Link
TIME, here
" ... After the 9/11 attacks, Washington and Tehran worked quietly together: Iran had helped train, arm and finance many of the fighters and commanders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which worked with the U.S. to overthrow the Taliban and drive out al-Qaeda. James Dobbins, the Bush administration's first envoy to Afghanistan after 9/11, worked with Iranian officials to set up the post-Taliban government. But relations soured when President George W. Bush balked at a broader relationship with Iran, and included Tehran in his rhetorical "Axis of Evil."
Despite its discord with Washington, Tehran has built progressively stronger economic and political ties with Afghanistan, not only with its historical allies among the country's ethnic minorities — the fellow-Shi'ite Hazaras, and the Uzbeks and Tajiks — but also with the government of President Hamid Karzai. Still, some U.S. officials charge that the Iranians are hedging their bets and also building bridges to some elements of the Taliban despite their longtime enmity towards the movement. (Iran came close to war with the Taliban in 1998, when the movement murdered nine Iranian diplomats after capturing the northern city of Mazar e-Sharif.)
Iran experts say Tehran's broad interests in Afghanistan are the same as Washington's. The Islamic Republic doesn't want to see a return to chaos on its eastern flank, which would likely lead to a massive refugee influx. As a Shi'ite state, it would see the return to power of militant Sunni hardliners as a setback. And Iran, which faces a drug addiction problem of alarming proportions, shares the U.S. desire to curtail Afghanistan's opium trade. If anything, "Tehran stands to lose much more than Washington if Afghanistan reverts back to an al-Qaeda infested, Taliban-controlled narco state," says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But shared interests may no longer be enough to get Ahmedinejad to go along with Obama's plans in Afghanistan. "Many of the hardliners who are today running Iran define their foreign policy priorities as that which is opposed to the United States," says Sadjadpour. "They may hate the Taliban, but they just might hate the United States more." Says Dobbins, who now heads Rand Corp's International Security and Defense Policy Center, "The best we can probably hope for is that Iran continues to do no harm."
Tehran certainly has the tools to make trouble. The Qods Force, an elite unit of the Iran's Revolutionary Guards, was able to stir up sectarian tension in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein: It helped arm and finance Shi'ite militias that first fought against the U.S.-led coalition, and then conducted a campaign of violence against Sunni Iraqis. The commander of the Qods Force, Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, is also credited with reigning in the Shi'ite militias in 2007 — a key factor in helping the U.S. "surge" strategy succeed.
Suleimani has been active in Afghanistan as well, having visited Kabul several times. Mark Fowler, of Persia House, says the Qods Force has likely "been putting into place covert infrastructure and developing clandestine relationships aimed both at securing Iranian interests in Afghanistan as well as providing Iran with a capability to strike U.S. Forces in the event it is [deemed] necessary."
Iran can also use political levers against U.S. interests in Kabul. Dobbins points out that the Northern Alliance constituencies with which Tehran has strong connections — Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks — are also key support bases of Abdullah Abdullah, whom Karzai beat in this year's fraud-riddled election. "The most damaging thing that Iran could do would be to encourage these elements ... to cease supporting the [Karzai] government and essentially open a third front in the current civil war," says Dobbins.
Dobbins himself doesn't think it will go that far. "This is not in Iran's long-term interest and they will not do it unless their competition with the U.S. comes to dominate their policy toward Afghanistan, which it has not to date," he says. Sadjadpour is not so sanguine, warning, "It [wouldn't] be the first time Iran has cut off its nose to spite its face."
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