Tehran’s Hand in the Taliban

Tehran’s Hand in the Taliban

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/02/tehrans-hand-in-the-taliban/

Posted by Matt Gurney on Aug 2nd, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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WikiLeaks, the website that offers up pilfered military, government and corporate information for all the world to see, recently scored a coup when it posted online 77,000 documents (a further 15,000 in the possession of WikiLeaks have not yet been released), obtained by means unknown from the U.S. military and relating to the Afghan war. The sheer quantity of the documents means that it will be some time before they can be fully digested, but their raw data have shook governments throughout NATO. President Obama himself has expressed his concern at the risk such leaks pose to the national security of the United States and the safety of troops overseas.

Much of the media’s initial focus was on how the war in Afghanistan is going, in the eyes of the soldiers fighting it. The answer was self-evident — war is hell, the going is tough, the Taliban are a fearsome, determined enemy and victory is far from certain. Such information is readily available to anyone who reads a newspaper, and did not require a sensationalized leak. Nor is the fact that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the ISI, is deeply involved in supporting the Taliban surprising in any way, having already been well covered. What is becoming clear, however, is that despite the continued desire of the Administration to find an accommodation with Iran on issues concerning Israel and Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran continues to actively work against America and its allies and is directly complicit in attacks that have claimed the lives of unknowable numbers of allied soldiers.

The sheer quantity of documents released makes it impossible for there to be a full understanding so early on of what it is they reveal. Despite the initial buzz, much of the reaction to the documents thus far suggests that they are a letdown, or as John Barry wrote in Newsweek, “There is less to the documents than meets the eye.” They reveal little that was not already known to observers of the war, and the documents, mostly unedited battlefield reports, reflect the inaccuracies of documents written in haste. (In one telling example, it was suggested that the loss of four Canadian soldiers to friendly fire was covered up. In fact, friendly fire was initially suspected before it could be confirmed that it was indeed Taliban fire that killed the Canadians, not an errant American bomb, which landed nearby but did not detonate.)

All the same, what has been revealed about Iranian meddling in Afghanistan is interesting, especially given that it’s a topic that both the Bush and Obama administrations chose not to overly publicize while diplomatic efforts to contain the Iranian atomic program continued (as they still do). Iran is reported to offer safe haven to Taliban leaders, to support the training of Taliban soldiers on Iranian soil and to supply insurgent forces inside Afghanistan with weapons and explosives that are in turn used against the allies and Afghan forces. Bounties are offered for Afghan troops and politicians, particularly pro-Western reformists, and bribes offered to government officials. Pro-Iranian thugs are put into positions of authority and used as conduits for supplies and men, as well as for influence, to advocate a pro-Iranian agenda and to provide intelligence for Tehran. Suicide vests have been directly linked back to Iran by forensic evidence.

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