Pentagon denies Cheney's Iran-Taliban claims
Provided by Inter Press Service (IPS), civil society's leading news agency, is an independent voice from the South and for development, delving into globalisation for the stories underneath.
pressureworks.org.uk December 6, 2007

A media campaign portraying Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban guerrillas fighting American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, appears to have backfired last week when US defence secretary Robert Gates issued unusually strong denials.

The allegation that Iran has reversed a decade-long policy and is now supporting the Taliban, conveyed in a series of press articles and TV reports quoting 'senior officials' in recent weeks, is related to a broader effort by officials aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney to portray Iran as supporting Sunni insurgents, including al Qaeda, to defeat the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

An article in the Guardian published May 22 quoted an anonymous US official as predicting an 'Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive in Iraq, linking al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies' and as referring to the alleged 'Iran-al Qaeda linkup' as 'very sinister'.

That article and subsequent reports on CNN, ABC, Washingston Post and the BBC all included an assertion by an unnamed US official or a 'senior coalition official' that Iran is following a deliberate policy of supplying the Taliban's campaign against American, British and other NATO forces.

In the most dramatic version of the story, US network ABC reported 'NATO officials' as saying they had 'caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces.'

Far from showing that Iran had been 'caught red-handed', however, the report quoted from an analysis which cited only the interception in Afghanistan of a total of four vehicles coming from Iran with arms and munitions of Iranian origin. The report failed to refer to any evidence of Iranian government involvement.

US defence secretary Robert Gates flatly denied last week that there is any evidence linking Iranian authorities to those arms. Gates told a press conference on June 4, 'We do not have any information about whether the government of Iran is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it's smuggling, or exactly what is behind it.' Gates said that 'some' of the arms in question might be going to Afghan drug smugglers.

The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, implied that the arms trafficking from Iran is being carried out by private interests. '[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here,' he told Reuters. 'That's not my view at all.'

Gates and McNeill are obviously aware of the link between arms entering Afghanistan from Iran and the flow of heroin from Afghanistan into Iran.

It is well known that Afghan drug lords who command huge amounts of money have been able to penetrate the long and porous border with ease. They have undoubtedly been involved in buying arms in Iran with their drug proceeds for both themselves and the Taliban, which protects their drug routes. Smuggling is relatively easy because of the money available for bribery of border guards.

Another factor helping to explain the influx of arms from Iran, as noted by former Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan Rustam Shah Momand, is that the Taliban now controls areas on the Iranian border for the first time.

Momand said the Taliban, which is awash in money from the heroin exports to Iran, buys small quantities of weapons in Iran and smuggles them back into Afghanistan.But the Iranian government itself is not involved in the trade in arms, Momand insisted.

The combination of anonymous statements by administration officials and the dismissal of the charge by the commander in the field contrasts sharply with the Bush administration's claims that Iran was sending armour-piercing IEDs to Shiite militias in Iraq last January and February.

Those accusations, which were never backed up with specific evidence, were made publicly by Bush himself, the State Department and US military command in Baghdad.

The fact that the officials making the accusation about Iran and Afghanistan are unwilling to go on the record and the refusal of Gates and McNeill to go along with it suggests an effort by Cheney and his allies in the administration to do an 'end run' around the official policy by conjuring up a region-wide Iranian offensive against US forces.

The line being pushed by the Cheney group in the administration that Iran is supplying the Taliban with arms appears to be based on a highly imaginative reading of some recent intelligence reporting on Iranian contacts with the Taliban. A source with access to that reporting, who insists on anonymity because he is not authorised to comment on the matter, told IPS that it indicates Iranian intelligence has had contacts with the top commanders of the Taliban's inner Shura -- the leadership council located in Kandahar.

However, the source also says these intelligence reports do not provide any specific evidence of an Iranian intention to give weapons to the Taliban.

The Cheney group is evidently arguing within the administration that the mere existence of contacts between Iranian intelligence and Taliban commanders, combined with the presence of arms or Iranian origin, is sufficient reason to conclude that Iran has changed its policy toward the Taliban.