What Is Iran’s Deal?

One thing I’ve become pretty frustrated by is the U.S.’s insistence that Iran is directly aiding the Taliban. Those accusations, at least by officials in speeches, have been little but: just a throwaway line like “Iran is funding the Taliban” then a quick segue into something about Iraq or Pakistan or Karzai or something. But from what I can tell (and this NYT background piece offers a good overview), it amounts to weak physical evidence and a lot of guess work.

I’m not saying it’s impossible Tehran is actively helping the very people that almost sparked an invasion and outright war between the two countries last decade; I’m saying their differences run deeper, and the consequences of a Taliban win are so much stronger, that I find it difficult to accept without actual evidence that Iran is involved in the weapons trade in western Afghanistan. This is for reasons that vary from religious differences (fanatical Shiism vs. fanatical deobandism) to geopolitical ones—Iran first of all likes Karzai as a friendly leader, and second of all, does not want an emboldened Taliban taking over vast swaths of the country and posing the same threat it did last century. It makes intuitive sense for Iran to fund the Shiite militias in Iraq; it does not make intuitive sense to fund the Sunni militia in Afghanistan.

Iran, however, is not above funding Sunnis when it suits their purposes—its support of Hamas has been incredibly successful as a proxy against Israel, and during the Afghan civil war Tehran backed Sunni factions that resisted Taliban rule.

Funding the Taliban just enough to keep the U.S. and NATO off balance and occupied with cooling a simmering countryside seems the most logical guess of the bunch. But even this is fraught with such risk, I would be surprised to see a normally risk-adverse leadership council tempt fate in this way. If Iran gets successfully blamed for American failure in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the temporary ego boost they feel will be quickly tempered by American bombs raining down on every nuclear facility the DoD the CIA can find. Furthermore, if Iran does successfully support insurgents in both wars just enough to force an American withdrawal from Iraq and a refocus on Afghanistan, they’re in trouble, as the tables will suddenly turn as Iran must try as hard as it can to keep Iraq from spilling over while not being able to fight a pissed off and determined U.S. by proxy to the east.

In other words, unless an extremely delicate balance is struck between support and neutrality, it is a big time loser strategy for Tehran. If Kabul’s legitimacy is permanently weakened or destroyed, the Taliban go back to having every advantage they had on their first sweep through in 1994.

And here’s the real nightmare scenario, at least for NATO: the big problem is not necessarily IEDs, which are deadly but can be mostly dealt with either through MRAPs or metal detection. The device that gives everyone nightmares is the explosively formed projectile, or EFP—those, which punch big holes through the thickest armor we have and flood crew cabins with burning high explosives, wreck even the largest tanks. There is no protection against them. And they are generally considered so sophisticated (and difficult to copy) that when high-tech Iranian models show up somewhere, everyone thinks there is official sanction.

Unless, that is, they can be made at home. That is the nightmare—that outside assistance is no longer needed to manufacture the deadliest shaped explosives.

Putting another big wrinkle into the DoD’s plans to involve Iran and the Taliban: rogue or clandestine units of the Iranian government could be assisting some Taliban units without the official sanction of even knowledge of Tehran—kind of an ISI-style arrangement. That is also a nightmare scenario, as it means Iran’s intelligence services have far more autonomy that we know how to realistically counter.

So while it’s nice to hear SecDef Gates go on about Iranian involvement, especially when it’s done cased in a threatening speech that for the life of me sounds like a warmup to either the punitive bombing or outright invasion of Persia, I’d really like to see why and how they are so confident he feels okay making such a blanket statement for public consumption. And until the DoD ponies up the reasons why it thinks there is direct, official Iranian involvement, I can’t believe a word they say on the topic—it would be indistinguishable from a politician claiming there are WMD in a… Oh hell, I don’t want to go there.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust