Officials Revive "Iran-Taliban Connection"

Iran and the Taliban, once mortal enemies, are now supposedly cooperating. Or maybe they're not cooperating. It's hard to tell, but it certainly sounds familiar.

Earlier this week Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns was quoted by CNN as saying there was a clear Iran-Taliban connection:

The United States has "irrefutable evidence" that Tehran is transferring arms to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, a top U.S. diplomat told CNN Wednesday, noting that NATO forces have intercepted some of the arms shipments.

"There's irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this and it's a pattern of activity," U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told CNN.

"If you see the Iranians arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank and, of course, arming Shia militants inside Iraq itself. It's very violent and very unproductive activity by the Iranian government."

And one that puts Tehran contrary to the U.N. Security Council, Burns said.

This statement, however, actually reminds me of back during the 2000 elections, when Condoleezza Rice, a Sovietologist by training, claimed there was an Iran-Taliban connection, only to be mocked for her ignorance in a New York Times article (which also noted that Bush thought the Taliban was a rock band):

*Of course, Afghanistan is also not Ms. Rice's primary area of expertise. Asked in an interview to support her assertion in her recent article in Foreign Affairs that Iran is trying to spread "fundamentalist Islam" beyond its borders, she replied, "Iran has been the state hub for technology and money and lots of other goodies to radical fundamentalist groups, some will say as far-reaching as the Taliban." *

When reminded that Iran was a bitter enemy of the Taliban and that the two countries had almost gone to war in late 1998, she replied, "They were sending stuff to the region that fell into the hands of bad players in Afghanistan and Pakistan." She did not identify "the bad players." (In a subsequent conversation, she said that of course she knew that Iran and the Taliban were enemies).

While some headlines today make it sound like Defense Secretary Gates confirmed these connections, actually he didn't. He said the government in Tehran must be aware of the shipments, because of the scale of the arms shipments. But he didn't say it was the government responsible for the arms. So, he didn't contradict Burns, but neither did he confirm what Burns claimed.

So which is it? There's actually a big difference between "knowing about" illegal shipments and being responsible for such illegal shipments (Iran, for example, knows about illegal drug smuggling across the border, but the government isn't behind those shipments).

In the meantime, Afghanistan's defense minister denies that Iran is supplying arms to the Taliban.