[Peace-discuss] Terrorism & energy

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Muhammad Sahimi, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and 
the NIOC professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern 
California, has published extensively on Iran's nuclear program and its 
political developments.  Here he connects terrorism (ours) to the real reason 
the US has invaded and occupied countries in the Mideast: energy.  --CGE]

	Jundallah and the Geopolitics of Energy
	by Muhammad Sahimi, October 21, 2009

On Oct. 18, the Jundallah (God’s Brigade) terrorist group, based in Pakistan’s 
Balochistan province, on the border with Iran, mounted two terrorist attacks 
inside Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province. One was a suicide attack, and the 
other was an ambush on a car carrying a group of soldiers. The coordinated 
attacks killed 42 people and injured dozens more. Five senior commanders of the 
Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Iran’s elite military unit, were killed, 
including Brig. Gen. Nourali Shoushtari, deputy commander of the IRGC’s ground 
forces.

Jundallah has also taken responsibility for the bombing of a bus carrying IRGC 
soldiers in February 2007. At least 11 soldiers were killed in that attack. 
Jundallah has carried out several other terrorist operations in Iran that have 
killed many policemen and civilians.

Iran immediately blamed the United States for having a hand in the attacks. Ali 
Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, said, "If they [the U.S.] want 
relations with Iran, they must be frank [in admitting their responsibility]. We 
consider the recent terrorist measure the outcomes of the U.S. measure." For 
years Iran has been making similar charges against the U.S. and Britain, 
accusing them of trying to incite ethnic tensions within Iran in order to cause 
instability.

The mainstream media in the U.S. tends to dismiss Iran’s charges. After Iran’s 
rigged presidential election of June 12 and the loss of legitimacy of Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad’s government in the eyes of a majority of Iranians, the mainstream 
media may be even more inclined to be dismissive of Iran’s accusations.

But regardless of Iran’s internal political situation, there is ample evidence 
that the George W. Bush administration was deeply involved in funding Jundallah. 
While it is not clear what the policy of the Obama administration is regarding 
Jundallah (the State Department flatly rejected Iran’s accusations), it is 
unlikely that the CIA’s direct or indirect support for Jundallah has ended.

In February 2007, Dick Cheney traveled to Pakistan and met with then-president 
Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Pakistani government sources said that the secret 
campaign against Iran by Jundallah was on the agenda when the two met. In an 
interview later that month, Cheney referred to the Jundallah terrorists as 
"guerrillas" in order to give them legitimacy.

But despite its claims, Jundallah is a sectarian, not liberation, movement. It 
is made of Sunni extremists who hate the Shi’ites, and its goal is to foment 
conflict between the two sects.

There is a movement in Pakistani Balochistan against the discrimination that the 
Baloch people suffer at the hands of the central government. The Baloch minority 
(totaling about 1 million) in Iran has also been discriminated against, although 
the Iranian government has been trying to improve the economy there. But 
Jundallah is not part of either struggle. Jundallah is simply a Sunni Salafi 
group of the Taliban or al-Qaeda variety, believed by many to have links to both 
groups and to be involved in drug trafficking as well. Since 1979, at least 
3,000 Iranian policemen have been killed by the drug traffickers in the region.

On Feb. 25, 2007, the London Telegraph reported, "America is secretly funding 
militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the 
Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program. … Such incidents [of violence] 
have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the northwest, the 
Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest, and the Baluchis in the southeast. … Funding for 
their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget but is 
now ‘no great secret,’ according to one former high-ranking CIA official in 
Washington."

According to the Telegraph, Fred Burton, a former U.S. State department 
counterterrorism agent, supported the assertion, saying, “The latest attacks 
inside Iran fall in line with U.S. efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic 
minorities to destabilize the Iranian regime.”

In April 2007, ABC News reported that according to Pakistani and U.S. 
intelligence officials, the Jundallah group "has been secretly encouraged and 
advised by American officials since 2005." According to the report, the "U.S. 
relationship with Jundallah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to 
the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as 
well as congressional oversight." The money for Jundallah was funneled to its 
leader, Abdel Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with 
European and Gulf states.

In an interview with National Public Radio on June 30, 2008, Seymour Hersh 
explained how the Bush administration’s policy of "my enemy’s enemy is my 
friend" led the U.S. to support Jundallah and the Mujahedin-e Khalq 
Organization, or MEK, an Iranian exile group listed as a terrorist organization 
by the State Department, both of which have clear records of terrorist activities.

