Iran’s Turbulent Neighbour: The Challenge of the Taliban

Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University.

The rise to power in Afghanistan of the ultra-orthodox Sunni Islamic Taliban militia since its takeover of Kabul in mid-1996 has confronted the neighbouring Islamic Republic of Iran with serious dilemmas and challenges. It has undermined the Iranian regime’s claim to moral leadership of Shi’ite Muslims in the region. It has also threatened Iran’s national security by creating grievous cross-border difficulties and enabling Pakistan and its Arab friends, especially the United Arab Emirates, which is locked in a territorial dispute with Iran, to gain dominant influence in Afghanistan. At the same time, despite an initial period of ambiguous support from the United States, the Taliban have grown vocal in their anti-Americanism and this appeals to many Islamic conservatives in Iran. Yet the Taliban’s intolerant brand of Islam has allowed Iranian reformers to paint their version of the faith in the best possible light. The result has been a divided, often contradictory and ineffectual Iranian policy towards the Taliban, which the militia and its Pakistani patrons have exploited to their advantage.

That Iran’s policy towards Afghanistan has been ambiguous ever since the Soviet invasion of the country in late December 1979 is to state the obvious. While the Islamic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini opposed the Soviet invasion, it channelled its aid mainly to Shi’ite Afghan resistance forces. Even among these forces, which represented 15–20 per cent of the Afghan population, Tehran was careful to support only those which followed its ideological line and recognised Khomeini as the extra-territorial supreme leader. Iran thus primarily adopted a sectarian approach to the Afghanistan crisis, withholding active support from the seven mainstream Sunni resistance (mujahideen) groups, which represented most of the Afghan population and whose leaderships were headquartered in Pakistan. It did so for three main reasons. First, given that it was itself fighting a war (with Iraq), Iran had few resources to spare and could provide only limited assistance to the Afghan resistance. Second, the Pakistan-based mujahideen groups were mostly bankrolled, trained and equipped by Iran’s arch enemy, the United States, and by Iran’s regional Arab rivals, most importantly Saudi Arabia, and Tehran did not want to help these powers achieve their anti-Soviet and possibly anti-Iranian goals in the region. Third, Khomeini’s concern was to support those Shi’ite mujahideen groups which would secure substantial influence in a post-communist Afghanistan.

Sectarian Support

Iran pursued a policy of caution even towards the mujahideen group with which it had much in common linguistically and culturally. The Jamiati Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Society of Afghanistan) was the largest mujahideen group and, unlike its other Sunni counterparts, was dominated by the non-Pashtun ethnic minorities (such as Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkamens) making up some 60 per cent of the Afghan population. It was headed by Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani and his celebrated commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud. What held Tehran back from forging close co-operation with Jamiat was its distrust of the group’s strongly independent character.

After Khomeini’s death in June 1989, the Iranian approach remained sectarian in emphasis, even though the Iran–Iraq War had ended and Tehran was now free to release more resources in support of its Afghan policy, and even though the Soviet Union had withdrawn in humiliation from Afghanistan and was on the brink of disintegration. With the Soviet-backed communist government of Mohammad Najibullah facing inevitable collapse, Tehran sought to improve the position of the clusters of Shi’ite resistance by forcing them in 1990 to unite under one group—Hezbi Wahdat (the Party of Unity). While also publicly voicing support for the Rabbani–Massoud Jamiat group, Iran remained uneasy about Massoud’s independent stance. Massoud, who never left Afghanistan during the whole decade-long Soviet occupation, had repeatedly emphasised his independence from outside powers. He impressed upon Afghanistan’s neighbours that, in the event of the mujahideen’s final victory, he would resolutely oppose the subordination of Afghanistan’s freedom and sovereignty to foreign interests. When Jamiat emerged as the strongest mujahideen force to take over Kabul in late April 1992, and the Pakistan-based mujahideen leaders agreed to endorse Rabbani as president of the newly declared Islamic state of Afghanistan for two years from July, the development was seriously disturbing for Pakistan and somewhat unsettling for Iran.

