontinent.
Not because this war is hindering maritime trade flows, disrupting oil and gas supplies, risking Indian lives in the Gulf, and triggering protests by Shia communities across South and West Asia. Nor necessarily because the theater of operations has expanded into the wider Indian Ocean region since the downing of the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena just off Sri Lanka. All these aspects are true and troubling; This is already a global conflict with no clear ends.
There is a more proximate cause for concern for New Delhi, though: The segues between an Iranian civil war and the “open war” between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the worst inter-State fighting the two sides have experienced since 1960-61; Afghanistan lost that bout to Pakistan, which effectively used airstrikes to trigger the political ouster of then Afghan prime minister (PM) Daud Khan.
From clashes in the borderlands, Kabul’s sponsorship of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and Baloch militants, coupled with cross-border drone probes, to unimpeded Pakistani airstrikes across Afghanistan, the “open war” has clarified two aspects. One, the Afghan Taliban’s prowess as an insurgent movement has not translated into conventional power. Its inheritance of high-grade American equipment cannot fill Kabul’s deficit in airpower and air defense. In an inter-State war with Pakistan, Kabul doesn’t even have the luxury of time, and the muscular rhetoric of Afghan resilience is struggling in the face of unceasing aerial bombardment.
This is creating contradictory pressures in Afghanistan. There is a rallying around the flag effect that has reduced the salience of tension between the Sirajuddin Haqqani-led faction in Kabul and the followers of Kandahar-based supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada. But it has started to dawn in both these camps that Afghanistan is woefully isolated, that Pakistan has no reason to stop the bombing, and that there are no third-party interlocutors in the Gulf available to seriously negotiate a ceasefire. To top it all, Afghanistan’s trade networks through Iran and links with the Tehran regime lay asunder.
The Afghans are, in effect, fighting the only neighbor their economy depends on — this is unsustainable. Whether Pakistan goes for leadership decapitation and regime change in Kabul or restricts its aims to degrading the Taliban’s capabilities, desperation is about to mount in Afghanistan. The most damage Kabul can inflict on Pakistan is to let the TTP execute mass casualty attacks. Far from deterring Islamabad, such attacks will escalate this “open war”.
From this perspective, Iran’s devastation could not be more ill-timed for the Afghan Taliban and be a blessing in disguise for Pakistan. Several thousand Afghan fighters belonging to the previous Islamic Republic took shelter in Iran after 2021. Sooner than later, these fighters and their leaders will seek to return home to relative safety. Pakistan has already been engaging with the National Resistance Front and other anti-Taliban outfits in and around Afghanistan. If it sees an opportunity to fund and arm these Iran-based Afghan exiles, there is a risk of the Afghan civil war re-erupting. Even if the Taliban regime does not collapse, for Pakistan, chaos in Kabul is preferable to a united Afghan Taliban that shelters anti-Pakistan outfits.
Internal conflict in Afghanistan and civil war in Iran will put Pakistan back in the driver’s seat as a frontline partner of the US. When seen from this vantage, Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif’s cringeworthy praise for the American president and Field Marshal Asim Munir’s growing assertiveness start to make strategic sense. It also brings us to the material and psychological calculus at play in Islamabad. There has long been an argument that if Pakistan is busy fighting fires on its western front, it is likely to focus less on its eastern front. Given the evolving character of “non-contact” warfare between India and Pakistan, as witnessed last May, such territorial logic does not hold as much ground today as it did in the past.
Moreover, accurately or not, Pakistan’s armed forces are a lot more confident about their capabilities in relation to India than they were before Operation Sindoor. Far from being humbled by Pakistan’s crises, Munir has become emboldened by them. The psychological impact of supposedly “winning” several battles since he took charge is a lot more potent than Munir’s apparent piety has ever been. It is his continual tactical successes, more than the strength of his Islam, that makes Munir dangerous and prone to overplaying his hand.
The US and Israel’s war on Iran has unleashed powerful centrifugal pressures far beyond just geo-economic supply-side shocks. India and Pakistan are dangerously close to another bout of fighting, and the next round of conflict is unlikely to stop in 88 hours. China’s siding with Pakistan, India’s domestic political realities, Munir’s overconfidence while blaming India for all of Pakistan’s troubles, and Iran’s unprecedented destruction risks rocking the subcontinent’s fragile calm. Whether State sanctioned or not, all it will take is one successful terrorist attack on Indian soil for such escalation to occur.
India may think that it has chosen a “side” in the US-Israel war on Iran, but it must be under no illusion that this “side” has not yet chosen India. Beyond playing peacemaker, the US is unlikely to come to India’s defense given Pakistan’s growing value for the White House in the context of the Iran war, and Munir’s expectations on Afghanistan in return. Neither will Israel or the Gulf States intervene to India’s satisfaction. New Delhi is arming for war, but it also needs to plan for peace. For this, it needs to urgently put in place guardrails with Pakistan to ensure that the next round of conflict — a question of when, not if — does not spark a wider Asian war.
Avinash Paliwal teaches at SOAS, University of London and is the author of India’s Near East: A New History. The views expressed are personal
