‘Rapid de-escalation at Pak-Iran border reflects responsible diplomacy’

Islamabad : Foreign and strategic policy expert Syed Muhammad Ali has said that swift managing of Pak-Iran border crisis disappointed countries who wanted to spoil relations between the two neighbours.

Syed Ali was speaking at an event hosted here by Institute of Regional Studies.

S Ali opined that the relations between the two neighbourly states had multiple dimensions including military-to-military high-level contacts. He stated that Pakistan’s calculated response to the Iranian strikes inside Baluchistan depicted Pakistan’s status as a responsible nuclear power. Pakistan’s retaliatory attack manifested precision, calculation and determination to avoid any collateral damage,” S Ali argued. He observed that even Iran admitted Pakistan’s selection of target in which no Iranian life was lost. He cautioned that any longevity of crisis between Pakistan and Iran would benefit the spoiler states like India. Therefore, in order to avoid such incidents in future, economic interdependence, regulation of border markets and people-to-people contacts were utmost important, he added.

Riffat Masood, former ambassador to Iran, mentioned that the issues between the two states were primarily due to the porous border. She said that both Pakistan and Iran had complained with each other because of the presence of militants in each other’s territories. She further argued that the sense of deprivation existed in both Pakistan’s Baluchistan and Iran’s Sistan province. This episode brought the realities to both the states regarding regional complexities, Ms Riffat argued. She concluded that if the economic stakes between the two countries were high, the miscreants would found little space to create disturbance in that region. Nadeem Riyaz, President, Institute of Regional Studies, thanked the participants in the end.