Despite what US officials keep claiming, the truth of the matter is that most of the arm flowing into Afghanistan for delivery to the Taliban are coming across the border from our “ally” Pakistan, not from Iran:
MONTREAL – A top United Nations diplomat is dismissing claims from the Bush administration that Iran is supplying weapons to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
The allegations of Iranian meddling in Afghanistan first surfaced in June, and gained momentum with senior U.S. intelligence and military officials accusing Iran of officially endorsing the shipment of armaments across its eastern border. […]
Asked whether the UN has seen any evidence of Iranian weaponry reaching the Taliban insurgency, Chris Alexander, the deputy United Nations representative to Kabul, told CanWest News Service: “None. It’s the other border across which arms and weapons principally arrive.”
Alexander was referring to Pakistan, Afghanistan’s eastern neighbour.
A reconstituted Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgency is believed to be using Pakistan to mount a renewed guerrilla insurgency in the past year and a half that has severely challenged Canada and its NATO allies in southern Afghanistan.
“We are, quite frankly, trying to encourage everyone to recommit to having a sense of proportion, to putting the reality of the insecurity of Afghanistan into proportion. That means not saying that Iran is the principle source of arms shipments to the Taliban. That’s simply not true,” said Alexander, previously Canada’s first ambassador to Afghanistan in 2003, after the fall of the Taliban two years earlier.
Alexander noted that Iran actually opposes the Taliban and has signed on as an international development partner that is committed to rebuilding Afghanistan, contributing tens of millions of dollars of aid to the country.
Let’s see. I wonder how many US papers picked up on this story in which the former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan, and the current deputy UN representative in Kabul knocks down all the disinformation being put out by the Pentagon and Bush officials regarding Iran arming the Taliban. Not very damn many. It seems to be a story primarily covered in the foreign press, if at all. What a surprise.
