Confidential report from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
'The Defence of the Middle East'
(Confidential)

According to the Iranian Embassy and the Foreign Office, the recent visit to London of the Shah of Iran and his wife was a purely private one. In fact, however — in somewhat marked contrast to what was done when the King and Queen of Denmark visited London privately last year — the British government went out of its way to give the royal pair the kind of welcome which is usually reserved for State visits. They were met by the Duke of Gloucester; they were entertained at Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street; and they wound up a week of festivities and ceremonies by giving a lavish soirée themselves, of a kind which — as Mr. R.R. Stokes¹ put it — can only be afforded nowadays by Oriental potentates with revenues derived from oil royalties. In the words of the Manchester Guardian, the visit, though private, had ‘all the trappings and ceremonies of a State occasion’.

2. The British have several reasons for courting the favours of the Shah. It was he who overthrew Dr. Mussadecq² and, but for his influence and his prestige with his own people, it would hardly have been possible to negotiate the new oil agreement against the opposition of the intensely anti-British nationalist and religious sections of opinion in the country. Secondly, now that the new oil royalties have made Persia solvent and credit-worthy again, the British are keenly interested in the trade openings presented by the Shah’s rather ambitious scheme of national development and improvement. The British government have already granted Persia a ‘tied’ loan of £10 million, on the strength of which contracts for £6.6 millions worth of railway and farm machinery have been placed with British firms. Much more important than these considerations, however, is the question of Iran’s position in the general scheme of Middle Eastern defence. British policy towards Persia in the past makes it impossible for her to play any leading role in the task of enlisting Persian co-operation in Western plans for the defence of the Middle East. That is a matter for the United States with the help of Pakistan. But Britain is even more vitally concerned in the success of the task than either of these two countries, because the bulk of British oil resources are situated in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and the British are acutely conscious of the facts that (a) Iraq is militarily indefensible without possession of the mountain positions in Persian Azerbaijan which the Soviet forces occupied in 1945 and only abandoned under United States pressure; and (b) as Mr. Molotov informed Herr Ribbentrop in 1940, the ‘centre of the aspirations of the Soviet Union’ is the ‘area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian gulf’.
3. In a report of the 27th March last³ I gave an account of Anglo-American defence policy in the Middle East based on what was being said at the time in official circles here. Subsequent events have confirmed the picture given. When the idea of a Middle Eastern joint security pact had to be abandoned owing to the Anglo-Egyptian dispute and the continued tension between Israel and the Arab states, Anglo-American plans for Middle Eastern defence turned, as an alternative, to the Pentagon’s concept of the ‘Turkey-Pakistan-Suez triangle’, i.e., the policy of linking up Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in a system of interlocking mutual security pacts and of making sure of Suez, the apex of the triangle, by means of an Anglo-Egyptian settlement. The assumption was made that if this much were once achieved, the other Islamic states between the base and the apex of the inverted triangle would tend to fall into line by degrees.
4. Considerable progress has been made towards translating this policy into reality. The Anglo-Egyptian Agreement signed last October entitles Britain to re-occupy Suez in the event of an attack on any member of the Arab League or on Turkey. The apex of the triangle is thus satisfactorily assured. Within the last year also, Pakistan has made defence agreements with the United States and Turkey. Iraq has now made a similar agreement with Turkey and will shortly conclude a similar one with Pakistan. The Turkey-Iraq agreement is open to the accession of other states and it is confidently expected that at least two of the States in the Arabian peninsula will eventually come in on it. The next target is Iran and, for the reasons I have mentioned, the British have a special interest in bringing about her participation.
5. For understandable reasons, the burden of the task of enlisting Iran’s participation is being undertaken by Pakistan and, as you may have noticed from recent press messages from Karachi, the Pakistan government is confident that a mutual defence pact between Iran and Pakistan will be concluded in the near future. This is certainly the view of the Pakistani High Commissioner here, Mr. Ikramullah, who told me that, having seen the reports of recent conversations between the Shah and members of his government, he hadn’t the slightest doubt that an agreement would be signed before very long. British official opinion is not so confident. The Foreign Office believes that Iran will align itself with Pakistan and Iraq ultimately but that the process will take considerably longer than the Pakistani government seems to think. Mr. Iverach MacDonald,⁴ the Foreign Editor of the Times, told me that this is also the opinion of the Times correspondent in Teheran.
