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March 27, 2010

Iran has been hosting regional leaders, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to celebrate the Persian New Year, or Nowruz (a spring festival whose equivalent in Pakistan, incidentally, ).

The Nowruz celebrations, which also included the presidents of Iraq, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, are part of Iran’s efforts to build regional ties and followed renewed debate over the kind of role Iran wants to play in Afghanistan. , it has also been improving ties with Pakistan, and both countries , leader of the Jundollah rebel group.

Depending on who you listen to, Iran is either an unlikely potential ally of the United States in Afghanistan, with shared common interests in stabilising the country, or a spoiler ready to support its old enemies the Afghan Taliban in order to undermine Washington’s position.  Others put it somewhere in between, like every other country in the region biding its time in order to make sense of the U.S. exit strategy from Afghanistan, while also picking its way through .

Evidence so far of its exact intentions on Afghanistan is sketchy. After initially supporting the United States following the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 -Shi’ite Iran has no natural sympathy with the hardline Sunni Taliban – it found itself branded by former president George W. Bush as part of the axis of evil in 2002, and then after 2003 squeezed between U.S. troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since then there have been regular unconfirmed , largely designed to queer the pitch for the Americans. In one of the more recent reports, . In a follow-up, however as saying that there was intelligence that Iran was instead holding off support to the Taliban and had recently refused requests for arms. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates

At the same time, Iran is keen for stability in Afghanistan in part to help clamp down on a booming heroin trade which has left it with its own huge drug addiction problem. Nearly a year ago, at a conference in The Hague attended by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

, ”in addition to hosting a large domestic consumption market for narcotics, Iran is the shortest drug trafficking route from Afghanistan to the world. Opium-based products such as morphine and heroin are usually transported to European countries and other products such as hashish are trafficked to other countries such as the Persian Gulf littoral countries. Given all of this, naturally Iran is the country suffering here.”

, “some analysts argue that Iran and the U.S. actually share the same long-term goal in Afghanistan, which is creation of a stable government. The U.S. needs a stable Afghanistan so al Qaeda and other terrorist groups don’t again form operating bases there. Iran needs a stable border free of refugees and drug trafficking.”

It quotes George Gavrilis, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iran has, overall, behaved responsibly toward Afghanistan. “Iran works furiously to protect its vast boundary with Afghanistan, responds to unrest in its border provinces with an iron fist, and avoids major intrigues in Kabul,” he wrote. As a result, it quoted him as saying, ”it’s high time for the United States to engage Iran over Afghanistan in a way that is public, decisive, and comprehensive. Strategic cooperation is possible because the United States and Iran have converging interests and common aversions in Afghanistan.”

So will we see cooperation or confrontation between the United States and Iran over Afghanistan?  The question is probably impossible to separate from the row over Iran’s nuclear programme.  And you also need to keep an eye on the role played by Saudi Arabia, Iran’s main regional rival, which along with being a staunch ally of Pakistan was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban government when they were in power from 1996 to 2001.

So far, the Saudis have been keeping a low profile - although that has not stopped other regional players engaging them on the future of Afghanistan.  Karzai has

Earlier this month, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by an Indian leader since 1982. Even Kashmiri separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq went there - an unlikely hope given that India rejects outside mediation. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, , is .

(File photo of Ahmadinejad and Karzai in Kabul)