State Dep’t Official: Iran Definitely Arming Taliban

In a statement echoing February’s claims that the Iranian government was arming Iraqi terrorist groups, Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s influential undersecretary for political affairs, told CNN today that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is arming the Taliban as well:

“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 [sic]. 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.

Burns’s comments come a little more than a week after Defense Secretary Bob Gates said that it wasn’t yet certain whether the presence of Iranian weaponry in Afghanistan indicated a concerted strategy on the part of the Iranian government. Now, apparently, the evidence has become “irrefutable.”

If Iran is in fact aiding the Taliban, it’s aiding an old enemy. In 2001, according to a presidential rival to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guard helped U.S.-backed Afghan fighters overthrow the Taliban. (U.S. intelligence officials have called the claim somewhat overblown.) The theory goes that now, Iran feels so threatened by U.S. forces on its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan that it will cast its lot in with whomever fights the Americans, despite old antipathies. It’s known as “managed chaos.” Muhammed Tahir, writing for the Jamestown Foundation, contends, “Iran has been increasing its operations in Afghanistan in an effort to gain influence with the contending insurgent factions and to hasten the departure of U.S. troops from the country.”

It’s a plausible enough theory, given that Iran remains surrounded by U.S. forces led by a bellicose administration, but it remains unclear what Burns’s “irrefutable evidence” of Iranian strategy is, and how it represents an improvement over the evidence Gates possesses. Determining the ultimate provenance of Iranian weaponry is tricky. Last year, the Guardian reported that Iranian operatives were offering military support to Taliban-held areas in Afghanistan — but most likely, those Iranians were Baluch seperatists fighting Tehran, rather than Iranian government agents. That’s not to say that the Iranians aren’t supplying the Taliban — only that “irrefutable” evidence of who’s arming who in Afghanistan is often more refutable than it might initially appear.