Most of the international attention on Iran in the second half of 2009 focused on the political turmoil following the presidential election of 12 June. The discussion of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and plans receded from the foreground, though it continued behind the scenes among all the states and international agencies involved. The signs are that, whatever the outcome of the domestic confrontation between the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime and the opposition, the coming months will see a sharpening of tension over the nuclear issue. This raises the question of whether there will be a military assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities – most likely by Israel, since there is little likelihood that the Barack Obama administration would countenance direct United States military action against Iran – in an attempt to stop the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon (see “Iran, Israel, America: the nuclear gamble”, 2 October 2009).

In current circumstances, any unexpected or dramatic incident is likely to be read in terms of its bearing on the complex interplay over the nuclear question of Iran, Israel and the United States.  The assassination by a remote-controlled bomb of the Iranian quantum-physicist (and opposition supporter) Massoud Ali Mohammadi on 12 January 2010 is one such. The Iranian government immediately attributed Dr Mohammadi’s killing to the United States and Israel, working in collaboration with internal dissidents.  

Tehran’s accusation against its main adversaries is as predictable as Washington’s denial of any involvement in the murder. While the truth of this event remains to be established, what can be said is that on a larger diplomatic front the United States has little to gain from any rupture in relations with Tehran. The rhetoric in Washington from conservative sources and supporters of Israel may be as strong as ever, and is more than matched by the propaganda of the Ahmadinejad government; but in reality the US and Iran actually have overlapping interests. Both have reason, albeit for different reasons, to oppose al-Qaida and the Taliban (with Iran recalling the deaths of Iranian diplomats at the Taliban’s hands in 1998); and the US government is well aware of the potential for Iran to make things very difficult for it in Iraq.

The deep state

Two pieces of evidence, however, suggest that events involving Israel may make the delicate Tehran/Washington relationship even harder to sustain. The first is that sources close to the Israeli government confirm and are clear that training and other preparations continue for possible military action against Iran. This is not to say that an attack is imminent, or indeed inevitable: just that the option is, and will remain, readily available.

The Binyamin Netanyahu government has been careful to moderate its public pronouncements about Iran; but its repeated statements that Iran is Israel’s primary security concern – far outweighing Hamas, Hizbollah and certainly the Palestinians on the West Bank – are far more than rhetoric. Some nuclear analysts in the United States believe that Washington could come to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran, should that be Tehran’s ultimate aim; for Israel, such an outcome is simply not acceptable.

The second piece of evidence enters here, namely a range of reports suggesting that Iran has gone much further than previously believed in protecting its nuclear facilities.  The reports centre on news of a new nuclear plant being constructed inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom (see William J. Broad, “Iran Shielding Its Nuclear Efforts in Maze of Tunnels”, New York Times, 6 January 2010).

The argument is being made that the Qom development – news of which follows Iran’s admission in September 2009 that it is building a uranium-enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qom – is just one of many of this type; that a programme of systematic protection of sensitive sites has been operating for several years; and that these are sufficiently robust to greatly diminish the likely success of any air-strikes.  The reports do not explicitly claim that the diverse sites are clearly linked to a nuclear-weapons (as distinct from a civil nuclear-power) programme, but the implication is that they are, and that they’re intended as a form of deterrence.

It is impossible to verify these reports. What can be said is that Iran has huge experience in tunnel-engineering, not least in carving road-and-rail routes through mountainous terrain, as well as the construction of subway-systems in three cities (Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz).  Some of the world’s leading tunnelling-contractors, including Germany’s Herrenknecht, have offices in Tehran. President Ahmadinejad himself, a transport engineer by profession, was in 1998 a co-founder of the Iranian Tunnelling Association.

Iran has, therefore, the capability to protect sensitive facilities and there is a fair amount of evidence that it has done so. Any kind of nuclear development is seen in the country as a powerful symbol of modernity (and is to that extent popular); and the risk of an attack on nuclear facilities, even if they are not weapons-related, makes protection a high priority for the authorities.

Indeed, if as is probable Iran did embark on a scheme some years ago to develop a major civil-nuclear programme that could also give it the potential to “break out” into nuclear weapons, then its thinking from the start would have been that an Israeli military assault was at some point likely.  From that early point it would have made eminent sense to focus intense efforts on extremely strong protection of selected facilities; indeed it would be a sign of political and technical incompetence not to have done so.

It is still feasible that Iran is not actually engaged in developing nuclear weapons but is determined to maintain that option. Merely to do this in a survivable way, however, would require sophisticated levels of protection. The latter would be far better provided by tunnelling into mountains than digging deep holes and covering facilities with substantial layers of concrete, earth and rock. The latter option would leave facilities vulnerable to attack by the 2.3-tonne GBU-28 “bunker-busting” bomb available to the Israelis; whereas such a weapon would have little if any effect on deep tunnels other than to wreck entrances (and even this risk can easily be countered by dummy entrances and other technical tricks).

