Pakistan Frets Over Iran Standoff

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The look and rhetoric are pure Iran. On the wall hangs a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the robed and turbaned speaker is a powerful Shiite Muslim leader. America? ``The mother of all evils,'' says Ghorband Ali Tawassuly in an interview, sitting beneath the late Iranian revolutionary's picture.

What if America attacks Iran? ``God forbid,'' he replies. And if Iran's leader sends an order to Tawassuly and his men to rise up? ``We will obey it.'' However, this is not Iran but Pakistan, specifically its rugged, violence-wracked province of Baluchistan, where discontent with the central government 900 miles away in Islamabad feeds a long-running guerrilla war that some fear could get a lot of worse if the United States should attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Tawassuly, who lives in a high-gated home in Quetta, Baluchistan's dusty capital, is the leader of Tehrik-e-Jaffria, which claims to represent Pakistan's 25-percent Shiite Muslim minority and was outlawed by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf three years ago. He's not alone in warning of an explosive response to any attack on Iran. In Islamabad, retired army chief of staff Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg says: ``If Iran is attacked it won't be like Afghanistan. Here in Pakistan there will be a revolt. It will be very different this time around. Overnight there will be 50,000 more jihadis created.''

Iran, which has a 545-mile border with Baluchistan, is fanning the insurgency with money and radio propaganda to keep Musharraf's government preoccupied and deny the United States a base from which to prod and possibly attack Iran, say experts in Islamabad and residents of the Montana-sized province of 6.5 million people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5849789,00.html

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1. Someone wrote that politics "is like a game of pool".

You hit one ball, trying to get it into a pocket. Instead, the ball bounces off of two more balls which ricochet into 3 others. This sets of a movement of some balls clear on the other end of the table that you weren't anticipating.

ANTICIPATING.

There's the key word. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfailed do not have the mental capacity to understand what they are dealing with. They just don't. The worst part of this is, even though they don't have the mental ability to understand the complexities of world affairs, they won't take the advice of those who do.

FORGING AHEAD, AND HOPE IT WORKS OUT.

That's their modus operandi. And it will come back to haunt them.