If Iran collapses, India must be prepared for a surge in weapons smuggling

Much of the public discussion surrounding the US-Israel war with the Islamic Republic centres on Iran’s current closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Energy market panic is unwarranted. While Iran and Gulf Cooperation Council states export oil through the Strait of Hormuz, decades of mismanagement and sanctions have left the Islamic Republic unable to refine enough petrol and diesel. Accordingly, the regime must import up to 20 per cent of its needs through Hormuz. Iranian rhetoric and sporadic attacks on shipping might have spiked energy prices, but there is a ticking clock over Iran’s capabilities as its gasoline reserves run dry. Revolutionary Guard speedboats operate from small, informal jetties and marinas, each of which has limited petrol storage that US and Israeli bombers now target.

Even if Persian Gulf oil exports do not quickly resume, President Donald Trump’s temporary sanctions waivers for Russian exports to India suggest, at a minimum, a better willingness in the White House to listen to and understand Indian concerns and perspectives.

As second-order effects ripple through the region, the biggest threat to India from the Iran war will not be high energy prices or even refugees, but rather the potential for loose weapons falling into anti-India extremists’ hands.

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In 2007, Mohammad Ali Jafari, at the time newly appointed to lead the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, concluded that the greatest threat to the Islamic Republic would come from the Iranian people themselves rather than from outside. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was dead; the Taliban had their backs against the wall. Israel was a paper tiger, he said, and “the Americans cannot do a damned thing,” the Revolutionary Guards declared. Jafari proceeded to reorganise the Guards to put a separate unit in each of Iran’s 31 provinces, with an extra unit in Tehran due to the size of its population. Each of those units presumably has its own weapons depot.

If the Islamic Republic collapses, these depots will become key for two reasons. First, when the regime dies, so too do the pay cheques it issues. Many Guardsmen will loot what they can, raiding the depots to sell weapons and ammunition on the black market. Alternately, if civil war breaks out, different groups will raid the depots, flooding Iranian society with weapons.

There is a precedent for the danger loose weapons could pose. In October 2004, then-Senator John Kerry accused President George W. Bush of negligence for not securing a weapons depot at Al-Qaqaa, from which he alleged Iraqi insurgents had stolen 380 tonnes of explosives. In 2011, President Barack Obama, like Trump today, opted for a bombing campaign “without boots on the ground.” Extremists looted President Muammar Qadhafi’s weapons depots. Not only did they fuel civil war inside Libya, but the weapons flows undermined the stability and security of neighbouring Sudan and Niger and also helped fuel insurgencies in Mali, Burkina Faso, and the Central African Republic.

While India will not face instability in the manner that African countries did, it will not be immune to the loose weaponry problem. Baloch tribes span the Iran-Pakistan border. Historically, they used their connections to facilitate smuggling of drugs and other contraband. While there is historically little love between Baluch tribes and the Pakistani government, which conquered and annexed the Khanate of Kalat, money matters.

Weapons will flood Pakistan and provide Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency the plausible deniability it needs to arm Kashmir and Khalistan movement terrorists or Jamaat-e Islami affiliates that Muhammad Yunus, the coup collaborator in Bangladesh, freed from prison.

Criminal elements in India itself might also acquire weaponry, including Sunni extremists whom Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan incites with arguments that no Muslim should live under a non-Muslim government.

The problems are not insurmountable, but they are real. At a minimum, India should be prepared: either defensively, to shut down weapons markets and crack down on smugglers, or more proactively, to secure weapons depots in Iran itself should the state collapse.

(Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)