Entangled Alliances

photo credit: Stewf

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that Iran has its own agenda in Afghanistan, but U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates seems to be cross about it anyway. From the Guardian:

It must have felt very uncomfortable for President Hamid Karzai to have his guest and “brother”, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, use a press conference in Kabul to attack Afghanistan’s main donor and ally, the United States. “They themselves created terrorists and now they’re saying that they are fighting terrorists,” said Ahmadinejad, accusing the US of playing a “double game” in Afghanistan.

Ahmadinejad was in fact returning a compliment by the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, who only hours earlier had accused Tehran of “playing a double game” of offering friendship to the Afghan government while at the same time giving “low-level support” and money to the Taliban.

Of course Iran is playing a double game, though as the article points out it’s not actually the Taliban that Iran are likely to be funding but instead anti-Taliban warlords. But in any event Iran shares a border with Afghanistan – a fact that someone should remind Robert Gates of – so obviously Iran are going to want to fund the various factions that might at some point take  control of the country, so that whatever the future holds for its government Iran has some influence over it. An even more obvious point is  that Iran are hardly going to ignore the fact that there are American soldiers prowling round the Iran-Afghahnistan border and since the relationship between Iran and America is not exactly tip-top, they’re probably going to want to make sure they have some connections in that area.

One lesson from this is that U.S. Defence Secretaries say silly things. The more  important point though is that so many of the clashes the U.S. has with Iran are a result of the deep fear and suspicion of what America has in store for it in terms of military intervention. If you’re going to sort out the relationship between the two countries, you’ve got to do something about that.