World

Great Game: two Ps, both Islamists, sign secret deal

by Ahmar Mustikhan | March 5, 2009 at 10:00 pm

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Pakistan interior minister Rahman Malik, who climbed the slippery pole of promotions in Pakistan by graft and corruption, has signed a secret deal with Iran.

Not many know, but Pakistan and Iran have highly secretive military links and Islamabad might have already supplied the nuclear know-how to Tehran to build a nuclear bomb. Five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany were trying to dissuade Iran from what it already has -- a nuclear bomb.

A day earlier, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei criticised Tehran for not cooperating in the watchdog's probe, but expressed hope that a possible change in US policy towards Iran could help break the deadlock.

Even after a six-year probe, the IAEA has failed to definitively say that Iran's controversial nuclear programme is entirely peaceful, as Tehran claims.

The late M.J. Shah, a very high-ranking Pakistani and father of anti-print union Eddy Shah, the London-based former publisher of Today newspaper, had told this scribe about his visits to Iran during the 1965 war with India.

At the time, arms to Pakistan could not be delivered at Karachi port so it was being delivered in Bandar Abbas, Iran, and then transported to Pakistan.

The Baluch who are at the receiving end of this secretive military deal want help from global powers, especially the US, UK, India and Israel, to thwart the hegemonist designs of Iran and Pakistan on their homeland.

In fact, a Jewish writer, who appears to be anti-Israel, attributed the so-called war on terror to the new great game for controlling the world's energy resources.

For a long time, the Americans have been arguing among themselves about the best route for piping this oil to the open sea. Routes that may be under Russian influence have been eliminated. The 19th century, deadly British-Russian competition, then called the "Great Game", is still going on between America and Russia.

Indian strategists agree there is this smell of oil in the region, which the Baluch call the Baluch Gulf.

There is nothing ambivalent about the "latest US strategic thinking for the region". It is clear for anyone who followed the proceedings of the US Congressional hearings in Washington on April 25-26 on "US Policy in Central Asia: Balancing Priorities". In a nutshell, the hearings were devoted to Washington's so-called "Greater Central Asia" policy. The new thinking resulted from a policy review in Washington following the collapse of the US regional policy in Central Asia in the recent past.