Well, this report certainly changes the equation in Afghanistan:
(CBS) The ancient city of Herat is Afghanistan’s best-kept secret.
For years, it has enjoyed 24-hour electricity and a booming economy, reports CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan.
But it’s not thanks to U.S. efforts – it’s all because of Iran.
The city lies right on Afghanistan’s border with Iran, fueling strong economic ties. But lately Iran’s been making a different kind-of investment – one increasingly worrying to the United States: it’s backing the Taliban.
A soldier from 7th Group Special Forces finds rocket propelled grenades in a hard-core Taliban village that he knows from experience, are made in Iran.
“Like right here, it says 82 mm “h-e” lot 02 slash 87,” the solider said. “The Iranians pretty much copy all of our ordinance, pretty much verbatim. They’ll even put English writing on there. But these lot numbers you’ll never see a U.S. lot number like that.”
The find confirms what U.S. commanders and troops in Afghanistan are seeing more often – a rise in the level of cooperation between Iran and the Taliban.
“I think Iran feels threatened,” said David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert. “And I think it feels that its interests are best served by being able to hurt the United States in Afghanistan.”
The west of Afghanistan, bordering Iran, is fast becoming a graveyard for U.S. forces. U.S. deaths there have spiked from four a year since the war began, to 13 in the last five months alone.
U.S. military officials have told CBS News that Iran is sending money and weapons onto the Afghan battlefield. But U.S. commanders are not allowed to comment publicly and it’s unclear to them what the U.S. strategy is for dealing with Iran’s increasingly deadly involvement.
Nuclear issues aside, this would seem to be a profound roadblock to any improvement in US-Iranian relations, which is probably why the Administration seems so intent on keeping it secret:
Why does the White House want the military to keep quiet about Iranian connections to the Taliban? They want to keep enough political support in the US for direct talks with the mullahs. That support will evaporate if the military starts drawing clear connections between Tehran and the Taliban, especially with al-Qaeda as its ally in Pakistan.
(…)
Iran sits at the nexus of radical Islamist terrorism, and has since its 1979 revolution. Obama may want to hush the military to keep that “secret,” but all it does is make the US look weak and ignorant. We should have pushed harder this summer to assist those in Iran who wanted freedom from the radical mullahs instead of giving the mullahs more legitimacy.
So it would seem.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
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