Saturday, July 04, 2009
Gen. David Petraeus
Picking up where the Bush administration left off, U.S. officials have been claiming in recent months that Iran has been helping the Taliban in Afghanistan—an assertion not backed up by hard evidence and downplayed by others fighting the war.
General David Petraeus, commander of CENTCOM, told Congress in April that Iran was “providing opportunistic support to the Taliban,” and later that same month the State Department asserted in its annual terrorism report that the Iranian Qods Force was supplying Taliban fighters with weapons and training. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated this claim in June, telling the media Iran was “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities” to Afghanistan.
But an investigation by the Inter Press Service found that the Pentagon had concluded there was no evidence linking Iran to the improvised explosive devices used by the Taliban. Furthermore, according to the Inter Press Service, a senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan told reporters last month in Washington that Iran was neither a “major problem” nor a “growing problem” for the U.S. against the Taliban.
Indeed, the Shi’a government of Iran has had mostly hostile relations with the extremist Sunni Taliban. When they were in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban treated the Shi’a minority harshly, and in August 1998 Taliban forces seized the Iranian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif and executed eight Iranian diplomats and a journalist.
Gilles Doronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says there is a divide in the Obama administration between those seeking to stop Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program, who seem to be behind the claims of Tehran-Taliban linkage, and others trying to gain Iran’s help in the war in Afghanistan.
-Noel Brinkerrhoff
Massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif 1998 (Hazara Nation)
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