Gambit to link Iran to the Taliban
backfires By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A media campaign portraying
Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban fighting US
and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in
Afghanistan, orchestrated by advocates in the US
administration of a more confrontational stance
toward Iran, appears to have backfired. Last week,
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the
commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General
Dan McNeil, issued unusually strong denials.
The allegation that Iran had reversed a
decade-long policy and was now supporting the
Taliban, conveyed in a series of press
articles quoting "senior
officials" in recent weeks, is related to a
broader effort by officials aligned with US Vice
President Dick Cheney to portray Iran as
supporting Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaeda,
to defeat the United States in both Iraq and
Afghanistan.
An article in the London
Guardian published on May 22 quoted an anonymous
US official as predicting an "Iranian-orchestrated
summer offensive in Iraq, linking al-Qaeda and
Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shi'ite militia
allies" and as referring to the alleged
"Iran-al-Qaeda linkup" as "very sinister".
That article and subsequent reports on CNN
on May 30, in the Washington Post on June 3 and on
ABC (American Broadcasting Co) news last Wednesday
all included an assertion by an unnamed US
official or a "senior coalition official" that
Iran is following a deliberate policy of supplying
the Taliban's campaign against US, British and
other NATO forces.
In the most dramatic
version of the story, ABC reported "NATO
officials" as saying they had "caught Iran
red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C-4 explosives
and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use
against NATO forces".
Far from showing
that Iran had been "caught red-handed", however,
the report quoted from an analysis that cited only
the interception in Afghanistan of a total of four
vehicles coming from Iran with arms and munitions
of Iranian origin. The report failed to refer to
any evidence of Iranian government involvement.
Both Gates and McNeil denied flatly last
week that there was any evidence linking Iranian
authorities to those arms. Gates told a press
conference on June 4, "We do not have any
information about whether the government of Iran
is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it's
smuggling, or exactly what is behind it." Gates
said "some" of the arms in question might be going
to Afghan drug smugglers.
McNeil implied
that the arms trafficking from Iran is being
carried out by private interests. "When you say
weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest
there is some more formal entity involved in
getting these weapons here," he told Jim Loney of
Reuters on June 5. "That's not my view at all."
Gates and McNeil are obviously aware of
the link between arms entering Afghanistan from
Iran and the flow of heroin from Afghanistan into
Iran. It is well known that Afghan drug lords, who
command huge amounts of money, have been able to
penetrate the long and porous border with ease.
They have undoubtedly been involved in buying arms
in Iran with their drug proceeds for both
themselves and the Taliban, who protect their drug
routes. Smuggling is relatively easy because of
the money available for bribery of border guards.
Another factor helping to explain the
influx of arms from Iran, as noted by former
Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan Rustam Shah
Momand in an interview on Pakistan's GEO
Television on April 19, is that the Taliban now
control areas on the Iranian border for the first
time. Momand said the Taliban, who are awash in
money from heroin exports to Iran, buy small
quantities of weapons in Iran and smuggle them
back into Afghanistan.
But the Iranian
government itself is not involved in the trade in
arms, Momand insisted.
The combination of
anonymous statements by US administration
officials and the dismissal of the charge by the
commander in the field contrasts sharply with the
administration's claims that Iran was sending
armor-piercing improvised explosive devices to
Shi'ite militias in Iraq in January and February.
Those accusations, which were never backed up with
specific evidence, were made publicly by President
George W Bush himself, the State Department, and
the US military command in Baghdad.
The
fact that the officials making the accusation
about Iran and Afghanistan are unwilling to go on
the record and the refusal of Gates and McNeil to
go along with it suggest an effort by Cheney and
his allies in the administration to do an "end
run" around official policy by conjuring up a
regionwide Iranian offensive against US forces.
Steve Clemons reported on his weblog The
Washington Note on May 24 that an aide to Cheney
has told gatherings at right-wing think-tanks that
Cheney is afraid Bush will not make the "right
decision" on Iran and believes he must constrain
the president's choices.
Iran long
regarded the Taliban regime as its primary enemy
and was the first external power to support Afghan
forces in an effort to overthrow it. It is not
merely a sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite divide but the
Pakistani government's patronage of the Taliban
that has made them irreconcilable enemies of Iran.
The line being pushed by the Cheney group
in the US administration that Iran is supplying
the Taliban with arms appears to be based on a
highly imaginative reading of some recent
intelligence reporting on Iranian contacts with
the Taliban. A source with access to that
reporting, who insists on anonymity because he is
not authorized to comment on the matter, said it
indicates that Iranian intelligence has had
contacts with the top commanders of the Taliban's
inner shura - the leadership council in
Kandahar.
However, the source also said
these intelligence reports do not provide any
specific evidence of an Iranian intention to give
weapons to the Taliban.
The Cheney group
is evidently arguing within the administration
that the mere existence of contacts between
Iranian intelligence and Taliban commanders,
combined with the presence of arms or Iranian
origin, is sufficient reason to conclude that Iran
has changed its policy toward the Taliban.
That argument parallels a key assertion
made by Cheney and other neo-conservative
officials in constructing the case for war against
Iraq in 2002. They insisted that any contact
between an official of the Iraqi government at any
level and anyone in al-Qaeda was sufficient proof
of the government's support for al-Qaeda
terrorism.
Afghanistan specialist Seth
Jones of the Rand Corporation, who visited
Afghanistan most recently this year, said some
elements of the Iranian government may be involved
in arms trafficking but it is "very small-scale
support" and Iran does not want to strengthen the
Taliban.
NATO commanders in Pakistan have
long been aware that the Taliban have been
dependent on Pakistan for their arms and
ammunition. The London Telegraph reported on
Sunday that a NATO report on a recent battle shows
that the Taliban fired an estimated 400,000 rounds
of ammunition, 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and
1,000 mortar shells and had stocked more than a
million rounds of ammunition, all of which came
from Quetta, Pakistan, during the spring months.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
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