The US air force has for some years funded the development of a far more powerful system, the 13.6-tonne GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). The first of these are due to be deployed later this year, though there are no indications whatsoever that they will be made available to the Israelis (see “MOPping Up: The USA’s 30,000 Pound Bomb”, Defense Industry Daily, 22 December 2009). In any event, if Iran has created deeply buried facilities within mountains, even the GBU-57 would have little effect.

The hard choice

The logic of the foregoing is that even if Iran has not yet decided to divert into a nuclear-weapons programme, there is a strong risk of an Israeli attack – but that Iran’s leadership will be confident that a raid would leave important parts of any programme intact. Moreover, Iran’s elite could respond to an attack from the middle-east’s only nuclear-weapons power by withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty; mobilising the people around a unifying cause; portraying the country as a regional leader against aggression; and “really” going all-out for nuclear weapons.  The result would be yet more assaults by Israel in subsequent months, with complex political effects across the region in which (for example) the reaction of Arab elites and Arab citizens would be very different.

The long-term consequences of any Israeli operation against Iranian nuclear targets are unpredictable, but probable among them is serious regional instability. Yet where the dominant security paradigm remains fixated on Iran’s nuclear potential, this would not be enough to stop Israel. 

The United States clearly recognises this fact, and the Barack Obama administration – unlike its predecessor – well understands how damaging a war would be. The watchwords of the Washington’s dealings with Tehran in coming months will continue to be caution and patience. It is far less certain that the US president has any serious control over Israel’s plans and calculations. For that reason alone, a crisis remains likely some time in 2010.

The term “global war on terror” has long since been dropped from the United States’s official vocabulary. The phrase that came to be proposed as a replacement even when George W Bush was still in office, the “long war”, has similarly fallen by the wayside, to be succeeded in March 2009 by a less overtly combative Pentagon formulation: “overseas contingency operation”. But it is easier for the Barack Obama administration to redefine the conflict it is involved in than to change the bleak current reality in three main flashpoints – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq:

* the coordinated suicide-attack and rocket-attack in the early morning of 28 October 2009 on two high-profile civilian targets in Kabul – the Bekhtar guest-house and Serena Hotel – are a sign that the deepening insecurity in Afghanistan reaches even to the heart of the capital. The Bekhtar incident ended in the deaths of twelve people, including five United Nations staff who were helping to oversee the re-run of the presidential election on 7 November

* the devastating market-bombing in Peshawar, also on 28 October, are part of a widening insurgency in Pakistan. The attack killed over ninety people, and coincided with the arrival of United States secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the country for high-level talks with Pakistani leaders

* the suicide-bomb operations against Iraq’s justice ministry and the administrative headquarters of Baghdad’s region on 25 October – which killed at least 155 people and wounded over 500 – are a reminded that violence in Iraq remains endemic and that insurgents retain the capacity to strike close to the heart of power.

The rising tide

In Afghanistan, the great concern over the Kabul assaults is accentuated by awareness of four serious security developments elsewhere in the country:

* the war is continuing to spread to previously peaceful areas. German troops in Kunduz province in the north of the country, for example, are involved in direct combat for the first time in over six decades (see Nicholas Kulish, “German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality”, International Herald Tribune, 27 October 2009)

* the increasing effectiveness of the attacks on foreign troops. United States forces are suffering relentless casualties: sixty-seven troops have been killed so far in October 2009, including seven on 27 October in multiple, “complex” bomb-attacks on an armoured vehicle in Kandahar province

* after the United States withdrew troops from four bases in Nuristan province in northeast Afghanistan (and adjacent to Pakistan), it has effectively fallen under the control of a Taliban network led by Qari Ziaur Rahman, a leader with close links to al-Qaida (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Taliban take over Afghan province”, Asia Times, 28 October 2009)

* it is now becoming ever more clear that the United States forces and the wider Nato/International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) coalition is facing military opposition from groups that extend beyond Taliban militias and some loosely associated warlord networks; these include scores of local militias that have very little to do with the Taliban but work to protect their own power-bases and resist what they see as a foreign occupation.

All war is local

The implication of these trends is that a transition from insurgency to a broader insurrection may be occurring – and that deploying even more American and allied troops (as Barack Obama and his advisers are currently discussing) risks increasing rather than diminishing the military challenge (see “Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection” [8 October 2009] and “AfPak: the unwinnable war” [16 October 2009]).

Some US military and political officers on the ground are beginning to register these dynamics. Matthew Hoh, a senior US state department official and former marine who was based until recently in Zabul province, explained his resignation on 10 September 2009 by referring to his experiences in the Korengal valley and elsewhere. These, he is reported as saying:

“taught him ‘how localised the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometres away.’ Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases. ‘That’s really what shook me,’ he said. ‘I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism’” (see Karen De Young, “U.S. official resigns over Afghan war”, Washington Post, 27 October 2009).

