Pakistan and Iran exchanged missiles between January 16 and 18, 2024, killing 11 people. Pakistan has repeatedly betrayed the US since entering its security orbit in the 1950s with the Manila Pact and the Baghdad Pact. Yet Pakistan is the interlocutor of choice between Iran and the US. The question is, why? On that “why” hangs a tale of collusive perfidy and chicanery as also convergences and shared interests.On August 19, 1953, the CIA and MI6 in a joint operation overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected nationalist Prime Minister of Iran, to protect and preserve their hydrocarbon interests. This was the Anglo-American response to the nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry by Mosaddegh. The coup d’état paved the way for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to take an executive role.AdvertisementIn 1957, as part of the Atoms for Peace programme, President Dwight D Eisenhower greenlit the supply of US nuclear technology to Iran under the aegis of a civil nuclear agreement. In 1967, a five-megawatt research reactor granted by the US to Iran went critical, fuelled by highly enriched — at 93 per cent, weapons grade — uranium. But the Shah had more ambitious objectives, and by the 1970s, plans were underway for a massive expansion of the nuclear power programme.The Shah was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, invaded Iran the following year. Over the next eight years, a generation of Iranian strategic thinkers internalised an important doctrinal lesson as the West supplied weapons to Iraq and global organisations like the UN looked away when Hussein used chemical weapons on Iranian troops and civilians. The lesson was that as long as Iran lacked nuclear weapons, any dictator in the neighbourhood could infringe its sovereignty. Thus began a clandestine nuclear weapons programme to acquire that strategic autonomy. Ukraine is learning this the hard way after forsaking nuclear weapons under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.This is where the Pakistan connection comes in. A Q Khan, who operated the “Walmart of Nuclear Proliferation”, had reportedly visited the Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr in February 1986 and again in January 1987. Between 1989 and 1995, Khan is believed to have shipped over 2,000 components and sub-assemblies for centrifuges to Iran. Khan believed in breaking the monopoly of established powers on nuclear weapons. He famously stated, “I want to question the bl***y holier-than-thou attitude of the Americans and the British. Are these b*****ds God-appointed guardians of the world?” when asked to justify his international network aimed at providing clandestine nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.AdvertisementIran approached Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, for nuclear cooperation — a fact publicly confirmed by former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 2015. The Pakistani military kept successive civilian governments in the dark about Khan’s clandestine activities. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto stumbled upon this by sheer accident when Rafsanjani asked her to confirm the agreement between the two countries on “special defence matters” while she was on a visit to Tehran in 1989. By that time, reportedly, Iranian scientists had already been trained in Pakistan, at the Centre for Nuclear Studies/Nuclear Studies Institute.This is the institutional connection between the Pakistani military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Praetorian Guard of Iran’s nuclear programme. Hence the comfort level with Field Marshal Asim Munir as the broker of choice.Turning now to the US-Pakistan axis, Pakistan has been a Western strategic project since its inception. In early November 1940, as the Battle of Britain drew to a close, Prime Minister Winston Churchill started ideating with his War Cabinet the division of India on its western periphery, as the second iteration of the Great Game had commenced in earnest in Central and West Asia. Churchill thought the Indian National Congress, which in his mind represented the interests of the demographic majority, would be an unreliable ally. This was long before Choudhry Rehmat Ali’s theory of a Muslim nation on the western extremity of India, or the Lahore resolutionof March 1940, had gained any serious traction.The USSR and Germany were on the same side in November 1940, with Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, still seven months away. Churchill was worried that the Soviet Union’s push into Asia would impel it towards the warm waters of the Arabian Sea. And given the internal ferment in India, a British catspaw strategically positioned with respect to both West and Central Asia became an imperative.you may likeOnce the Cold War began, this became a priority. It is not a coincidence that the Partition of India in the west in 1947 was carried out in the manner Churchill had proposed to his cabinet colleagues seven years earlier. It was in fact Churchill, as Leader of the Opposition in Britain, who persuaded Muhammad Ali Jinnah to accept a “moth-eaten Pakistan”. Since then, the West has never abandoned this strategic piece of geography, just as it never forsook another faith-based state, Israel, created a year after Pakistan. It was Pakistan that in 1971 provided the US access to China as Henry Kissinger sought to leverage the widening Sino-Soviet split.Pakistan has let down its Western masters ad nauseam. It misappropriated weaponry, funds and other logistics during the Afghan Jihad from 1980 to 1989. It propped up the Taliban in 1996 after the US lost interest in Afghanistan. It sheltered Osama Bin Laden and Taliban regime figures in its own territory during the alleged War on Terror. All was forgiven, however, for in the Western strategic conception, Pakistan is a vital piece of real estate that should not be abandoned, and if it is ruled by a ruthless military dehors the raggedness of democracies, all the better. Hence, who better than the “favourite field marshal” to become the instrument of outreach — a tool that can always be discarded at will if things go south.The writer is a lawyer, third-term MP and former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting