Iran, US take their fight to
Afghanistan By M K Bhadrakumar
Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is not beyond making
gaffes. When the clever editors of the Chicago
Tribune recently prompted him to discuss his
former commander-in-chief Bill Clinton's "Don't
ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality among US
servicemen, Pace responded that homosexuality was
as "immoral" as adultery.
Senator Hillary
Clinton, among others, promptly objected. For a
week, it seemed Pace elbowed out the killing
fields of Iraq from
the
great American debate.
Therefore, it might seem at
first glance Pace was making a ridiculous gaffe on
Tuesday when he implied Iran could be arming the
Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Pace told
reporters in Washington, "We know there are
munitions that were made in Iran that are in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Either the leadership in that
country knows what their armed forces are doing,
or that they
don't know. And in either case,
that's a problem." Pace added that Iranian-made
mortars and C-4 explosives were intercepted in
Kandahar.
But it is well known in the
Afghan bazaar that the country is awash with
Iranian weapons that were supplied to Northern
Alliance groups during the anti-Taliban resistance
in the late 1990s. The London-based Institute for
War and Peace Reporting has been monitoring
erstwhile Northern Alliance groups based in the
north of Afghanistan clandestinely selling their
stockpiles of weapons to the Taliban. A
north-south corridor of arms smuggling seems to be
in place. North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) contingents have independently confirmed
such smuggling.
There was nothing new
about weapons with Iranian markings being found in
Kandahar. Was Pace making another gaffe? No, Pace
cannot be unaware of the lay of the land in the
Afghan war zone. He must be a good soldier to hold
such high office. But, as Bertolt Brecht wrote in
his famous play The Caucasian Chalk Circle,
"A good soldier has his heart and soul in it. When
he receives an order, he gets a hard-on, and when
he drives his lance into the enemy's guts, he
comes."
Pace was speaking on orders. No
sooner had he spoken than three senior officials
of the George W Bush administration took over -
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Assistant
Secretary of State Richard Boucher and White House
spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Perino
essentially kept Bush out of the controversy, but
what was interesting was that Gates and Boucher
spoke while traveling abroad in regions relevant
to Iran and the Afghan war. Gates was in Cairo,
and Boucher spoke while on a visit to Brussels
aimed at drumming up European support for the
Afghan war.
Gates was categorical about
Iranian government involvement. He then proceeded
to discuss the Iranian government's Afghan policy.
Gates said, "We don't know at what level this has
been approved by the Iranian government or in the
Iranian government. We don't know the magnitude of
the assistance. It's obviously troubling and
worrisome that the Iranians may be deciding to
counter the efforts of some 42 nations in
Afghanistan to establish a strong democratic
state. So we'll watch it very closely."
Evidently, Gates went overboard by
inviting the US's allies and friends to join in
his condemnation of Tehran. Indeed, it strains
credulity that the Iranian government has taken a
virtual u-turn in its policy toward the Taliban.
Iran is a big player in Afghanistan. It has
thoughtfully exploited any new opportunities in
the past five years to spread its influence and
ideas within Afghanistan. Iran has pursued a
nuanced strategy where various elements and policy
instruments have been brought into almost optimal
interplay - reconstruction, education, propaganda,
good-neighborliness, trade, investment, economic
interdependence and religion and ethnicity.
Conceivably, like any other outside power,
Iran would keep up a certain tempo of intelligence
activity inside Afghanistan in the nature of
surveillance, information-gathering, and
recruitment of agents.
Iran has made no
bones that its Afghan policy is essentially
three-pronged. First, Iran must hasten the
vacation of the American military presence in
Afghanistan. Second, everything possible should be
done to ensure that the Taliban don't regain power
in Kabul. Third, it is in Iran's historical,
cultural and geopolitical interest to ensure that
western Afghanistan remains in its sphere of
influence.
But despite its self-image as
an ascendant regional power, Iran has relied on
soft power in advancing its policy objectives. In
2006, Iran issued close to half a million visas to
Afghan nationals to visit Iran. Its contribution
to Afghan reconstruction has been stunning -
almost nearing US$1 billion.
Iran decided
to live with President Hamid Karzai's enduring
links with the security establishment in
Washington. Iranian mediation was crucial in his
induction into Kabul five years ago. Iran
pretended it didn't notice that the US lowered the
bar of democracy for getting Karzai elected as
president. And, all the while, it kept counseling
Shi'ite leaders to cooperate with Karzai.
Iranian propaganda doesn't berate Karzai's
government for being ineffectual or corrupt, even
though Tehran is uneasy about the aggravation of
the Afghan situation. Unsurprisingly, Karzai
visualizes Tehran as a balancing factor in Kabul's
troubled equations with Islamabad. Out of all
Afghanistan's neighbors, apart from New Delhi
perhaps, it has been with Tehran that Karzai's
government has kept up steady exchanges at the
political level.
Kabul has time and again
indicated that it has its perspectives on friendly
relations with Iran, which are based on the
imperatives of Afghanistan's national interests,
no matter the tensions between Washington and
Tehran. Similarly, Tehran appreciates that
Karzai's government has its limitations in
influencing US activities on Afghan soil directed
against Iranian interests. Even with regard to the
removal of Ismail Khan from the post of governor
of Herat two years ago, Iran decided to take the
US-engineered move in its stride.
Tehran
has a fundamental problem with the Taliban's
virulent anti-Shi'ite ideology - the main reason
why Saudi Arabia and the US found the Taliban
movement attractive in the mid-1990s. The Iranian
leadership will not easily forget or forgive the
Taliban for massacring (often burying alive)
thousands of Shi'ites in the Hazarajat region and
in northern Afghanistan during its years in power
in Kabul. In Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997, when the
Taliban executed eight Iranian diplomats, Tehran
came close to war.
Without doubt, Iran was
a principal backer of the Northern Alliance.
Tehran not only rendered huge amounts of material
and military assistance to the Northern Alliance
groups, then-Iranian special envoy Alae'ddin
Broujerdi (presently chairman of the Majlis' -
Parliament's - foreign affairs and security
commission) was a frequent visitor to the Amu
Darya region and Panjshir Valley, cajoling and
motivating the anti-Taliban resistance. Without
Broujerdi's persuasive skill, Northern Alliance
groups, ridden with petty jealousies and
personality conflicts and turf problems, would
have unraveled.
Thus, as the Guardian
newspaper reported quoting Western officials in
Kabul, what Gates said "is all a war of words. It
has very little basis in reality." The remarks by
Boucher corroborate the British daily's
impression. "We have been seeing a series of
indicators that Iran may be getting more involved
in an unhealthy way in Afghanistan," Boucher said
in carefully calibrated language.
He
maintained, "I don't want to overstate it. We have
seen these things that I've noted; the weapons
that General Pace talked about show up in
Afghanistan; seen reports of political involvement
by Iran, and these are things that we are watching
very carefully." But Boucher refrained from
finger-pointing: "We don't know exactly who is
doing this and why but we know that these are
Iranian-origin weapons that have shown up in the
hands of the Taliban."
By Iran's
"political involvement", Boucher seemed to refer
to the formation of the so-called National Front
(NF) in Kabul a fortnight ago, which bears a
striking resemblance to the defunct Northern
Alliance but seeks reconciliation with the
Taliban. Not only is the National Front headed by
former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, but other
Northern Alliance leaders have joined it as a
collective leadership - Ahmad Zia Masoud, Mohammad
Qasim Fahim, Yunus Qanooni, Karim Khalili, Rashid
Dostum, Mohammed Mohaqiq, Ismail Khan, among
others.
Tehran's role, if any, in the NF's
formation; the timing of the NF's formation; the
NF's demand for national reconciliation with the
Taliban; its willingness to accommodate Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar; its forays into Karzai's Pashtun base
(the NF includes Mustafa Zahir, grandson of former
king Zahir Shah) - all these are nagging
questions. On top of all this, it must have
exasperated Washington to no end that Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is preparing to make
a visit to Kabul in the near future.
It
shouldn't come as a surprise if Iran's Afghan
policy is beginning to turn in a widening gyre
even while on the well laid out five-year-old
track. One thing is beyond doubt. Tehran must be
regretting its role in establishing a post-Taliban
regime in Kabul under American influence.
Characteristic of the American philosophy of
"winner-takes-it-all", once American control over
the Kabul regime was legitimized internationally,
Washington began seeking a rollback of Tehran's
influence in Afghanistan, including in the western
provinces.
Of late, details have begun to
emerge that American intelligence has been
training and equipping anti-Iranian terrorists
belonging to the so-called Jundollah in camps
inside Afghanistan. The Voice of America recently
interviewed Jundollah leader Abdul Malek Rigi. He
is a wanted by Tehran for several kidnappings and
over 50 killings. In the latest incident, on March
25, Jundollah terrorists blocked the Zahedan-Zabol
highway in Sistan-Balochistan province, killing 22
people, injuring six others and taking eight
people as hostages. Later, four of these hostages
were killed and the video footage of their killing
was broadcast on a number of Arab television
channels.
The leadership in Tehran has
sized up the unprecedented nature of the US threat
to the Islamic regime. Iranian rhetoric is
beginning to resemble the stridency of the early
years of the 1979 revolution when imam Ruhollah
Khomeini fought off wave after wave of US assaults
aimed at crippling the Islamic regime.
Once again, like during the Iran-Iraq war
in the 1980s, pro-Western Arab regimes are falling
in line with the US diktat. Saudi Arabia's
historic compromise in making the Arab League
enter into talks with Israel virtually opens the
way for Riyadh to have overt dealings with Tel
Aviv in the near future on the pretext of
discussing a settlement of the Palestinian
problem. Washington is all but clinching a
Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian-Israeli arc of hostility
toward Iran.
Meanwhile, the huge US
military buildup in the Persian Gulf region
continues. Gates just concluded a visit to Israel
- the first such visit by a US defense secretary
in the past eight years.
Tehran
understands that despite the talk of a "diplomatic
solution", Bush is ratcheting up tensions. Given
the Democratic Party's close links with the
Israeli lobby, it endorses Vice President Dick
Cheney's line that "all options are on the table"
when it comes to making Iran bend. In such a
dangerous scenario, Tehran will not act
impetuously. Persians do not behave like Texan
cowboys - "my-enemy's-enemy-is-my-friend". It is
illogical that Iran would open a new front in
Afghanistan, either.
Besides, Iran
estimates carefully that any link-up with the
Taliban (and al-Qaeda), howsoever tactical, could
have unforeseen long-term consequences. Also,
Iranians have a fairly accurate assessment of the
complexities of the US's dealings with the
Taliban. Iranians have all long suspected that
there is a convergence of interests between the
US, Britain and Pakistan to keep the Afghan war
going at a certain level of intensity as a
justification for perpetuating the Western
military presence in the region.
Without
doubt, Tehran realizes that continued American
occupation of Afghanistan is irreconcilable with
its vital interests and core concerns. But, at the
same time, Afghanistan's long-term stability is of
utmost concern to Tehran. Thus, the Iranian
reaction to the US support for terrorism will be
measured and proportionate. The Iranians know that
the Afghan war is largely a war dominated by spin.
We may expect that Iran will use all its
influence in Afghanistan, which is quite
considerable, to make Washington realize that its
support of terrorism from Afghan soil comes at a
heavy price. Pace unlikely thought through before
he spoke on Iranian support of the Taliban. But,
then, as Frederick the Great once said, if his
soldiers were to begin to think, not one would
remain in the ranks. M K Bhadrakumar
served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service for over 29 years, with postings including
India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and
to Turkey (1998-2001).
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don't know. And in either case,
that's a problem." Pace added that Iranian-made
mortars and C-4 explosives were intercepted in
Kandahar. 
