LONDON, Dec 22: Presumably the fear of shadows persisting here since 7/7 has landed one more British citizen, a soldier this time, with perceived divided loyalties into soup and with that Iran is now being named along with Pakistan as one of the two spoilers helping Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
A British soldier reportedly of Iranian descent who speaks fluent Pashto and has been serving as interpreter for Lt-Gen David Richard, the commander of British contingent of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has been arrested and was produced in the court on Thursday on charges of passing secret information allegedly to Iran.
The Daily Telegraph on Friday referring to this arrest attempted to attribute the sudden escalation in insurgency in Afghanistan in recent months to the involvement of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the bloody imbroglio across Tehran’s southern border.
DT columnist Con Coughlin in his analytical piece ‘War on two fronts in Afghanistan’, ignoring Shiite Iran’s historic and pathological hatred of the Whabist Taliban, asserts that irrespective of the outcome of the James case, the mere suggestion that Iran should be seeking to recruit someone with access to the innermost counsels of Nato’s high command was indicative both of Teheran’s intense interest in Nato’s activities in Afghanistan, and its determination to ensure that the West is not allowed to succeed in transforming the country from Islamic dictatorship into stable democracy.
“It also makes a mockery of the recent suggestion, advanced in both Washington and London, that the only way to resolve the region’s difficulties is by engaging in a constructive dialogue with Teheran,” he maintains.
In his opinion whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan, the over-riding priority of the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is to ensure the coalition’s efforts at nation-building end in failure.
Coughlin claims that the Iranians helped hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters to escape from Afghanistan following the coalition’s military campaign to remove the Taliban from power in 2001.
“Recent intelligence reports have indicated that many senior Al Qaeda leaders — including two of Osama bin Laden’s sons — are still living in Teheran under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards, where they are being groomed for a possible takeover of the Al Qaeda leadership,” he further claims.
Discussing what he calls close Iranian links with Pakistan, he says: “They have been identified as one of the countries that bought blueprints for making nuclear weapons from A. Q. Khan, the so-called “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb.”
Given the extent of Iran’s interests in the region, the DT columnist finds it strange that Nato commanders have appeared reluctant even to discuss the possibility that the Iranians might have their own agenda in upsetting coalition attempts to establish an effective government, particularly when commanders in Iraq have been frank in blaming the Iranians for helping to orchestrate the roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many soldiers.
He attributes this apparent reticence on the part of Nato commanders to what he says the limited resources at their disposal, “they have a big enough challenge dealing with the threat posed by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, without running the risk of extending their field of operations elsewhere”.
But in his opinion all that might soon change “if, as some intelligence reports suggest, concrete evidence emerges that Iran is actively supporting and providing equipment to Taliban-related groups fighting Nato forces in Afghanistan.”
