A few days ago, I asked what Iran might possibly be trying to accomplish through it’s supposed Taliban support. A potential answer might come from the latest round of meetings between Stomatologbashi and his counterparts in Iran:
Turkmenistan and Iran continue to build on their relationship, but NBCentralAsia experts say a closed political alignment with Tehran would disrupt Ashgabat’s plans to diversify its energy export routes, so future cooperation will probably be limited to the economic sphere…
President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov paid an official visit to Iran on June 16, where agreement was reached on Iran’s role in a road and railway construction project that will link Kazakstan with the Gulf.
The presidents of Turkmenistan, Iran and Kazakstan will sign the “North-South Corridor” agreement when they meet at a Caspian states summit in Tehran, the date of which is yet to be fixed.
So Iran is angling to turn itself into the hub for Caspian Energy. This would make sense—building a pipe network along the sea’s southern edge would probably be cheaper than sinking pipes along the sea bed, and at the least would provide an alternative for dealing with an increasingly heavy-handed Russia.
How would supporting the Taliban factor into all this? I can only speculate. Though the U.S. steadfast refusal to strengthen ties with Berdymuhammedov still irk me six months after Turkmenbashi’s death, Tehran might still be worried the U.S. will make a move in Ashgabat. Keeping attention focused on Afghanistan and Iraq (remember Iran has a hand in both) makes this much more difficult—we can barely manage one stupid war, to say nothing of the smaller one. Throwing Taliban collaboration into the mix turns the whole area into a nasty red zone for American interests (including personally belligerent moves like the jailing of American scholar Haleh Esfandiari while she was visiting her sick mother).
As I said originally, this still seems like a negative-sum game for Iran, as it’s too easy to push too hard and see all your above-ground nuclear facilities suddenly exploded by JDAMs. Which means, instead of balancing the U.S, Iran might just be looking for a way to develop while severely isolated diplomatically. Back in March, I speculated that building nuclear reactors would be a cheaper way of generating power than building out oil capacity, at least when most of it is for internal consumption. Adding to the pipe network along the northern shoreline would be a huge coup for Tehran, especially if it can convince Ashgabat to foot some of the bill.
Indeed, none of this hypothesizing is new to regular readers. But it seems like Tehran is getting ready to make its move—a Persian Central Asia.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 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
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