US revives talk of Iran-Taliban ties
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The Barack Obama administration has given new prominence to a
George W Bush administration charge that Iran is providing military training
and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever
been produced, and which has been discredited by data obtained by Inter Press
Service (IPS) from the Pentagon itself.
The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious
talks between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials and Iran
involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO's logistical support for the war
against the insurgents in Afghanistan.
Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has
been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the
United States.
The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of
increasing political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear program,
despite NATO's need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.
United States Central Command chief General David Petraeus declared in
testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 1, "In
Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for
the [President Hamid] Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to
the Taliban."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels on June 12 that "Iran
is playing a double game" in Afghanistan by "sending in a relatively modest
level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF [International Security
Assistance Force] and coalition forces".
The State Department's annual report on terrorism, published April 30, 2009,
claimed that the Iranian elite Quds Force had "provided training to the Taliban
on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons". It
also charged that Iran had "arranged arms shipments including small arms and
associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets,
and plastic explosives to select Taliban members".
The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda
Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department's Office of the
Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about
those charges in the report.
A military official who refused to be identified told IPS the charge of Iranian
assistance to the Taliban was based on "an intelligence assessment", which was
limited to "suspected" Iranian shipment of arms to the Taliban and did not
extend to training. That admission indicates that the charge of shipments of
weapons to the Taliban by Iran is not based on hard evidence.
The only explicit US claim of specific evidence relating to an Iranian arms
shipment to insurgents in Afghanistan has been refuted by data collected by the
Pentagon's own office on improvised explosives.
In an April 2008 Pentagon news briefing, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Admiral Mike Mullen said in reference to Iranian authorities, "[W]e're seeing
some evidence that they're supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan."
When pressed by reporters for the evidence, however, Mullen admitted that there
was no "constant stream of arms supply at this point" and that the basis for
the charge was primarily "evidence some time ago" that Iranians were providing
armor-piercing EFPs (explosively formed projectiles) to the Taliban.
That was a reference to a July 2007 allegation by the US command in
Afghanistan, under obvious pressure from the White House, that Iranian-made
EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan.
Colonel Tom Kelly, a US deputy chief of staff of the ISAF, told reporters on
July 18, 2007, that five EFPs that had been found in Herat near the Iranian
border and in Kabul were "very sophisticated", and that "they're really not
manufactured in any other places other than, our knowledge is, Iran".
That was the same argument that had been used by the US command in Iraq to
charge Iran with exporting EFPs to Shi'ite insurgents there.
But in response to a query from this writer last July, the Pentagon's Joint
Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), which is responsible
for tracking the use of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, provided the
first hard data on EFPs found in Afghanistan. The data showed that there was no
connection on which to base even an inferential connection between those EFPs
and Iran.
Every one of the 13 EFPs reported to have been found in Afghanistan up to that
time was "crude and unsophisticated", according to Irene Smith, a spokesperson
for General Anthony Tata, JIEDDO's deputy director for operations and training.
In fact, the insurgents in Afghanistan had not shown the ability to make the
kind of EFPs that had been found in Iraq, Smith said.
The US command in Afghanistan, moreover, does not appear to be an enthusiastic
supporter of the administration's political line on the issue. NATO officials
began a serious dialog with Iran last March which focused on the possibility of
moving supplies for NATO troops to Afghanistan from Iranian ports.
At an off-the-record seminar in Washington last month, a senior US military
officer in Afghanistan said the Iranian policy toward Afghanistan was neither a
"major problem" nor a "growing problem" for the war against the Taliban,
according to one of the attendees.
The lack of enthusiasm of the US command in Afghanistan for charges of Iranian
support for the Taliban suggests that the impetus for such charges is coming
from those in the administration who are trying to ramp up the overall pressure
on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program.
Gilles Doronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says he sees sharp
differences between the position of those responsible for Afghanistan and those
whose primary concern is Iran's nuclear program.
"You have one discourse of officials in Afghanistan, who would support
collaboration with Iran," Doronsoro said in an interview with IPS. "It's very
clear that those people don't want a crisis with Iran and don't want to push
Iran too far."
But those who want to put pressure on Iran to stop its enrichment program, he
said, "are acting as though they are building some kind of legal case against
Iran".
The Bush administration initially claimed it had evidence of Iranian aid to the
Taliban in 2007 that didn't exist, only to have it refuted by the US command in
Afghanistan. (See Gambit
to link Iran to the Taliban backfires
, Asia Times Online, Jun 13, 2007.)
In April and May 2007, NATO forces in Helmand province found mortars, C-4
explosives and electrical components believed to have been manufactured in
Iran. Then under secretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns
asserted that the United States had "irrefutable evidence" that those weapons
were provided to the Taliban by the Quds Force of Iran's Iranian Revolutionary
Guards Corps.
When State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was questioned about the Burns
statement on June 13, 2007, McCormack admitted that the charge was an
inference.
General Dan McNeill, then the top US commander in Afghanistan, rejected the
idea that any official Iranian role could be reasonably inferred from Iranian
weapons showing up in Afghanistan.
"[W]hen 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. McNeill said he had "no information to support that there's
anything formal in some arrangement out of Iran to provide weapons here".
The obvious alternative explanation for Iranian weapons in arms shipments is
that drug lords and the Taliban have used commercial arms smugglers to get the
weapons from Iran into the country. Arms dealers have close ties with Afghan
officials, and have been reported to use police convoys to carry smuggled arms,
according to a BBC2 television report last September.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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