Pakistan’s Goals

From the outset, Pakistan had expected the ethnic Pashtuns, who had historically been divided along clan and tribal lines, but constituted the largest single ethnic group in Afghanistan and populated both sides of the Afghan–Pakistan border, to rule Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which was and still is in charge of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy, had already crowned a Pashtun for this purpose—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a self-styled and highly opportunistic Islamist. The ISI had promoted Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Party of Afghanistan) as the largest mujahideen group and given it the lion’s share of outside (especially US) military and non-military aid. Tehran, on the other hand, wanted the mujahideen takeover of power to occur in such a way as to enable its Shi’ite allies within Wahdat to have a central role in the running of Afghanistan. The Rabbani government tried to reach an accommodation with both Hezbi Islami and Wahdat, but to no avail. Pakistan wanted Hekmatyar to become the undisputed ruler of Afghanistan, while Iran desired that Wahdat be given several more cabinet posts than the Shi’ites’ demographic representation could justify. Thus, instead of helping the Rabbani government to consolidate its position, Pakistan aided Hekmatyar in unleashing a savage military offensive against Kabul, and Tehran did little to restrain Wahdat from engaging in a similar action when it formed a de facto alliance with Hekmatyar and therefore Pakistan.

Iranian intelligence even forged a secret agreement with its Pakistani counterpart to support a joint military operation by Wahdat and Hezbi Islami against the Rabbani–Massoud government at the start of 1994. The operation was also supported by a former communist Uzbek leader from northern Afghanistan, Abdul Rashid Dostum (who had initially defected from Najibullah to Massoud, but had subsequently turned against the latter to realise his own ambitions). The attempted coup failed, but it seriously damaged Kabul–Islamabad relations and undermined the trust between Kabul and Tehran. In combination with previous attacks on Kabul, the operation raised the number of civilian deaths in the capital to twenty-five thousand and led to the destruction of nearly half the city. While Rabbani and Massoud not unexpectedly became very resentful of Pakistan, they also began to suspect Iran’s motives.

The whole episode demonstrated to the Pakistani authorities, especially the ISI, that Hekmatyar was the wrong horse to back, given his inability to deliver what Islamabad was looking for, namely, a government in Kabul supportive of Pakistan’s wider regional interests. Pakistan wanted to secure Afghanistan as a reward for its help in resisting the Soviet occupation and as a friendly backyard that it could use in the event of a war with its regional archenemy, India. It also sought a definitive end to a border dispute that had led successive Afghan governments to press for the creation of a client state, or what they called “Pashtunistan”, out of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier and Baluchistan Provinces. In addition, following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Islamabad was now keen to use Afghanistan as a profitable and direct corridor to the resources and markets of the newly independent Central Asian Muslim republics.

A New Force

Tehran remained ignorant of the extent of Pakistan’s regional ambitions, and continued to favour its own sectarian approach. But Islamabad found it expedient to change tack. Aware that the Afghan population had reached the point of almost total social fragmentation and military exhaustion, and was in desperate need of peace and stability, Pakistan decided to drop Hekmatyar and create a new pliable force to advance its interests, a force that would be much more extreme in its ideological disposition, and violent, ruthless and destructive in its behaviour. This was the Taliban, or “religious students” militia. The initial architect of the Taliban was Pakistan’s then-interior minister, General Nasserullah Babur, an old military hand well versed in the British policy of divide and rule, which was once deployed to maintain British control of the Indian subcontinent. But the agency that immediately ran with it was the ISI.

The new militia proved to be Afghan in appearance only and very much Pakistani in content. The ISI controlled it politically, organisationally and militarily, right down to the grass-roots level. The militia was to be composed of a mixture of extremist Sunni Pashtuns from both sides of the Afghan–Pakistan border, drawn mainly from Pakistan’s Deobandi Islamic schools, and members of the Khalq (People) wing of the former Afghan communist government, also predominantly Pashtuns but more experienced and skilled in military operations than their Islamic partners. The militia would be largely faceless, allowing the ISI to change its leaders from the top down with impunity whenever it deemed necessary. It would espouse an extreme version of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism, making it, on the one hand, anti-modern and medievalist, and so able to claim superior doctrinal purity over Rabbani’s moderate Islamic government and its mujahideen supporters, and on the other, a challenge to the Iranian brand of Shi’ite political Islam—rendering it potentially attractive to Iran’s oil-rich Arab rivals and to the United States.

