Summary
Given the fragmented nature of the Afghan political system, and the limits of Iranian influence in the country, Iran cannot, on its own, and even cooperating fully with the USA and the west, deliver a settlement in Afghanistan. Tehran’s rivalry with Pakistan, moreover, will continue, whatever happens in Kabul.
However, any initiatives that seek to involve Iran in a negotiation process must take into account both Iran’s specific goals in Afghanistan, and also the broader pattern of regional rivalry and promotion of state influence of which both Afghanistan and the nuclear programme form part.
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As was evident in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when Iranian diplomats worked with western officials to promote a transitional government in Kabul, Iran has been, and remains, one of the most influential countries in Afghanistan and an essential interlocutor, if not partner, in any diplomatic process designed to limit the conflict there.
At a time when, as is evident to an increasing number of observers, there can be no purely, or even mainly, military solution in Afghanistan, and when three major western leaders, of the UK, France and Germany, have called for an international conference before the end of 2009, Iran’s position has become, therefore, of renewed international importance.
However, recognition of this Iranian role, and of Iranian participation and possible good will as a precondition for peace in Afghanistan, is complicated by other, equally cogent, considerations. Any involvement of Iran in a multilateral negotiating process on Afghanistan encounters three obstacles. One is internal to Afghanistan: the very fragmentation of the political and regional situation within Afghanistan, a result of historic diversity compounded by years of war, as in Iraq, makes the attainment of any political settlement, and even the most consensual of external involvements, such as might be that of Iran, all the more difficult – even if in the past this was the case, no outside power can ‘deliver’ its allies.
The second obstacle is international: any attempt to involve Iran in negotiation or a loose multilateral process will collide with the ongoing and, in recent weeks, apparently rising tension between Iran and the west on the nuclear issue, and the related international controversy over Iran’s newly repressive and assertive regime, following the disputed June presidential elections.
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, a broad measure of overlap between Iranian and western, not least, US interests and goals is overridden by the exacerbated regional context. Finally, as on all issues, including the nuclear question and Palestine, the Iranian government itself remains divided, with a consequent impact on its foreign policy.
Iranian Policy and Goals
Although Afghanistan has been, since its creation as a buffer state in 1747, under considerable Iranian cultural, economic and political influence, with the Shah playing a particularly active role, rivalling the USSR in the 1970s, and with Persian serving as the main langue of culture and government, Iran has not, since the conjoined revolutions in Tehran and Kabul of 1978-1979, been able to exercise political or strategic dominance in Afghanistan.
Unlike other countries where it has an active, organised and armed following, (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine), Iran has been more limited in its role in Afghanistan. During the war against Soviet forces between 1979 and 1989 the two Shiite guerrilla groups backed by Iran played a much less important role, and received much less foreign support, than did the seven major Sunni groups, organisations that Tehran viewed with suspicion, given their links to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the USA, and the espousal by these groups of anti-Shiite, hence anti-Iranian, attitudes.
Indeed, in an interview with a senior Iranian diplomat in Tehran in 2000, he told me that Iran had made a big mistake in not working with the communist regime, one of the three ‘big mistakes’ of the Islamic Republic (the other two being the detention of the American hostages in 1979-1981, and the rejection of Iraqi peace offers in 1982).
While Iran’s involvement in the war of the 1980s was, in military and economic terms, limited, the war had a major impact on Iran, in the form of the flow of refugees: the Afghan refugee population in Iran had, by the late 1980s, become the largest in the world, a situation made more costly for Iran because, as a result of disputes with the UN and the UN Security Council over the war with Iraq in the west ( 1980-1988), it refused to deal with, or accept funding from, the UNHCR.
When the communist regime fell in 1992 to the mujahdeen, Iran at first sought to develop normal and collaborative relations with the government of President Rabbani, and positioned itself, in a general way, as friendly to, if not a patron of, the Northern Alliance of guerrillas, based on the Tajik Panshir valley. The advent of the Taliban to power in 1996, seen in Tehran as a manoeuvre by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to reassert tighter control, led to a marked deterioration in relations: in 1998 a group of Iranian diplomats was killed by Taliban forces in the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif, and the countries came close to war.
This conflict with the Taliban extended to Kabul’s Islamist allies in al-Qaeda: the latter, an extreme Sunni groups, articulates much of the hostility to Shiites (as apostates, polytheists, traitors) taught in religious schools in Saudi Arabia and propagated by radicals inside Pakistan. Iran had no role in 9/11 and reacted by supporting US indignation and then military action, attending the conference in Bonn, in November 2001, that paved the way for the establishment of the new regime in Kabul.
