By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON – The Barack Obama administration has given new prominence to a George W Bush administration charge that Iran is providing military training and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever been produced, and which has been discredited by data obtained by Inter Press Service (IPS) from the Pentagon itself.
The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO’s logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan.
Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States.
The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, despite NATO’s need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.
United States Central Command chief General David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 1, “In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the [President Hamid] Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels on June 12 that “Iran is playing a double game” in Afghanistan by “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] and coalition forces”.
The State Department’s annual report on terrorism, published April 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian elite Quds Force had “provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons”. It also charged that Iran had “arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members”.
The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report.
Asia Times for more