Driving That Af/Pak Train

October 18th’s suicide bombing in Iran near the Pakistan border was the subject of the top three articles in October 20th’s Asia Times.
 
“Conventional wisdom suggests that the terrorist strike by Jundallah in southeastern Iran on Sunday might have had the backing of the United States or Britain,” M K Bhadrakumar opens the first.  Yet “clearly,” he concludes, Obama would have to be “out of his mind to have his intelligence agencies mount a terrorist attack on Iran which would torpedo his own gameplan to address the Iran nuclear file at the present sensitive juncture” (Saudi-Iranian hostility hits boiling point). 
 
In the second, Pepe Escobar cautions “but one thing is the Obama administration’s priorities; another is the agenda of ‘full spectrum dominance’ types at the Pentagon and the CIA…Chaos in Iranian Balochistan derails the [Iran-Pakistan] pipeline – something that is an absolute priority for full spectrum dominance: Washington wants its horse, the Trans-Afghan (TAP) pipeline, to win at all costs. A ‘victory’ of the IP pipeline means Gwadar port in [Pakistani] Balochistan falling into China’s orbit, not the US’s”  (Jundallah versus the mullahtariat). 
 
In the third, Kaveh L Afrasiabi quotes a Tehran professor, “‘There is now a serious crisis of Iranian confidence in Mr Obama and many people are asking: is he really in charge and who calls the shots on US policy in the region? Did Mossad pull this off without notifying the White House, or in cahoots with them [the US]?'” (Iran’s nuclear talks also hit)
 
Here at Antiwar, in Our Two-Faced Iran Policy, Justin Raimondo raises the possibility that the U.S.’s “terrorism” complements its “talk,” the idea being “to keep the Iranian regime off-balance, and make them more amenable to compromise…In any case, we are walking a tightrope” and the presence of “the very powerful Israel lobby” is a major reason why “military conflict with Iran may be unavoidable.”         
 
With the suicide bombing in Iran occurring as the Pakistan situation degenerates (and now, Baghdad blasts echo far and wide), Reuters blogger Myra MacDonald is almost reduced to prayer:  “In my 25 years of journalism, I’ve rarely seen a situation move so quickly.  I’d like to think there is someone in power who is not only keeping pace, but keeping ahead”  (Afganistan, Pakistan … and all the other countries involved).
 
“Someone?”  I don’t think she has in mind Osama bin Laden, so, if it’s not the Obama administration and/or a CIA-Pentagon cabal and/or the Mossad, that leaves—The Duchy of Grand Fenwick!
 
Leaving aside the question of who, if anyone, is driving, to where is the train hurtling? What humongous wreck awaits?
 
The U.S. falling off the “tightrope” into an Iranian “quagmire” is one possibility, but even as I write, the words “unprecedented” and “spin out of control” appear in a Reuters article, the subject of which is “India-China tensions” (Afghanistan in focus at trilateral meet in India).  For a bigger dip into an “electrified” atmosphere, with a similar warning that “an accidental slip or go-off at the border would erode into war,” see M K Bhadrakumar’s The dragon spews fire at the elephant.  For a treatise on how “the wider struggle between the powers of Eurasia and the nations of the Periphery, led by the United States,” could manifest itself in a nuclear war, there’s Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya’s Geo-Strategic Chessboard: War Between India and China?