Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Raymond Tanter

The role of Iran in fueling insurgency in Iraq, particularly attacks against U.S. forces, has been well-documented and forms one front in Iran’s proxy war against the United States. Receiving much less attention than Iraq, is the role Iran has played in supporting anti-NATO insurgents in Afghanistan as a second front against U.S. and NATO forces.

At first blush, such support seems bizarre given the intense antagonism between radical Shiites in Tehran and the fringe Sunni Taliban movement, each of which sees the other as lying outside the bounds of true Islam. Indeed, the two were at odds throughout the 1990s, at times approaching what some considered a full-blow regional crisis. Late 1998 saw the Taliban murder of hundreds of Shiites in Mazar-e-Sharif and an Iranian buildup of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps troops along the border with Afghanistan.

By 2000, however, the Taliban had dispatched an emissary charged with reaching out to the Iranian regime, Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa. Cooperation, even with ideological enemies, fits with Tehran’s pattern of willingness to work with any ally to oppose the United States. (Iranian regime support for Al Qaeda in Iraq is part of this trend.)

During a January 2000 meeting in Iran, its representatives offered weapons assistance in light of the Taliban’s inability to procure weapons on the open market; and at a November 2001 meeting, Iranian diplomats offered anti-aircraft weaponry to the Taliban for use in impending action with the United States and NATO and offered safe passage of fighters, weapons, and money across the Iran-Afghanistan border.

Direct Iranian government assistance to the Taliban was first alleged by U.S. officials during 2007. In January of that year, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns alleged that “There’s irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this and it’s a pattern of activity.… It’s certainly coming from the government of Iran. It’s coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a basic unit of the Iranian government.”

A 2007 Treasury Department Fact Sheet identifies the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Qods Force as Tehran’s main vehicle for providing the Taliban with financial and weapons support. Secretary Gates has argued that the quantity of materiel proffered to the Taliban from Iran requires senior Iranian government involvement. Such support, even if not directly ordered by senior political leadership in Tehran, is certainly known of and allowed to continue unabated.

The same Explosively-Formed Penetrator IEDs Iran ships to Iraq are turning up in western Afghanistan, a previously quiet area compared to the eastern border with Pakistan. There have been 15 U.S. deaths in western Afghanistan in the last five months. One Taliban commander told BBC News in mid-2008 that Iranian businessmen sell Explosively Formed Penetrators, called “Dragons,” at a premium price to select Taliban commanders. In addition to businessmen who sell the weapons, the Taliban commander added that “There are people inside the state in Iran who donate weapons.” The Afghan press is reporting in October 2009 that Afghan security forces confiscated 860 Iranian-made land mines in northern Afghanistan. Tehran is also escalating by sending shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to Afghanistan, which would greatly complicate NATO operations.

General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, alleges in his September report to the White House that in addition to supplying weapons, “The Iranian Quds Force is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups.”

As U.S. forces gradually shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, Tehran likely sees the opportunity to bog down the American military in a way it was unable to do in Iraq. Such an analysis accords with American assessments that see the U.S. position in Afghanistan as tenuous at best.

The Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council (P5+1) initiative to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and use maximum leverage to do so, diminishes the ability of NATO countries to use diplomacy to discourage Iranian support for the Taliban. Success against Iranian infiltration in Afghanistan will almost definitely require changing the security environment on the Afghanistan side of the border, rather than transforming the behavior of Tehran on the Iranian side of the border.

As President Obama weighs General McChrystal’s request for some 40,000 additional troops to execute a population protection counterinsurgency strategy, it is important to bear in mind that with external support from the likes of Tehran, the Taliban is unlikely to be defeated by anything less than rejection by the Afghan people themselves. To this end, the United States may be well-advised to seek support of members of Pashtun tribes that have formed alliances of convenience with the Taliban. A counterinsurgency strategy with enough U.S. forces to win the trust of locals by providing security will be essential to allow the American military to wean some of the Taliban’s tribal Pashtun allies away from the insurgency.