The ‘12-day war' is over, but West Asia is still a tinderbox

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The grand ambition to topple Iran's mullahs is not likely to come to fruition. Israel will continue to be beleaguered read more
West Asia is again on the boil. Well, to be precise, it has been on the boil for a very long time, but we have the additional spectacle of the Iran-Israel war. Despite the ceasefire, which I hope does hold, there is a lot here that should concern all of us based on the geopolitical and geoeconomic fallout.
There are at least three issues of interest: the geopolitics, the war tactics, and the impact on the rest of the world.
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Geopolitics
It would be fair to say that much of the turmoil in the region dates back to British (and to a lesser extent French) meddling in the 20th century, for instance, the Sykes-Picot Act or the antics of TE Lawrence. Britain's broader actions—contradictory promises (Balfour), repressive mandates, oil-driven interference, and botched withdrawals—sowed division, resentment, and conflict that shaped the region's 20th-century chaos. Many of these issues, like sectarianism in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, persist today.
The nations Britain created with arbitrary lines marked on a map made no sense because they ignored ethnic, tribal, and religious realities, sowing seeds for future conflicts. Indians know all about this: the same sort of random map-making in the Indian subcontinent led to extraordinary misery (the Radcliffe Line, created in just five weeks, created East and West Pakistan with little attention paid to ground realities, using outdated maps and census data).
The British Deep State (let us call it Whitehall for short) has lost much of its clout, but it has been leading the American Deep State by the nose in what I referred to as a 'master-blaster' relationship. And the latter has a rather clear SoP: there needs to be constant wars to feed the military-industrial complex, and so they will arrange for wars, which will lead to a complex money-laundering operation, with petrodollars being whitewashed through the IMF, etc, and ending up in the coffers of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and friends.
It is notable that one of President Trump's main claims to fame in his first presidency was that he scrupulously avoided going to war, in sharp contrast with his predecessors over the last several decades, all of whom had started or indulged in one war or the other. It appears that this time, though, the US Deep State has managed to co-opt Trump into its warmaking agenda, which, incidentally, does not disqualify him for a Nobel Peace Prize: see Kissinger or Obama.
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What has happened in this 12-day war is that it became a stalemate, for all practical purposes. Neither Israel nor Iran can fully defeat the other, as neither has the resources to continue. A good metaphor is a boxing match, where evenly matched pugilists are both exhausted, covered and blinded with blood, and can hardly stand on their feet. The referee calling a halt is a blessing for both of them.
Iran has, for years, shouted hair-raising slogans about obliterating Israel, although it is not clear how much of this was rhetoric, considering Uncle Sam's support for the latter makes the latter quite powerful. This sloganeering was supplemented by proxy allies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, all of whom have been capable of mischief. Plus there is the nuclear bomb.
Israel set out to tame Iran on all these fronts. Their goals were to deprecate, if not destroy, Iran's nuclear capability, defang the proxies, and impose a regime change on the country. Let us remember the Stuxnet incident of 2010 when a computer virus was introduced into the Iranian centrifuges that are used for uranium enrichment, causing many of them to disintegrate. The assaults on Nataz, Fordow, and Ispahan (much like Israel's raid on Iraq's Osiraq reactor long ago) were intended to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program altogether.
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With the US' help, it appears as though there has been serious damage to Iran's weapons capabilities, although there are rumours that 400 kg of highly enriched uranium were smuggled out just before the bunker-buster strikes via B-2 bombers on the fortified, underground sites.
Among Iranian proxies, or force multipliers, its so-called Axis of Resistance, Hamas, has been severely degraded, with top commanders eliminated (notably Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh) and its tunnel network in Gaza largely inoperable. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nazrallah and several key aides have been targeted and killed. The Houthis have escaped relatively unscathed, although the Americans were bombing them.
On the other hand, it may not be possible to effect regime change in Iran. There seems to be a standard playbook of so-called 'colour revolutions', wherein a ruler is replaced by someone close to the West through what is portrayed as a 'popular uprising'. The Ukraine Maidan Revolution that placed Volodymyr Zelenskyy in power, the Bangladeshi coup that brought Yunus to power, and the 'Velvet Revolution' are examples.
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But one of the earliest examples was the CIA/MI6 coup in Iran that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and brought Shah Reza Pahlavi back to monarchical power. And the reason: Mossadegh had nationalised the Iranian oil industry and freed it from the clutches of British Petroleum. The 1979 coup by the mullahs succeeded because the Shah was unpopular by then. Iranians, despite widespread opposition to Khamenei, probably don't want the Shah dynasty back, or, for that matter, someone else chosen to rule them by outsiders.
There was also a fairly strange set of events: just as it is said the Iranians were allowed to spirit their uranium away, the Iranians seem to have given notice of their attacks on US bases in Qatar, etc (allowing the US to move their aircraft and personnel), and, strangest of all, a social media post by Trump that appeared to approve a sanctions-free Iranian supply of oil to China!
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Thus there are some pantomime/shadow-boxing elements to the war as well, and some choreography that is baffling to the impartial observer. Geopolitics is a complex dance.
War tactics
The Israeli assault on Iran started with shock and awe. In the first phase, there was a massive aerial bombing campaign, including on Natanz. But more interestingly, there was a Mossad operation that had smuggled kamikaze drones into a covert base near Tehran, and they, as well as anti-tank missiles, degraded Iranian air defences. Mossad also enabled successful decapitation strikes, with several top commanders and nuclear scientists assassinated.