However, this initial collaboration between Iran and the west, specifically the US, did not last: Bush’s January 2002 speech placing Iran in the ‘Axis of Evil’, with Iraq and North Korea, rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme and the conflict in Iraq after the US invasion of March 2003, where Tehran was blamed for supporting America’s enemies, in effect ended co-operation. Iran has, since then, pursued its goals in Afghanistan separate from the US and its western allies. If it has co-operated with any country, it has been Russia, with whom it shares broad goals. These can be summarised as follows:
- support for the central government under President Karzai, as a stabilising force, and opposition to the return of a Taliban government;
- seeking solutions to the conflict, and resultant movement of population, that increase refugee pressure on Iran or make it more difficult to repatriate refugees;
- reducing the flow of Afghan drugs exported to, or transported via, Iran, which now has, for the first time in its history, a major narcotics problem amongst its population;
- controlling and, ideally, reducing and removing the influence and military presence of the USA and, by extension, of its traditional rival in Afghanistan, Pakistan. The rivalry with Pakistan is deep-seated and explains, in part, Iran’s nuclear programme.
Current Iranian Policies
Against this background, Iran has, since 2001, pursued a cautious but consistent policy towards Afghanistan. It has continued to support President Karzai, and has welcomed senior Afghan officials to Tehran. It has sought to work with the Afghan government on issues of refugees and drugs. Lacking a client party, as it originally had in Iraq, it has resorted to backing the Kabul government, and the Northern Alliance, while at the same time seeking to promote the interests of the Shiite population, about 20% of the total.
It has looked with favour on the increase in Russian influence – military, economic, political – directly and via the former Soviet republics where Russia retains a strong security role (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), not least because good relations with Russia and the Central Asian states, as with China and India, helps it to lessen western economic pressure.
More immediately, Iran has, in the face of the chaotic situation in much of the rest of Afghanistan, and the limited import of any influence it may have in the capital itself, moved to establish a defensive buffer zone along its frontier, in effect seeking to annex, or at least significantly control, the three Afghan provinces along its frontier. Here Iran has considerable influence in trade, security and political matters, even as local officials and warlords seek to assert their own interests and bargaining power.
The Interrelationships of Regional Conflict
The prospects for significant cooperation with Tehran over Afghanistan, or at least of reasonable if implicit support for western goals, are, at the moment, limited. Tehran feels that its collaborative behaviour in 2001, far from being rewarded, was abused by Washington. Similarly, the quiet backing it has given to the US in Iraq, in particular by encouraging its Iraqi allies to sign the troops redeployment and withdrawal agreement of December 2008, has not altered US, and EU, pressure over the nuclear issue.
However, the nuclear issue is not entirely separate from the situation of Afghanistan, or indeed from the range of regional issues, including Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, on which the west and Iran have diverged in recent years. Both themes, apparently distinct, revolve around the core issue of Iran’s regional role and western recognition of this. Iran’s nuclear programme has, for sure, a military goal: in the first place, to deter external attack, of the kind Iran suffered from Iraq in 1980 and in Iraq, in its turn, from America in 2003.
But as, or more, important is the political and strategic logic of this programme, namely to enhance Iran’s standing in West Asia and to enable it to bargain more effectively with its regional and international interlocutors, in such a way as to give Iran a say in the settlement of regional disputes. It is regional politics, not purely military concerns, or ‘proliferation’, that explain Iran’s nuclear policy, and with this set of regional issues, Afghanistan, and, of equal importance, the rivalry with Pakistan, play a central role.
Given the fragmented nature of the Afghan political system, and the limits of Iranian influence in the country, Iran cannot, on its own, and even cooperating fully with the US and the west, deliver a settlement in Afghanistan. Tehran’s rivalry with Pakistan, moreover, will continue, whatever eventuates in Kabul. However, any initiatives that seek to involve Iran in a negotiation process, in late 2009 or later, must take into account both Iran’s specific, and in themselves not unreasonable, goals in Afghanistan, and also the broader pattern of regional rivalry and promotion of state influence of which both Afghanistan and the nuclear programme form part.
At the moment, with an apparent failure by western states to connect the different parts of Iranian policy and concern, and with increasing pressure on Iran over nuclear matters even as the situation deteriorates in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would seem that the opposite, and very dangerous, policy is being pursued.
