MORE ON IRAN & THE WOT

Below I wrote about how Iran has sometimes aided us in our war on terror and found a link on Crooks & Liars to a paper by a former U.S. intelligence expert that provides more evidence of how Iran helped us in Afghanistan.


Dealing with Tehran:
Assessing U.S. Diplomatic options toward Iran

Flynt Leverett*


In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration used the cover of the “6+2” process to stand up what was effectively a freestanding bilateral channel with Iran, with regular (for the most part, monthly) meetings between U.S. and Iranian diplomats.

U.S. engagement with Tehran over Afghanistan provided significant and tangible benefits for the American position during the early stages of the war on terror. At a minimum, U.S. engagement with Tehran helped to neutralize the threat of Iranian actions on the ground, either by Afghan proxies or by Iranian intelligence and paramilitary assets, which could have made prosecution of Operation Enduring Freedom and subsequent post-conflict stabilization more difficult. More positively, engagement elicited crucial diplomatic cooperation from Iran, both during the war and afterwards. Over years, Iran had cultivated extensive relationships with key players on the Afghan political scene, including important warlords in northern and western Afghanistan. Iranian influence was critical for arming and managing these players during the U.S.-led coalition’s military operations.

After the war, Iranian influence induced these players to support the political settlement enshrined at the Bonn Conference in December 2001, when the Afghan Interim Authority under Hamid Karzai was established.

*Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow and director of the Geopolitics of Energy
Initiative in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He is also a visiting professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between 1992 and 2003, he had a distinguished career in government, serving as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the secretary of state’s Policy Planning Staff, and senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.