This phase was a big win for Israel and reminded one of the continuing importance of human intelligence in a technological age. Patiently locating and mapping enemy commanders' movements, managing supply chains, and using psychological tactics were reminiscent of how Mossad was able to introduce the Stuxnet worm and use pagers as remote explosive devices.
In the second phase, the two were more evenly matched. Israel's Iron Dome was unable to deal with sustained barrages of Iranian missiles, as no anti-missile system can be more than 90 per cent effective. Both began to suffer from depleted stocks of arms and ammunition. Thus the metaphor of two grievously wounded boxers struggling to stay on their feet in the ring. It took the bunker-busting US B-2 bombers in the third phase to penetrate deep underground to the centrifuges, but there is still the possibility that Iran managed to ship out its fissile material.
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We are now in a fourth phase: both parties are preparing for the next round of kinetic warfare.
The lessons here were once again the remarkable rise of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), or drones, as weapons of war, and the continued usage of high-quality human intelligence. It is rumoured that Israeli agents had penetrated to high levels in the Iranian military hierarchy, and there was allegedly a high-level mole who was spirited away safely out of Iran.
Both of these are important takeaways for India. The success of India's decoy drones in the suppression of Pakistani air defences will be hard to repeat; the Ukrainian drone strike against Russia's strategic TU-44 and other strategic bombers, which were sitting ducks on the ground, shows us what drones can do: India has to substantially advance its drone capability.
India's counterintelligence and human intelligence suffered grievous blows when various personalities, including a prime minister, a vice president, and the head of RA&W, all turned hostile, with the result that India's covert presence in Pakistan will have to be painfully recreated again. Perhaps India also does not have a policy of decapitation strikes. Should it?
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Impact on the rest of the world, especially India
In general terms, it's hard to declare an outright non-loser in this war, except possibly China, because it is the one player that seems to be quite unaffected: its sabre-rattling on Taiwan continues unabated. Russia lost because it had been viewed as being an ally of Iran; it was unable to do much, enmeshed as it is in the Ukraine mess. Israel and Iran both came out, in the end, looking weakened, as neither could deliver a fatal blow.
The US got kudos for the B-2 bombers and the bunker-busters, but it is not entirely clear if there was some kind of 'understanding' that meant that Iran is still not that far away from being able to build its nuclear bomb. Indians will remember how President Ronald Reagan winked at Pakistan's efforts to nuclearise with Chinese help and issued certificates of innocence.
Pakistan in particular, and the Islamic Ummah in general, took a beating. Instead of expressing Islamic solidarity with Iran, it turns out Pakistan was quite likely opening up its air bases for possible US strikes on Iran. That would explain why Indian strikes on Pakistan's Nur Khan air base alarmed the Americans, who may have been bulking up their presence there partly as a way of opening a new front against Iran.
None of the other Islamic powers, with the possible exception of Turkey, paid more than lip service to Iran's troubles, which was interesting to note. The Sunni-Shia schism holds.
The worst outcomes were averted: the nightmare scenarios, in order of seriousness, would have been a) World War 3, b) nuclear bombs being dropped on one or more of the belligerents, c) a broad war in West Asia, and d) the closing of the Straits of Hormuz and a serious spike in energy prices.
From the point of view of a nation like India, it demonstrated, yet again, that superpowers have their own rationale of amoral transactional relationships with other countries. India, as an aspiring superpower, needs to internalise the fact that foreign policy is the pursuit of war by other means, and there are only permanent interests, not permanent friends. Instead of the highfalutin' moralising of the Krishna Menon and Jawaharlal Nehru days, what India needs is the pursuit of its own national interests all the time.
In this context, both Israel and Iran are useful to India. There is a billion-dollar arms trade between Israel and India (and Israel long ago offered to destroy Pakistan's Kahuta nuclear reactor with India's help, but shrinking-violet India refused). Today India is Israel's biggest arms buyer, with products ranging from Phalcon AWACS to Barak missiles to Harop and other drones, with Hermes 900 drones co-produced in India and exported to Israel.
As for Iran, India's investment in Chabahar port is a strategic counter to China's CPEC and Gwadar port in Pakistan. It enables India to avoid Pakistan in its trade to Afghanistan and Central Asia. It is also a node on the International North-South Transport Corridor, using which India can connect to Russia and Europe. It cuts the time and cost of shipping to Europe by 30 per cent as compared to the Suez Canal. India has invested more than a billion dollars in Chabahar.
Besides, India used to be a big customer for Iranian oil, but that has been cut to near-zero from 20+ million tonnes a year because of US sanctions on Iran. If and when sanctions are lifted, India will have an interest in buying Iranian oil again. India has interests in both Israel and Iran, and it should continue to maintain its good relations with both.
Nevertheless, West Asia remains a tinderbox. Hostilities will resume again; the only question is when. Iran will not give up on its nuclear ambitions, and as with Pakistan, some nuclear power will proliferate to it sooner or later, quite possibly from China. The grand ambition to topple Iran's mullahs is not likely to come to fruition. Israel will continue to be beleaguered. Status quo ante, after the current round of noise dies down.
The writer has been a conservative columnist for over 25 years. His academic interest is innovation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.