In addition, given Pakistan’s own dire economic and financial circumstances, the militia would immediately promote narco-economics as the best means of generating funds, turning to poppy growing, heroin production, drug trafficking and smuggling to supplement what it was given by Arab donors. It would also emphasise such religious, moral and political practices as could motivate its poorly educated and highly malleable fighters to channel all their energy into a culture of violence and destruction. The same practices would enable the ISI to link the Taliban to certain regional and international networks of Islamic activist groups with which the agency had forged close ties during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. These groups ranged from those fighting for the independence from India of Jammu and Kashmir to those capable of threatening the interests of any actors seeking to oppose Pakistan in the region. Finally, the militia would provide Pakistan’s own Islamic militants with a solid cause on which to dissipate their energy, diverting them from opposition activities at home. Such militants had become a source of concern for the Pakistani leadership, especially following the discovery of a coup plot against the elected government of Benazir Bhutto in early 1994.

Islamabad accompanied its orchestration of the Taliban with vigorous propaganda and diplomatic offensives to keep Iran reassured that Pakistan’s aim was Muslim brotherly friendship, and that it had no motives other than to work with Iran for a peaceful settlement of the Afghan conflict in the interests of regional stability. Tehran seemed naively to embrace Pakistani assurances, and remained confident that Pakistan would do nothing to jeopardise its relations with Iran, especially given the earlier co-operation between the intelligence services of the two countries.

The Taliban Triumphant

The Taliban originally began operating from the Pakistani border city of Quetta in late 1994 as a force appointed by the ISI to protect a convoy to open up a new route through Afghanistan between Pakistan and Central Asia. However, within a short period they were able to defeat the warring mujahideen factions in the southern Afghan city of Qandahar, which they took over as their leadership base under a young, unknown, self-styled cleric named Mullah Omar. As Pakistan stepped up its logistic, financial and military help, the Taliban used a mix of financial bribery and light military operations to neutralise Hekmatyar’s forces on the way towards Kabul. By mid-1995, the Taliban had reached the gates of the capital, challenging Rabbani–Massoud control of the city with their sudden, unexpected capacity to operate some of the most sophisticated military technology: fighter bombers, radar and rocket launchers.

Meanwhile, to the surprise of most outside observers, the Taliban conquered the western province of Herat on the border with Iran—a province which had been under the control of Ismail Khan, a mujahideen bulwark and ally of Rabbani’s government. By September 1996, the Taliban had succeeded in overrunning the eastern province of Jalalabad and capturing Kabul, forcing the Rabbani–Massoud government, which had recently been joined by Hekmatyar as a result of his discontent with Pakistan, to flee to the north. In the process, the Taliban a year earlier had also routed Wahdat, killing its leader Abdul Ali Mazari in the most grotesque fashion possible and forcing Wahdat fighters to withdraw in defeat to their traditional base in the central Afghan province of Bamiyan. In all these military operations, reports filtered out that the Taliban were being directly assisted by Pakistan’s air force and army. Massoud’s capture of a number of Pakistani regulars and volunteers as prisoners of war lent credence to these reports.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates followed Pakistan in recognising the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and increased their financial aid to the militia and to Pakistan. Although these two Arab states acted for different purposes, their ultimate goals were anti-Iranian. Riyadh viewed the rise of the Taliban and Pakistan’s orchestration of them as something that could help boost Saudi Arabia’s leadership of Sunni Islam, and more specifically the Saudis’ Wahabi brand of it, and also serve as a caution to Iran against widening either its influence in Central Asia or revolutionary adventurism in the Persian Gulf. Abu Dhabi acted partly because it was persuaded by Pakistan that the Taliban were a genuinely stabilising Islamic force and that it was thus the duty of Muslims to support them. But its chief aim was to secure a strong anti-Iranian leverage. The United Arab Emirates was locked in a territorial dispute with Iran over three islands in the Persian Gulf. As the United Arab Emirates cannot match Iran for manpower and military might, its support for the Taliban and Pakistan provides it with a means of pressuring Iran on the islands issue.

