Afghan President Hamid Karzai admitted on Monday that his office has received millions of dollars in financial aid from Iran for several years. A day earlier, The New York Times reported that unnamed Western and Afghan officials said Tehran was giving bags of cash to Karzai’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, to enhance its influence in Afghanistan. A U.S. State Department spokesperson responded to Karzai’s admission by saying that United States did not question Tehran’s right to provide aid to Kabul or Afghanistan’s right to receive it, but Washington “remains skeptical of Iran’s motives.”
Kabul’s admission and Washington’s response speak volumes about how both sides are looking at a post-NATO Afghanistan — one in which the southwest Asian country’s neighbors, particularly Iran and Pakistan, will play a dominant role. Pakistan influences Afghanistan via the Afghan Pashtun plurality, whose most powerful political force is the Taliban movement. Iran’s influence comes largely via the ethnic minorities seeking to curb Pashtun domination of the country who are thus the Taliban’s bitter opponents.
“This increasing complexity does not negate the point that the Iranians and Pakistanis will play the lead roles in any settlement in Afghanistan.”
For Karzai, caught between the domestic and international players, it is a given that Iran and Pakistan will fill the geopolitical void left by the United States and its NATO allies. That reality is one that the various Afghan factions will have to live with in the long term. After all, the two countries are Afghanistan’s principal neighbors with their own spheres of influence, and they worked together (albeit unsuccessfully) in the post-communist era, in the early 1990s, to form a coalition government in Kabul. But if the United States is saying that it has no qualms about such an outcome, this regional arrangement must somehow complement the U.S. strategy for the country and the surrounding region.
From the U.S. perspective, a settlement in Afghanistan underwritten by Iran and Pakistan could create the conditions conducive to a Western military withdrawal from the country. More importantly, such an understanding could also prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for transnational jihadists. Furthermore, Tehran and Islamabad could reach an arrangement that would create a balance of power in Kabul, where neither side would have the upper hand.
Achieving such a regional arrangement, however, is easier said than done, as several factors complicate the situation. First, the United States’ relationships with Iran and Pakistan are far from simple: Washington and Tehran are locked in a bitter struggle over Iraq and the nuclear issue, and Washington is in a complex love-hate relationship with Islamabad. On the bilateral level, Tehran views Islamabad with great suspicion, given the latter’s close relations with Saudi Arabia. Conversely, Iran and India’s close ties are a major cause of concern for the Pakistanis. This mistrust is a major hurdle that prevents them from arriving at an understanding on how to achieve a political settlement in Afghanistan, especially one that would work for Washington.
Within Afghanistan, the Iranian and Pakistani positions have become more complex than they were before the U.S. move to oust the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks. Although Iran’s main influence in Afghanistan is through the assortment of anti-Taliban forces, Tehran has cultivated closer ties with elements of the Pashtun jihadist militia since 2002. Pakistan, which historically has been the Taliban’s main patron, now has its own Taliban rebels to deal with and is diversifying its influence in Kabul through the Karzai government.
This increasing complexity does not negate the point that the Iranians and Pakistanis will play the lead roles in any settlement in Afghanistan. It does, however, make life harder for the United States, which wants to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and needs to get Tehran and Islamabad to cooperate in order to keep to its timetable.
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