6. After Iran, it will be the turn of Afghanistan, which is of strategic importance for its control of the approaches to the passes into N.W. Pakistan. Judging from the Afghan ambassador⁵ here, his country will be extremely slow to commit itself. He told me that within recent years, the United States have been taking an increasing interest in Afghanistan, and there are now quite a number of American technicians in the country working on Point Four schemes. On the other hand, he said, in spite of the influence of the mullahs who dominate opinion in the villages and are strongly anti-Communist, there has been a considerable softening of Afghan opinion towards Communism within the last ten or fifteen years, mainly because spectacular economic and social progress has taken place in the Turkmen, Uzbek and Tadzik Soviet Republics on the Afghan northern frontier, while conditions in Afghanistan itself have remained static and backward. He mentioned as an illustration that in Uzbekistan there are over 2,000 doctors for a population of 6 million, whereas in Afghanistan, in spite of the fact that there is a medical faculty at the university of Kabul, there are only 300 for a population of 12 million.
7. The Ambassador, who was formerly Foreign Minister of his country, went on to say that the traditional policy of Afghanistan was one of delicate balance between its northern and southern neighbours. He thought it would be slow to abandon it. Even if it were otherwise disposed to do so, the dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan about the Tribal Territory in the North West Frontier Province, known as Pashtunistan, presented a virtually insurmountable obstacle. Afghanistan could not join any defence combination including Pakistan as long as the dispute lasted. This attitude bears obvious similarities to our position with regard to NATO, with the difference that the Turkey-Pakistan-Suez defence system is, for deliberate reasons, not based on any single agreement. It aims at a series of interlocking bilateral pacts of such a nature that it would be possible, for example, for Afghanistan to enter the system by means of a mutual pact with Iran, without entering into any direct treaty relations with Pakistan at all.
8. Behind the scenes, there is a good deal of scepticism and misgiving in London about the Turkey-Pakistan-Suez policy. The basic criticism is that to think in terms of building up the military defences of countries like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan simply doesn’t make sense. In the event of a major conflict, they would all be overrun within 48 hours and any military installations or infrastructure established on their territories would be lost over-night at little cost to the enemy. It is recognised that American legislation lays stress on the importance of defence commitments as a condition of foreign aid. But, in the opinion of a good few people here, more is lost than gained by the pursuit of something which in form is a policy of mutual co-operation in defence but in fact is not an effective military defence policy at all. It has all the disadvantages of military alliances in increasing tensions and providing the enemy with excuses for strengthening his armed forces, without any of the corresponding benefits.
9. People here who take this view (and they include Mr. McDonald of the Times) think that in present circumstances the economic is far more important than the military approach from the point of view of countering the Communist danger in the Middle East and, indeed, in Asia as a whole. It is pointed out that the governments of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, with whom the present pacts are being made, are little more than unrepresentative feudal oligarchies. Behind them lie large, politically immature populations subsisting on standards of living considerably lower than those obtaining in nearby or neighbouring Soviet territories. The real danger in Asia and the Middle East lies in this situation. So far popular energies in Asia and the Middle East have been absorbed in nationalist and anti-foreign movements. Corrupt and unrepresentative governments have been tolerated for their success in leading them. But once such movements achieve their objects, ideas of social revolution are likely to take over. When that happens, down will go the feudal oligarchies and their military pacts; popular opinion will be slanted against the Western powers which beguiled and bribed the despots and oligarchs with dollar aid and oil agreements; and Communism will be presented with a fertile breeding ground for the spread of its doctrines.
10. This, of course, is the point of view of Pandit Nehru, whose voice carries a great deal of weight with many people here. I gather he expressed himself freely to this effect in off-the-record talks with British press representatives during the recent Commonwealth conference. According to reports, he urged the same views very seriously on Colonel Nasser during his visit to Cairo after the Conference, and found the Colonel (who, for his own reasons, is strongly opposed to the conclusion of defence pacts between Arab States and the Western powers) a most receptive and sympathetic listener. Sir Anthony Eden is said to have spent most of the time during his recent visit to Cairo trying unsuccessfully to pull Colonel Nasser’s views back the other way. The fact is that British policy in the Middle East now finds itself in somewhat of a dilemma. On the one hand, Pakistan (mainly out of animosity towards India and a desire to curb Pandit Nehru’s pretensions to leadership of the Asian world) has assumed the initiative in the policy of building up a system of mutual defence among the states of the Middle East and S.W. Asia in association with the Western Powers; and Britain herself is committed to this policy by reason of her understanding with the United States. Pandit Nehru, on the other hand, to whose collaboration in the S.E. Asian theatre the British attach the highest importance, is rigidly opposed to Western efforts to draw Asian states into defence combinations, and he has now stolen a march on devoutly Islamic Pakistan by enlisting on his side the support of Colonel Nasser who exerts all the authority which the voice of Egypt traditionally commands with the popular masses in Islamic countries. For the British government, which is as anxious not to become embroiled with Colonel Nasser any more than with Pandit Nehru, the situation is a somewhat ticklish one, but it is not beyond the resources of Sir Anthony Eden’s well-known pliability to find a way out of it.