Deepak Lal: Alarms on the western front

India can only hope and pray the US staunches nuclear threats on its (India's) Western frontiers.

India's near western neighbourhood is in turmoil. The growing threat is from the spread of political Islam. India remains vulnerable. Is there anything it can do to counter this threat? This is the subject of this column.

With President Musharraf's growing troubles, there is a real danger of the Talibanisation of Pakistan, as the respected Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid noted in a recent report in London's Daily Telegraph. The consequences of a takeover of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal by jihadists would be a nightmare for India. At a conference at Harvard some years ago I asked a former high-ranking defence official in the US government what the US would do in these circumstances. Without batting an eyelid he said it would help India take out the nuclear arsenal. But with the demonstrable failures of US intelligence in Iraq, I wonder if much hope can be placed on this. Hopefully, Indian intelligence is better and plans are in place if this nightmare was to occur. Meanwhile, there is little India can do except hope and pray that either the army and/or the secular politicians will be able to stem the Islamist tide in Pakistan. Whether the US retains any leverage in the highly volatile situation in Pakistan remains moot, as much of the jihadi support is fuelled by the US' close relations with the General.

Moreover, much of the US' attention is concentrated on the imminent prospect of Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons as a result of the proliferation activities of the Pakistani nuclear scientist A Q Khan. Lest it be thought that US worries about an Iranian bomb are confined to the current Bush administration, the positions taken by prospective leading Democratic successors to the presidency "" Barrack Obama and Hilary Clinton "" are if anything even more bellicose. Many are hoping that, just as North Korea succumbed to international pressure to eliminate its nuclear arsenal and uranium enrichment facilities, Iran will do the same. I am doubtful.

Though the Iranians claim with some justification that they need nuclear power and their nuclear programme does not aim to produce a bomb, there are a number of reasons why this is disingenuous. One of the continuing elements in the Iranian political psyche is their desire to resurrect the ancient Persian empire. The late Shah, who began Iran's nuclear programme, sought to link his dynasty with those of Cyrus and Darius by his extravaganza in Persepolis in the late 1960s. The current Islamic republic has the added desire of creating a Shia empire to overcome the ascendancy of the Sunni Arabs. The Iraq war with the emergence of a Shia dominated state serves this purpose. Finally, the Iranians' distrust of foreign powers, in particular the US, going back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Mossadeq by a US-UK engineered coup in favour of the Shah, means that the Iranians want to acquire the bomb as an insurance policy against any US military adventure.

But would Iran's acquisition of the bomb necessarily be a destabilising influence in West Asia? For, despite the nuclear non-proliferation ayatollahs, mutually assured destruction (MAD) as a means of deterrence amongst nuclear armed powers does seem to work, as demonstrated by the recent example of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan. The MAD theory of deterrence however is based on assuming that the leaders of countries do not want their people to be turned to cinders along with those of their adversaries. It is this assumption which is questionable about both the Shia Islamists of Iran and the Sunni jihadists of the Taliban. With martyrdom being welcomed as the gate to paradise, particularly if it takes out the infidels, one cannot rely on MAD to live with a nuclear bomb possessed by jihadists in Pakistan or the mullahs of Iran. Doubts reinforced by the rantings of the Iranian President Ahmadi-Nejad.

The bomb in the hands of Iran would also lead to countervailing moves by the Sunni Arab states. Newspaper reports claim that, in this eventuality, Saudi Arabia would acquire part of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal it has helped to finance, whilst Egypt could restart its own mothballed nuclear programme. With the increased licence a nuclear-armed Iran would obtain to continue its support of terrorist organisations in Palestine and Lebanon against Israel, a nuclear holocaust in West Asia is not unforeseeable.

For these reasons it is very likely that, irrespective of who succeeds to the US presidency, there will be growing pressure to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb. There have been continual hopes of a grand bargain between the US and Iran, which would allow the normalisation of their relations, the end of sanctions, allowing Iran's entry into the WTO, and growing western investment in Iran's moribund oil and gas fields, in return for the Iranians eschewing their nuclear weapons ambitions and reining back their proxies in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. But as Kenneth Pollack notes in an excellent account of US-Iranian relations (The Persian Puzzle, Random House, 2004), nothing has come of these, and US-Iran relations are back to what they were after the Revolution.

Nor are the prospects of increased international pressures through strengthened UN sanctions likely to be possible, as both Russia and China seem to be unwilling to support them. Moreover, even if applied they may make it easier for the mullahs to play the nationalist card and openly acquire nuclear weapons.

This makes it more likely that the US, as a last resort, will use military force to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities. After its experience in Iraq it is unlikely that the US will attempt a military occupation in the much more difficult terrain of Iran. More likely is the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities on the pattern of the Israeli raid on Saddam Hussain's reactor. But many doubt whether this will be completely successful, given the dispersal of Iran's nuclear facilities and the likelihood that US intelligence is no better on their location than it was concerning Iraq's WMDs. Nevertheless I think there is a very high probability that in the next two years something like this will be attempted, and may even be partially successful in delaying, if not halting, the development of the Iranian bomb.

Once again it is not in India's interests that the Islamist regime in Iran acquires nuclear weapons, but there is little it can do directly, as with the threat of a jihadist takeover of Pakistan, except hope and pray that the US in its battle against political Islam will be able to staunch these threats on its Western frontiers.