IRAN UPDATE

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

IRAN’S OTHER PROXY WAR AGAINST THE WEST

Tehran's Troublemaking in Afghanistan

America’s leaders have focused much more intensely in recent weeks on Iran’s deepening role in Iraq, where U.S. officials say the Islamic Republic is helping expand the scope and lethality of the insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition. In their testimonies before Congress last week, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker both delineated Iran’s malignant political and strategic role in the former Ba’athist state.

Increasingly, however, Iran is working its destabilizing magic on another front in the War on Terror as well. Quietly, and away from the public eye, Iran’s ayatollahs are attempting to subvert the fragile, pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.

Evidence of an Iranian hand in the former Taliban stronghold is mounting. Over the summer, the Iranian regime suddenly announced that it was expelling thousands of Afghan migrants – many of them former Taliban fighters – from its soil. The reason, observers say, was two-fold. “First, Iran wanted to weaken Sunni-led insurgents in its bordering areas,” analyst Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote in the Asia Times in July. “[S]econd, it believed that the return of the refugees would fuel the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan.”

Then, on September 6, NATO forces in Afghanistan grabbed an Iranian arms shipment intended for Taliban fighters. The thwarted delivery, which included sophisticated explosives such as armor-piercing bombs, was part of what U.S. and European officials say is a growing stream of arms flowing from the Islamic Republic to the ousted Islamist movement.

Iranian officials formally denied the allegations, but Western policymakers say that the reasons for the increasing collusion between Shi'ite Iran and its former Sunni ideological adversary are practical. “They're playing with the enemy,” one coalition official told the Washington Post. “They have no love lost for the Taliban. The Taliban killed several Iranian diplomats. We believe it's about hurting the Americans and the international community.”

All of which begs the question: are the Americans, and the international community, prepared to do anything about it?