The United States must have been aware of these developments, as the Central Intelligence Agency and the ISI maintained some of the close co-operation they had forged during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This may explain why Washington repeatedly passed up opportunities to criticise the Taliban for their massive human rights violations, draconian domestic policies, poppy growing and drug trafficking. It also refused to criticise Pakistan for its creeping invasion of Afghanistan. The United States appeared to be interested in the Taliban as a means of stabilising the situation in Afghanistan, countering the growth of Iranian influence and securing direct access to Central Asia. After the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, Washington quietly condoned the pursuit by an American oil company, Unocal, of a multi-billion dollar project to build a pipeline through western and southern Afghanistan to export gas from the Turkmenistan fields to Pakistan and beyond, in the process providing millions of dollars in assistance to the Taliban. Although the efforts of Unocal and several other international companies eventually came to nothing, the financial spin-off that the Taliban received undoubtedly boosted their military campaign.

A combination of American silence and Saudi–UAE financial support proved significant in enabling the ISI and the Taliban to press on with their military quest for more territorial gains, and to ignore repeated United Nations demands for a political settlement of the Afghan conflict. They remained confident that the more they changed the situation on the ground in their favour, the greater would be the chances of the Taliban gaining international recognition, and the greater would be the pressure on Iran and Afghanistan’s weak Central Asian neighbours to embrace the Taliban as the ruling force in Afghanistan.

Lost Opportunities

Tehran’s response to all these developments appeared to be one of bewilderment and political confusion. In many ways it found itself outmanoeuvred and paralysed. The situation it now faced in Afghanistan was that of a buoyant and confident Pakistan-backed Taliban, and a demoralised and fragmented opposition to them. Tehran somehow had to find a more inclusive and decisive approach to help the Afghan opposition stem the tide of the Taliban’s advance.

Iran could have provided effective support to all three main anti-Taliban forces—Jamiat, Wahdat and Dostum’s Jumbushi Melli-e-Islami Afghanistan (National Islamic movement of Afghanistan)—which now controlled a number of northern and north-eastern provinces. However, it came up with little more than an ineffectual double act. On the one hand, it refused to recognise the Taliban, instead backing a northern alliance of the anti-Taliban forces under President Rabbani, whose government continued to occupy Afghanistan’s UN seat and most of its embassies abroad. On the other, it still favoured Wahdat within the opposition alliance, and wavered when decisive action in support of the alliance as a whole was so desperately needed. It still sought to manipulate the opposition forces to check one another so that they would operate in deference to Iran’s position, whatever shape that position might take.

Tehran even welcomed Hekmatyar, the ISI’s former protégé, Iran’s most vocal critic and the person most responsible for Afghanistan’s dire predicament, to reside in Iran—this despite the fact that his support for Iran’s position was suspect at best. Tehran’s reasoning seemed to be that Hekmatyar was useful to have in store as a means of moderating the independence of Massoud, or any other Afghan leader, with the potential to counter Iran’s interests. Meanwhile, its non-recognition of the Taliban did not prevent Tehran from signalling its desire for some lines of communication with the militia. It left the Iran–Afghan border open to the Taliban, enabling them not only to continue a booming trade in goods but also to smuggle opium and heroin through Iran, rapidly creating a tragic addiction problem in the country. (Today, Iran has more than two million drug addicts.)

Furthermore, in late 1996, Iran reportedly deflected a suggestion by New Delhi—alarmed by the consequences for India of developments in Afghanistan, especially Pakistan’s use of the Taliban to enhance the fighting capacity of Kashmiri militants—to allow Indian aid to go through Iran to Massoud’s forces. It equally resisted a proposal by Rabbani’s government that it train and equip a force from among some two million Afghan refugees in Iran—similarly to how Pakistan had assisted the Taliban—to fight for the liberation of Herat and to reduce the Taliban’s military pressure on other opposition groups. Instead, Iran largely continued with its own limited direct support and diplomatic operations. Given its international isolation, it could only be partially successful in these respects.

