Iran’s hosting of Taliban reflects desire for greater role

Iran quietly hosted a delegation of Taliban members in Tehran this month in a powerful and unusual signal of its ambition to shape the trajectory of the Afghan conflict as U.S. troops begin to withdraw.

Iranian officials had apparently hoped to facilitate a meeting between the delegation and Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and leader of the country’s reconciliation efforts who was attending the same conference in Tehran, according to Rabbani associates. Although that did not happen, the presence of the Taliban members suggests Iran has cultivated deeper ties with the insurgent group than was previously known, and is stepping up efforts to influence its eastern neighbor as the U.S. role recedes.

The relationship between Iran and the Taliban’s central leadership has long been deeply fraught; when the Taliban was running Afghanistan in the 1990s, the two countries came to the brink of war.

U.S. officials have for years accused Iran of fueling the Afghan war by providing training and sophisticated weapons to individual insurgent commanders, although they have described Iran’s role as minimal compared with other regional players. There have been few signs of senior-level contact between the Taliban and Iran.

Hosting Taliban members at the Tehran conference might have been an attempt by Iranian officials to mend ties as it becomes clear the group will be a major power-broker in Afghanistan after the United States withdraws its last combat troops in 2014, analysts said. U.S. officials have launched their own initiatives to talk to the Taliban, to little avail.

“Iran considers itself a regional player with a legitimate stake in Afghanistan and it doesn’t want to see progress that runs contrary to its political interests,” said Michael Semple, who has decades of experience in Afghanistan as a diplomat and a scholar. “If the price of Iran having a role in the next step is dealing with the Taliban, then they are prepared to do it.”

The Islamic Awakening conference was organized by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in the nation’s policies. Held in mid-September, the conference drew more than 700 scholars and Islamist political figures from around the world.

The Afghan government was represented by Rabbani, who a year ago was tasked with leading Afghanistan’s High Peace Council. Days after attending the conference, Rabbani was slain by a man posing as a Taliban negotiator. The two events do not appear to have been linked.

Council members say they have made virtually no headway in starting peace talks because the Taliban has shown little interest in a negotiated settlement to end the war. But the Tehran conference marked an unusual opening. Arsala Rahmani, a member of the council who traveled to Tehran with Rabbani, said he was startled when he saw Nik Mohammad, a former colleague from their years together as Taliban government officials.

“They seldom come to public events and when they do, they use aliases,” said Rahmani, who served as deputy education minister when the Taliban controlled Kabul un the late 1990s.

Rahmani said the two men shook hands but exchanged nothing beyond pleasantries.

“It was not in the typical way Afghans use to greet each other,” he said. “It was done in a very cool manner.”

Rahmani said that Mohammad, who was heading the small Taliban delegation, is an influential leader who is in contact with the top members of the Taliban’s ruling Quetta Shura.

Semple said that although Mohammad is on a United Nations sanctions list for terrorists, there has been little public evidence that suggests he is actively involved in running the Afghan insurgency. Mohammad served as deputy commerce minister during the Taliban regime.

Waheed Mozhdah, a political analyst who was with Rabbani’s delegation, said he first learned about the Taliban delegation as he leafed through the conference program and found two names he recognized. They were listed as representing what was described as the American Opposition Front in Afghanistan: Nik Mohammad and Tayeb Agha.

The latter is an aide to Taliban leader Mohammad Omar who reportedly held talks with American officials this year in Qatar and Germany. Agha apparently stopped talking to Western officials after his role in the talks was disclosed. None of the members of Rabbani’s delegation said they saw Agha, but two noted that some members of the Taliban delegation hid their faces with scarves.

At one point, Mozhdah said, the Iranian hosts asked Rabbani’s delegation whether they would object to giving the Taliban representatives an opportunity to make public remarks.

“There were various opinions,” said Mozhdah, who worked in the Afghan Foreign Ministry during the Taliban’s reign. “One side said let them come and express what they have to say.”

Mozhdah said he objected, arguing to Rabbani that such a move would “damage the relation between Kabul and Tehran.”

The Iranian hosts suggested instead that Rabbani make time to speak privately to the Taliban representatives on the sidelines of the conference, Mozhdah said. In the end, no such discussions took place, according to members of Rabbani’s team.

“We feared that if we were to do so, it would show our weakness,” said peace council member Qazi Amin Weqad, who also attended. “We were also scared of getting a negative response, such as, ‘You need to talk to the Quetta Shura.’ ”

A State Department spokesman declined official comment on the Tehran conference. Administration officials have said Iran has a legitimate interest in Afghanistan and a role to play in promoting regional stability. As part of its own efforts to promote Taliban reconciliation, the Obama administration has sent senior emissaries to all of the countries bordering Afghanistan, except Iran.

A predominantly Shiite nation, Iran supported the Northern Alliance as it fought the Taliban during the 1990s. The Taliban, a hard-line Sunni organization that was in power between 1996 and 2001, came close to war with Iran in 1998 when eight Iranian diplomats were killed in Afghanistan.

When U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Iran began to broaden commercial and diplomatic ties with Afghanistan. Iranian leaders have become concerned about keeping Afghanistan’s insurgency and illicit drugs from coming across Iran’s eastern border.

The presence of Taliban members at this month’s public conference appears to have received little notice in Iran, or beyond. But the news coverage it got provides insight into why Iranian leaders decided to invite a Taliban delegation.

A Sept. 24 article on the influential news Web site Khabar, which is supportive of the supreme leader, described the presence of Taliban and Afghan government representatives as a watershed moment.

“Officials who had never gathered in one place were now discussing current issues of the area together,” the article said.

Referring to the U.S. talks with Taliban representatives earlier this year, the piece said: “It should be noted that the radical forces in Afghanistan have not accepted mediations from [the] West.”

Correspondent Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran, staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul contributed to this report.

Source: The Washington Post