Here’s where it gets confusing for me. One day the top US general in Afghanistan says one thing about Iran supplying their former enemy, the Taliban with weapons …
No Proof Iran Supplying Weapons to Taliban, US General Says
By Katherine Poythress
CNSNews.com Correspondent
June 06, 2007… [General Dan] McNeill, the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), spoke live from Afghanistan at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday. He said it is not uncommon in Afghanistan to encounter weapons that originate in other countries. However, “I haven’t seen conclusive evidence there’s anything in the way of formal sanctioning by the Iranian government to provide weapons to the Taliban,” he said.
Mortar rounds of Iranian origin were found in one of the convoys, and plastic explosives similar to the U.S.-made C-4 were uncovered in the other. “Beyond that, there’s not much significant to report on these two convoys,” McNeill said.
… and President Karzai is, like all buddy-buddy with Teheran.
(cont.)
Afghan leader expresses support for Iran
Karzai notes the nations’ strong ties amid U.S. allegation of weapons flowing from Tehran to Taliban.
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
June 5, 2007KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave Iran his full embrace Monday, saying it has been his country’s “very close friend,” even as U.S. officials meeting with him here repeated their accusation that Iranian-made weapons were flowing to Taliban fighters. […]
When asked whether he believed Tehran, which has largely been a benign presence in Afghanistan since the 2001 fall of the Taliban, had decided to change course and support its former foes, Karzai gave an impassioned backing for the Iranian government. He called it a force for good in Afghanistan.
“Iran and Afghanistan have never been as friendly as they are today,” Karzai said. “In the past five years Iran has been contributing to Afghanistan’s reconstruction, and in the past five years Afghanistan has been Iran’s very close friend.”
But then we read this from ABC’s Blotter:
NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran’s proxy war against the United States and Great Britain. […]
But an analysis by a senior coalition official, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, concludes there is clear evidence of Iran’s involvement.
“This is part of a considered policy,” says the analysis, “rather than the result of low-level corruption and weapons smuggling.” […]
Iran and the Taliban had been fierce enemies when the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan, and their apparent collaboration came as a surprise to some in the intelligence community.
“I think their goal is to make it very clear that Iran has the capability to make life worse for the United States on a variety of fronts,” said Seth Jones of the Rand Institute, “even if they have to do some business with a group that has historically been their enemy.”
The coalition analysis says munitions recovered in two Iranian convoys, on April 11 and May 3, had “clear indications that they originated in Iran. Some were identical to Iranian supplied goods previously discovered in Iraq.”
Identical to Iranian arms found in Iraq? You mean like these arms which were also claimed to have come form Iran?
A raid in southern Iraq on Saturday seems to have complicated the case. There, The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.), troops “uncovered a makeshift factory used to construct advanced roadside bombs that the U.S. had thought were made only in Iran.” The main feature of the find were several copper liners that are the main component of EFPs. But, The New York Times reports, “while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.“
Among those cloudy items were “cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran.“
Possibly, the Times muses, “the parts were purchased on the open market” and then “the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings.”
Well, it’s so hard to tell one Middle Eastern country’s explosive devices from another one’s, isn’t it. Still, that shouldn’t stop senior American military officials and our allies in the region for helping out the Bush administration when it claims Iran is behind everything bad happening in the world today. I mean, why can’t they all read for the same script?
Why doesn’t the President of Afghanistan and the senior American general in that country simply support the administration’s line that Iran is arming it’s former enemy the Taliban? An enemy, by the way, Iranian politicians claimed to have helped the US military depose back in 2001:
Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards fought alongside and advised the Afghan rebels who helped U.S. forces topple Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the guards’ former leader says.
In an interview by e-mail, Mohsen Rezaie, a candidate in Iran’s presidential elections next week, says the United States has not given Iran enough credit. He says Iran played an “important role in the overthrow of the Taliban” in 2001 …
Current and former U.S. troops and officials confirm Iranians were present with the Northern Alliance as U.S. forces organized the rebels in 2001. …
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman says he has “no knowledge of (Iranian) assistance.” The CIA refused to comment.
Former CIA Afghan team leader Gary Schroen says there were two Iranian guard colonels attached to a Northern Alliance commander, Bismullah Khan, outside Kabul when U.S. Special Forces arrived in September 2001.
Makes you wonder how valid is this “evidence” of Iran’s clear involvement with the Taliban when our own top general in the area refuses to confirm it. And our own man in Afghanistan says Iran is his country’s BFF. And when past efforts to show Iran is a primary supplier of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq didn’t exactly pan out. Not that Bush and the Pentagon would ever lie to us about the danger Iran poses to America — would they?
The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.
Propaganda and disinformation? Things that make you go — Hmmmm. Well, so to speak, that is.