Pakistani Duplicity

Meanwhile, Islamabad spared no effort to deceive Tehran, leading it to believe that Pakistan was still willing to settle the Afghan problem diplomatically with Iran. While urging Iran to keep looking for a political settlement, Islamabad doubled its support for the Taliban. It helped the militia maintain its military superiority and “ideological purity” over the opposition by all possible means. Consequently, the Taliban were able to establish order rapidly in the areas they captured by ruthlessly disarming the opposition and imposing a strict, anti-modern, medievalist Islamic rule such as Afghans had never before experienced. They banned all forms of entertainment, closed down all girls’ schools, barred women from working and receiving education, ordered women to cover themselves entirely and men to grow a beard, and instituted a system of justice based on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, with public mutilation and execution as common forms of punishment.

To augment the Taliban’s manpower, thousands more recruits from Pakistani Islamic schools, and hundreds of Arab volunteers with whom the ISI had networked, were allowed to join the militia. The ISI also immediately promoted one of the Pakistan-based extremist groups, the Lashkari Taiba (Army of the Pure), to act as a deadly arm of the Taliban secret police. The Lashkari Taiba hunted down the Taliban’s enemies inside and outside Afghanistan, especially in Pakistan, where dozens of Afghan personalities from previous Afghan regimes have been cold-bloodedly murdered, without the killers being traced. Of the Arabs involved with the Taliban since the militia’s inception, the most prominent is the multi-millionaire Saudi dissident, Osama Bin Laden. After the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, Bin Laden finally found sanctuary in Afghanistan. While partly financing the Taliban and elements within the ISI, he also strengthened his own Arab army, al-Qaeda (The Base), and established terrorist training camps in Afghanistan for operations against the Saudi regime and the United States and to help the ISI with its Kashmir campaign.

The worst had yet to come for Iran. By 1998, following a number of costly Taliban failures to capture the north, the ISI worked out a new and more elaborate campaign for the militia, supported by a Pakistani commitment to provide extensive military assistance, including combat troops. According to a source inside Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence, Saudi Arabia provided most of the budget for this campaign, and the United Arab Emirates bought the Taliban hundreds of Toyota pick-up trucks to help the militia with its troop transfers. Although the Taliban failed to defeat Massoud’s forces north of Kabul, they took advantage of disunity in Dostum’s ranks and by mid-1998 had swept across from west to east in the north. They also captured Wahdat’s centre of Bamiyan, and even punched through Massoud’s base of Taliqan in the north-east, only to be pushed back within a few months.

With their renewed offensive, the Taliban underlined more vividly than ever their ideological and practical challenge to Iran. They perpetrated large-scale massacres of Shi’ites in Bamiyan and Mazari Sharif, which were condemned by the United Nations and many international human rights bodies, with some analysts describing the militia’s actions as “ethnic cleansing”. The Taliban also coolly murdered seven Iranian diplomats manning the Iranian consulate in Mazari Sharif, and two of their compatriots, thereby seriously undermining Iran’s moral leadership of the Shi’ites in the region.

These developments came against the backdrop of a changed American attitude towards the Taliban, which removed a major uncertainty for the Iranians and should have enabled them to respond more decisively to events in Afghanistan. By 1997, early in President Bill Clinton’s second administration, when a number of seasoned diplomats, such as Thomas Pickering and Karl Inderfurth, were put in charge of the South Asian desk at the State Department, Washington broke its silence by criticising the Taliban’s human rights violations. But it still refrained from condemning Pakistan’s sponsorship of the militia. However, in August 1998 the chickens came home to roost for both Saudi Arabia and the United States. The US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were devastated by terrorist bombings which killed 258 people, including many Americans. Washington indicted Bin Laden for masterminding the bombings. The Taliban’s refusal to hand him over prompted Saudi Arabia to freeze its relations with the militia, and Washington launched a cruise missile attack on Bin Laden’s bases in Afghanistan. This marked a turning point in America’s attitude towards the Taliban and Pakistan, freeing Tehran from concern at the possibility of US opposition to more forceful Iranian action against the militia.

