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Ghotbzadeh was not the only one to wonder. Nearly a month after the invasion, Western intelligence officials were still perplexed about the Soviets' strategic intentions. One school speculated pessimistically that the number of Soviet troops and the size and sophistication of their weapons were far in excess of what was needed to quell an internal insurgency. Afghanistan, according to these suspicions, could be only a steppingstone on the way to further military aggression, either west into Iran or possibly south into Baluchistan. Straddling both Iran and Pakistan, this area is inhabited by fiercely independent Baluch tribesmen who have long sought autonomy from both countries. The other school maintained that the Soviet move was basically a defensive, self-contained operation aimed at rescuing a crumbling client regime. The military overkill, one Western European envoy argued, simply represented "typical Russian thoroughness—using more force than necessary in order to make sure." In any case, no one disagreed with the argument that the introduction of brute Soviet power into the region had raised a fearsome set of further options—most of them Moscow's.