tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post150197473210105968..comments2024-03-27T15:36:44.737-07:00Comments on Haq's Musings: Pakistan and Iran Figure in Biden-Palin DebateRiaz Haqhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-16331681393199283712017-08-05T16:56:50.106-07:002017-08-05T16:56:50.106-07:00Iran and Pakistan: An Interview with Alex Vatanka
...Iran and Pakistan: An Interview with Alex Vatanka<br /><br />, Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence<br /><br /><br />https://lawfareblog.com/iran-and-pakistan-interview-alex-vatanka<br /><br /><br />So much of U.S. policy in South and West Asia has been determined by Washington’s relationship with two countries: Iran and Pakistan. But the relationship between these two regional powers has been in many ways as influential as their swings from allies to frenemies to adversaries with the United States. The ties between Iran and Pakistan run deep, and have shifted over time from a deep affinity to regional rivalry and proxy conflict. Underneath it all has been the two countries’ pragmatic self-interest. “Neither country has ever genuinely considered optimum relations as an end in itself,” Alex Vatanka writes in the introduction to his book, Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence. “For both Iran and Pakistan, bilateral closeness was always meant to reap something strategically larger.” But over the past seven decades, since Pakistan’s inception, their relationship has been buffeted by global and regional competition, by the Cold War, the scramble for Afghanistan, and the Iran-Saudi rivalry.<br /><br />I recently finished reading Vatanka’s book and had the opportunity to discuss the history of the Iran-Pakistan relationship with him by phone. “In this relationship, for the United States watching is not an option,” he told me. “This is a relationship involving two large countries, one is already nuclear armed, one is a threshold nuclear-armed state, combined something like 300 million people, almost the size of the U.S. population. It's a big market potentially if we wanted to integrate them. There are a whole host of areas where we can cooperate in terms of counterterrorism, trying to bring some sort of stability to Afghanistan. If you let the diplomats, perhaps, and economic entry have a bigger say and not look at the relationship purely through the security prism, which is where we are now, then this relationship can improve and become more healthy than it is today. It's clearly unhealthy today.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<br /><br /><br /><br />Could you start by explaining why you wanted to focus on Iran and Pakistan?<br /><br />Almost for the last 20 years, I've been covering Iranian affairs—domestic, foreign, and a lot of regional dynamics involving Iran and it's neighbors. When you look at Iran's immediate neighborhood, including its 15 immediate neighbors (if you include its land and maritime neighbors), there’s plenty of literature on most of the neighbors' relations with Iran. Certainly among those neighbors, we'd consider them the big neighbors, Saudi, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan—Pakistan stands out as one that hasn't really been tackled in the context of its relations with Iran. So I thought, here's a gap, here's a deficiency, and why not try to see if we can find out more about it. That was really the beginning of that research idea, project, and the subsequent book that came out of it.<br /><br />I think the history alone is really interesting, and there's a lot of that in the book, but I think there's a lot more to it than just the historical narrative. I think if you look at these two large countries, as they sit in Asia, anyone who wants to figure out how the large power politics, the race for influence in this part of the world happened, needs to take into account what drives Iran and Pakistan and where they come from in term of their past, where they are today, and where they are likely to go forward.Riaz Haqhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00522781692886598586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5848640164815342479.post-61155760578230283762008-10-03T11:08:00.000-07:002008-10-03T11:08:00.000-07:00Does it matter who wins? Pakistan loses out no?Does it matter who wins? Pakistan loses out no?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com