Asia Times: Gambit to link Iran to the Taliban backfires

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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