Washington soon recognized that a confederation required too many political concessions from all parties involved, and changed tack. CENTO, an entirely untested military alliance, became the chief vehicle for closer economic integration, including U.S.-supported pan-regional development of road, rail and communication infrastructures. The idea was to make some of Iran’s ports on the Persian Gulf into centers for commerce and link them up via a network of roads to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

Lessons from the Past

Back then, Washington’s bottom line was clear: it would support Afghanistan as long as its government was not unfriendly, in order to prevent Kabul from falling into Moscow’s lap. A key element in this was to broker better ties between Afghanistan and Pakistan; here, Iran was a net positive contributing factor. The legacy of such efforts remains to this day, including the then world’s longest line-of-sight microwave telecommunication system, to run from the Turkish capital Ankara through Tehran to Karachi—a distance of some five thousand kilometers.

In contrast, from the early 1990s, Iran and Pakistan had become chief rivals for influence in Afghanistan and pursued policies, which amounted to nothing short of a proxy war between Tehran and Islamabad as each sought to outdo the other in amount leverage they could garner in Afghanistan. Unless Iran and Pakistan revise their Afghan policies, the two countries might soon again be on a collision path, and a crash that could come even sooner depending on the timing and scale of Western withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In other words, the quest for influence in Afghanistan might reemerge with a vengeance. The international nuclear agreement with Iran in July 2015 will not remove all the suspicion and baggage, which will continue to impact U.S.-Iranian relations. But if Washington and Tehran opt to identify and cooperate on common interests, then very few topics are as worthy as collaboration around the future of Afghanistan. At the very least, both sides can work and help the Afghan government to make sure that the emergence of cells of Islamic State in that country are contained. Regardless of both Iran and Pakistan’s complicated relations with Taliban and Al Qaeda, the fight against ISIS and making sure that the movement fails in any attempt to transplant itself in West Asia is one that Islamabad and Tehran share with Washington.

Still, the greatest impediment in closer Iranian-Pakistani cooperation today is that, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, neither Iran nor Pakistan has the other as part of its top-tier foreign policy agenda. It is almost as if managed tension is the best that can be hoped for in bilateral relations. Structural roadblocks are an important constraint. It is the two countries’ respective security and intelligence agencies—and not the foreign ministries—that are the dominant actors in shaping policy toward each other. This in turn makes security-centric considerations dominate the conversation.

In comparison, trade and other sources of economic cooperation are almost entirely absent from the bilateral discourse in any meaningful way, despite ample rhetorical pledges. Among its immediate neighbors, Iran, with its eighty-million-strong population, today trades least with Pakistan, which happens to be by far its biggest neighbor with a 190-million-strong market. If narrow and tactical geopolitical calculations persist in fashioning Tehran and Islamabad’s approach to each other, including on the question of combating extremist Islamists in Afghanistan, then the huge potential for a much broader and multifaceted relations will be left unexplored.

Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. His book Iran and Pakistan: Diplomacy, Security and American Influence was published in 2015. Follow him on Twitter @AlexVatanka.

Image: An Afghan Local Police recruit fires his AK-47 rifle during a weapons training class in Nawbahar district, Zabul province​. Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Navy