Iranian Disunity

However, the Iranian response turned out to have more noise than bite. Iran demanded that the Taliban hand over the killers of its consular officials, issue a formal apology, refrain from killing Shi’ites and negotiate a political settlement with the opposition. It also increased its criticism of Pakistan for enabling the Taliban to commit anti-Shi’ite, anti-Iranian acts and warned that this could further jeopardise Iran–Pakistan relations. To support its rhetoric Iran moved some two hundred thousand troops to the border with Afghanistan and engaged in large-scale military manoeuvres. The Taliban’s response was one of defiance. Pakistan, duplicitous as ever, reiterated its claims of friendship with Iran and non-interference in Afghanistan, promising that it would use its good relations with the Taliban to locate the killers of the Iranian staff.

Iran’s show of military strength provided some relief to a beleaguered Afghan opposition, and for a while observers believed that Tehran might finally act to help the opposition reverse the Taliban’s and Pakistan’s gains. However, this soon proved to be wishful thinking. Tehran’s sabre-rattling immediately caused a fierce debate within Iran about the utility of a military confrontation with the Taliban, but it was a debate that said more about the nature of the power struggle in Tehran than it did about Iran’s long-term regional security and interests. The Iranian reformers, led by President Mohammad Khatami, who had been elected in a landslide victory the year before, were now locked in an increasingly bitter power struggle with the Islamic conservatives, who dominated most of the instruments of state power and were backed by Iran’s supreme religious–political leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Whereas many elements in the conservative leadership wanted to punish the Taliban and to weaken the militia’s and Pakistan’s hold on Afghanistan, the reformers resolutely opposed military action for two main reasons. One was that they felt a military confrontation would play into the hands of the conservatives, allowing them to declare a state of emergency and thus seriously thwart the reformers’ agenda. Another was that they believed a military confrontation could lead to a prolonged engagement in Afghanistan, rekindling memories of the bloody and costly eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. Some in the conservative leadership also were not unsympathetic to this point. The result was that the Iranian campaign amounted to nothing more than a show of force, with Tehran failing to achieve any of its objectives. If anything, it embarrassingly diminished Iran in the eyes of the Taliban, and made it quite clear to Pakistan that Iran was in no position to counter its Afghan adventure. Although Iran declared that it would close the border and retain the bulk of the forces it had moved there, within months it had thinned out its forces substantially and reopened the border, allowing the Taliban’s transit trade to flow again. Buoyed by what they perceived as a major victory, the Taliban intensified their activities in Bamiyan and Mazari Sharif and perpetrated another massacre of Shi’ites. With the defeat of Wahdat and Dostum and the loss of most of northern Afghanistan, the only significant forces left to counter Taliban and Pakistani aggression were those of Rabbani and especially Massoud, who controlled four provinces north-east of Kabul and maintained some resistance in a couple of other northern provinces.

This left Iran with no choice but to rely mainly on Massoud to shore up its bargaining position in Afghanistan. However, the aid Iran provided was too little, too late, and fraught with enormous logistical difficulties. Massoud maintained his resistance largely on the basis of whatever he could harness from his own resources. He managed to survive a series of Taliban offensives which were commanded by senior Pakistani military and ISI officers, and supported by increased numbers of Pakistani regulars as well as Arab and Chechen mercenaries, particularly after General Parvez Musharraf established his military rule in Pakistan in October 1999. In all these campaigns, however, the only piece of territory that Massoud finally lost was the north-eastern city of Taliqan in October 2000, and he did so after six weeks of bloody fighting in which his forces inflicted heavy casualties on his opponents.

Meanwhile, the fighting revealed the scale of Pakistan’s commitment to the Taliban and of its regional ambitions. When General Musharraf seized power, he initially promised he would work for a political settlement of the Afghan conflict and do everything possible to persuade the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden. (Pakistan is the only route by which the Saudi fugitive and his associates can enter and leave Afghanistan.) He also firmly conveyed this message to President Clinton during the latter’s stopover in Pakistan in March 2000. However, by May he had retreated from this position, and under the influence of Pakistan’s military and Islamic militants he declared the Taliban a “national security” imperative for Pakistan. This declaration was promptly followed by a new Taliban summer offensive against Massoud, this time with the direct participation of Pakistan’s military. At the same time, Musharraf urged the United States to enter into direct negotiations with the Taliban over Bin Laden—a ploy Pakistan has used to gain international recognition for the militia—and remained supportively silent over the Taliban’s sponsorship of a major cross-border raid into Central Asia in August 2000. The purpose of the raid was to enforce a “carrot-and-stick” policy to gain the acquiescence of the Central Asian republics.