In a July 2008 article in The New Yorker, Hersh quoted Robert Baer, a former CIA 
clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the 
Middle East as saying, "The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the 
regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as al-Qaeda. These are guys who 
cut off the heads of nonbelievers – in this case, it’s Shi’ite Iranians. The 
irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we 
did in Afghanistan in the 1980s."

In a symposium on U.S.-Iran relations that the author helped organized in 
October 2008 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Baer made 
the same statements.

Former Pakistani army chief retired Gen. Mirza Aslam Baig also confirmed that 
the U.S. supports Jundallah and uses it to destabilize Iran. Baig was deeply 
involved when the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) 
supported the Taliban. Baig is part of Pakistan’s ruling oligarchy, so he knows 
something about what goes down in South and Central Asia and the Greater Middle East

In his July 2008 article, Hersh also said that the MEK received arms and 
intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the U.S., and that the Kurdish party 
PJAK (Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan), "which has also been reported to be 
covertly supported by the United States," has been operating against Iran from 
bases in northern Iraq for at least three years.

In the fall of 2005, there was a series of bombings in Iran’s oil-rich province 
of Khuzestan bordering southern Iraq, which was occupied by British forces. The 
bombings killed many innocent people. The Iranian government accused Britain and 
the U.S. of being behind the terrorist attacks. In his article, Hersh also 
mentioned possible U.S. support for the so-called Khuzestan separatists (who 
exist only in the imaginations of American policymakers).

"Arabizing" Khuzestan and separating it from Iran has always been a goal of 
Britain. British Arabists have long supported Arab nationalist activities 
against Iran, in particular in Khuzestan.

A good example is what happened when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980. Iraq’s 
goal was to annex Khuzestan. The BBC news network, as well as the rest of the 
Western mainstream media, provided full overage of the Iraqi invasion in the 
first week, with two key claims: (a) Iran’s resistance would collapse quickly, 
and (b) the Arabs of Khuzestan fully supported the invasion. Both proved to be 
totally unfounded. In fact, the vast majority of Iranian Arabs not only did not 
support Saddam, but were in fact at the forefront of resistance to the Iraqi 
invaders.

It seems that the Bush administration (and its allies) tried very hard, through 
a covert program, to destabilize Iran by inciting its ethnic and religious 
minorities. The policy of the Obama administration toward the program is not 
clear. But President Obama has always stated that when it comes to Iran, "All 
options are on the table." So why should anyone believe that this particular 
option has been taken off the table?

There is another important aspect of the problem that the public is not well 
aware of. Since the 1990s, the U.S. has supported the construction of a pipeline 
from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean, in order 
to transport natural gas from that region to international markets. Though the 
political instability and mountainous terrain of Afghanistan make it much easier 
and more economical to construct the pipeline through Iran, the U.S. has always 
opposed such a route.

Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan native and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, 
and the United Nations during the Bush administration, was a consultant to the 
Unocal oil company in the 1990s. With Khalilzad’s help, UNOCAL (which has since 
been bought by Chevron) lobbied the Clinton administration very strongly to give 
it permission to construct the pipeline. The Clinton administration supported 
the project, but when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, the project was 
postponed.

But Iran and Pakistan have signed an agreement to construct a pipeline from 
southern Iran to Pakistan for transporting Iran’s natural gas to Pakistan. 
Initially, the pipeline was supposed to continue to India, but under pressure by 
the Bush administration, India withdrew from the project.

If constructed, the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, which has been dubbed "the peace 
pipeline," will be in direct competition with the pipeline through Afghanistan, 
if and when that pipeline is constructed. Instability in Iran’s Baluchestan will 
scare away potential investors in the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, and may prevent 
its construction altogether. These facts play an important role in Jundallah’s 
attack on Iran, but the mainstream media has ignored them.

Like a great majority of Iranians and Iranian-Americans, I believe that Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad’s government has no legitimacy, but the fact remains that the U.S. 
and its allies have been trying for years to incite Iran’s ethnic and religious 
minorities in order to destabilize it. To do so, the U.S. has not hesitated to 
use terrorist groups, such as Jundallah and PJAK, despite its so-called war on 
terror. When religious fanaticism mixes with the geopolitics of energy 
resources, the results are heinous.

http://original.antiwar.com/sahimi/2009/10/20/jundallah-and-the-geopolitics-of-energy/