The Barack Obama administration has yet to decide whether to deploy up to the 40,000 additional troops requested in General Stanley A McChrystal’s report; it still appears to want to delay the decision until political stability can be established in Kabul (through the 7 November re-run of the presidential election, and perhaps the formation of a national or emergency government). But the core dilemma remains: that deploying more troops is in current conditions likely to prove counterproductive, and only deepen the military quagmire.

There is a close parallel here with what is happening across the border in Pakistan. An extensive operation by the Pakistani army in Waziristan, launched with a certain fanfare on 17 October 2009 as attempt to occupy this key region and decisively curb Taliban control there, is too facing the reality of an intractable and well-organised opposition resistant to straightforward military solutions.

The Pakistani offensive lacks the equipment, the flexibility and the combat-troop levels (perhaps as many as 50,000) that would all be required to subdue the entire district; as a result, it now has the more limited aim of neutralising the influence of some important militia leaders. Even this will be hard enough. In addition, cities such as Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Lahore as well as Peshawar have endured high-profile insurgent assaults; and the Peshawar explosion on 28 October is further evidence that the army’s well-publicised operations cannot prevent (and may indeed provoke) violent incidents elsewhere in Pakistan.

The Baghdad blues

Amid this comfortless prospect, the situation in Iraq has appeared to present more hopeful evidence that here at least – both before and since United States forces started their partial withdrawal from Iraq’s cities on 30 June 2009 – Washington’s military strategy was showing the desired results.

At the same time, the very concentration of focus on “AfPak” during much of 2009 has tended to mean that the continuing severe violence and tension in parts of the country have been underplayed. There has, for example, been a series of bombings against Shi’a-populated areas whose resulting carnage is barely conveyed by the death-tolls: over 120 killed in the strikes against markets in Sadr city in April and June, seventy-one dead at a Shi’a shrine in Baghdad in April, forty-four  killed at a Shi’a mosque in Mosul in August. This is but a partial list.

The intention seems clear: to polarise Shi’a and Sunni communities and provoke further conflict. But those responsible have other targets, including the Iraqi government’s infrastructure and its security forces (which are supplemented, despite the ending of full-scale American patrols in urban areas, by US troops in what amount to joint operations).

It is in these circumstances that the insurgents have expanded their tactics by launching large-scale assaults against major government centres. In August 2009, these destroyed or inflicted serious damage on the foreign, finance and health ministries (with 102 people killed and more than 500 wounded); the 25 October attacks hit two more centres. An especially serious aspect of this approach is the suggestion that the militants’ ability to penetrate government buildings is possible only with a degree of collaboration from inside Iraq’s security forces.

The real debate

The death of the United Nations staff in the Kabul attacks on 28 October is a further significant aspect of the current situation. It shows that some militant groups deliberately target the more neutral expatriates precisely because their work involves efforts to resolve conflicts in times of intense difference. The input of UN agencies – such as the World Food Programme, five of whose officials were killed in an attack at its Islamabad offices on 5 October 2009 – can help provide space for limited progress even amid conflict, and this is what the more extreme elements in a dispute can find intolerable.

In this respect the Kabul incident belongs to a pattern includes the assassination of Count Bernadotte by militants of the Israeli rightwing Lehi group in Jerusalem in September 1948, and the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 which killed the envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and twenty-one others. In the latter case, the Baghdad canteen of the UN complex was in the early months of the Iraq war was one of the very few “neutral spaces” where Iraqis and expatriates of widely differing backgrounds and attitudes could meet informally. That was reason enough for it to be vulnerable; the human and psychological damage hugely diminished the UN’s role in attempting to heal wounds and avert the continuation of violence.

This adds a problematic element to the argument that the United Nations should play a more prominent and strategic role in current and future “international interventions” (see Pierre Schori & Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, “Afghanistan: peacekeeping without peace”, 26 October 2009). This is difficult enough to achieve when a military conflict has become rooted or where powerful trends point in that direction; it is made even harder when insurgent factions precisely seek to destroy UN personnel and disrupt their activities.

All this focuses a chilling beam onto the troubles of the United States and its allies (see Ahmed Rashid, “Trotsky in Baluchistan” [National Interest, November-December 2009]). There seems little hope of immediate respite. The conflict in what has become known as “AfPak” has since 2006-07 continued even through the winter months, while the hoped-for peace in Iraq is looking brittle.

If there is a way ahead, it rests not on short-term calculations about troop numbers but on a larger reassessment by the Barack Obama administration of the entire US security posture in the middle east and southwest Asia (see “A world in need: the case for sustainable security”, 10 September 2009). This will have to do more than crisis-manage the dire problems inherited from George W Bush; what is needed is no less than a move beyond military-led thinking to an integrated understanding of what security in the 21st century actually is.