Conflicting arms claims on Iran
reveal US rift By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - In a development that
underlines the tensions between the anti-Iran
agenda of the US administration and the
preoccupation of its military command in
Afghanistan with militant Sunni activism, a State
Department official last week publicly accused
Iran for the first time of arming Taliban forces,
but the US commander of North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan rejected
that charge for the second time in less than two
weeks.
Under Secretary of State Nicholas
Burns declared in Paris on June 12 that Iran is
"transferring arms to the Taliban in
Afghanistan", putting it in
the context of a larger alleged Iranian role of
funding "extremists" in the Palestinian
territories, Lebanon and Iraq. The following day,
he asserted that there was "irrefutable evidence"
of such Iranian arms supply to the Taliban.
The use of the phrase "irrefutable
evidence" suggested that the Burns statement was
scripted by the office of Vice President Dick
Cheney. The same phrase had been used by Cheney
himself on September 20, 2002, in referring to the
administration's accusation that then-Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein had a program to enrich
uranium as the basis for a nuclear weapon.
But the NATO commander in Afghanistan,
General Dan McNeill, pointed to other possible
explanations, particularly the link between drug
and weapons smuggling between Iran and
Afghanistan.
McNeill repeated in an
interview with US News and World Report last week
a previous statement to Reuters that he did not
agree with the charge. McNeill minimized the scope
of the arms coming from Iran, saying: "What we've
found so far hasn't been militarily significant on
the battlefield."
He speculated that the
arms could have come from black-market dealers,
drug traffickers, or al-Qaeda backers and could
have been sold by low-level Iranian military
personnel.
McNeill's remarks underlined
the US command's knowledge of the link between the
heroin trade and trafficking in arms between
southeastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. The
main entry point for opium and heroin smuggling
between Afghanistan and Iran runs through the
Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan to its
capital, Zahedan. The two convoys of arms that
were intercepted by NATO forces last spring had
evidently come through that Iranian province.
According to a report by Robert Tait of
The Guardian on February 17, Sistan-Balochistan
province has also been the setting for frequent
violent incidents involving militant Sunni groups
and drug traffickers. Tait reported that more than
3,000 Iranian security personnel had been killed
in armed clashes with drug traffickers since the
1979 Islamic Revolution.
McNeill further
appeared to suggest in the interview with US News
that not all the arms coming from the Iranian side
of the border were necessarily Iranian-made.
Munitions in one convoy, he said, "were without a
whole lot of doubt in my mind Iranian-made",
implying that the origins of the arms were not
clear in other cases.
McNeill's rejection
of Burns' accusation reflected the views of Afghan
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, who told
Associated Press on June 14 that it was
"difficult" to link the arms traffic to the
Iranian government. Wardak said the arms "might be
from al-Qaeda, from the drug mafia or from other
sources".
The clash between key civilian
officials and the command in Afghanistan over the
explanation for the arms entering Afghanistan from
Iran followed a series of news stories in late May
and early June quoting an anonymous US
administration official as claiming proof of a
change in Iranian policy to one of military
support for the Taliban. These anonymous
statements of certainty about such a policy shift,
for which no intelligence has ever been claimed,
pointed to Cheney's office as the orchestrator of
the campaign.
Given the very small scale
of the arms in question, Cheney's interest in the
issue appears to have much less to do with
Afghanistan than with his aim of ensuring that
President George W Bush goes along with the
neo-conservative desire to attack Iran before the
end of his term.
The US military command
in Afghanistan, on the other hand, sees the
external threat in Afghanistan coming from
Pakistan rather than from Iran. US commanders
there are very concerned about the increase in
Taliban attacks launched from Pakistan's North
Waziristan and South Waziristan after Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf's truce with
Islamic separatists in those border provinces last
year.
McNeill told a press conference on
June 5 that there can be no "long-term stability"
in Afghanistan "if there are sanctuaries just out
of reach for both the alliance and the Afghan
national-security forces that harbor insurgents".
Apparently reflecting Cheney's dominant
influence on policy, the Bush administration has
continued to defend the Musharraf government's
policy of compromise with the Pakistani Islamists
and has said nothing publicly about the rise in
Taliban attacks launched from Pakistan or the
massive arms flow from Pakistan to Taliban forces.
US military officials in Afghanistan could
be expected to be skeptical about an anti-Iran
propaganda line aimed at making it more difficult
for Bush to resist neo-conservative pressures for
a war against Iran. An attack on Iran could only
make the task of coping with the threat from the
Taliban more difficult.
Burns, who served
in senior positions in the Bill Clinton
administration, is part of Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's team, which is resisting
Cheney's pressures for preparations for an attack
on Iran. But the Burns statements came during a
visit to France that was aimed at ensuring the
French government would support tougher sanctions
against Iran in the United Nations Security
Council if Iran did not suspend enrichment of
uranium within a week or two.
So Rice
apparently agreed to the new accusation against
Iran to strengthen the US argument for tougher
sanctions - a Bush administration policy with
which she and Burns have both been identified
since late 2005.
Meanwhile, despite the
public statement by Burns indicting Iran, both the
State and Defense departments appear to have
adopted a more ambiguous position on the issue. In
the daily press briefing by the State Department
on June 13, spokesman Sean McCormack did not claim
that Iran has actually changed its policy toward
the Taliban, much less support the "irrefutable
evidence" language used by Burns.
"At this
point we can't make that assessment," McCormack
said in regard to a change in Iranian policy.
Asked by reporters to explain the
categorical language used by Burns, McCormack
offered the rather awkward explanation that Burns
was merely expressing the "concerns and
suspicions" that everyone in the administration
had about Iran's intentions. That remark in effect
undercut the use of the headline-grabbing language
by Burns, but was buried in media coverage of
Burns' remarks.
Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, who was then on his way to a NATO meeting
on Afghanistan, did not repeat a previous
dismissal of the charge of Iran's arming the
Taliban, but also failed to endorse the language
used by Burns.
"I would say, given the
quantities [of arms] that we're seeing, it is
difficult to believe that it's associated with
smuggling or the drug business, or that it's
taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian
government," Gates said.
However, Gates,
who had denied on June 4 that there was any
evidence linking the arms trade to Iran, made the
significant admission that he had seen no new
intelligence supporting such speculation.
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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