These developments, together with the Taliban’s refusal to budge on Bin Laden, and the alleged ISI and Taliban involvement in the hijacking by Kashmiri militants of an Indian Airline passenger plane in late December 1999, so alarmed Moscow, Washington and New Delhi that they joined forces to combat the Taliban and Pakistani menace. In addition, Massoud’s capture of more Pakistani officers and Arab and Chechen mercenaries proved just how far Pakistan was willing to go to ensure its domination of Afghanistan. By November 2000, the United States and Russia had co-operated to secure a UN Security Council resolution tightening the sanctions, including an arms embargo, which the United Nations had imposed against the Taliban. Moscow and New Delhi also sought to provide substantial assistance to Massoud as commander of the last resistance force inside Afghanistan.

Iran consented to all this, mainly through discussion with Moscow and New Delhi, given its ruptured relations with the United States. On 10 April 2001, President Khatami and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India discussed bilateral relations and mutual concerns about the Taliban in a closed-door meeting in Tehran. The two later signed a “Tehran Declaration” to bolster Indian–Iranian relations. The daily Iran quoted Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi as saying that the two countries “shared identical views” on Afghanistan and backed the establishment of a government there representative of all Afghan factions.

Implications for Iran

The Afghan situation has confronted Iran with serious ideological, security and political dilemmas. It has undermined Iran’s moral leadership of the Shi’ites in the region and disturbed the balance of power. It has also landed Iran with nightmarish problems arising from drug trafficking and drug addiction. Through it all, Iran’s Afghan policy has been indecisive, divided and weak. Whereas some Iranian hardliners advocate a more forceful stand against the Taliban, reformers oppose this in case it plays into the hands of the hardliners for domestic gains. As a result, some reformers have even advocated the opening of direct dialogue with the Taliban as a prelude to recognising the militia. Yet there is also a third group within the Iranian government which is quite happy for the situation in Afghanistan to remain chaotic and disturbed. It believes a strong and peaceful Afghanistan is undesirable as this might only encourage the oil-rich and gas-rich Central Asian states and international companies to look to Afghanistan rather than to Iran as a partner for building pipelines and doing business. This has given rise to a divided policy approach towards the Taliban, underlined by acute impotence over how to deal with the militia and counter Pakistan’s determination to dominate Afghanistan.

Wahdat as part of the Northern Alliance under Massoud’s military leadership still has a fighting capacity and has lately regained a foothold in Bamiyan. But if Tehran wants to deny the Taliban and their Pakistani backers wider regional influence, with major geostrategic implications for Iran, then it has only one option. It must stand firm against the Taliban and Pakistan, channel most of its aid to the Northern Alliance as a whole, co-operate and co-ordinate closely with Moscow, New Delhi, the European Union and Washington, and seek to resolve the dispute with the United Arab Emirates over the Gulf islands as soon as possible, thus undercutting Abu Dhabi’s incentive to fund the Taliban and Pakistan. The fact that Tehran has no direct relationship with Washington should not prevent it from dealing with Washington indirectly through Moscow and New Delhi. Yet all this depends very much on whether Iranian conservatives and reformers can co-operate to enable the Iranian security, foreign policy and propaganda apparatus to co-ordinate effectively and allow the development of a united rather than divided approach to the Taliban–Pakistani challenge. Given the power struggle in Iran, unresolved by President Khatami’s overwhelming victory in the June 2001 elections, the chances of such vital co-operation do not look good at present. But the Iranian leadership must know that it now has to make critical choices about the menace confronting it from the Taliban and Pakistan. Failure to do so may seriously threaten Iran’s regional position in the long run.