Iran Offers to Act as Mediator between the Taliban, Afghan Government
The insurgent Islamist group denies Western states’ accusations it is ‘continuing the war and killing civilians and destroying infrastructure’
[Islamabad] “Iran is ready to facilitate negotiations between the Taliban, the Afghan government and other Afghan groups,” The Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a visiting Taliban delegation in Tehran on Sunday.
“The noble people of Afghanistan have been wronged. The war and occupation of Afghanistan have dealt heavy blows to the Afghan people,” Zarif told the high-level delegation led by Taliban deputy political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
“In the meeting, Foreign Minister Zarif welcomed the idea of the formation of an all-inclusive government with the participation of all ethnic and political groups in Afghanistan,” the statement also said.
“The Taliban would focus efforts on an immediate end to the pains and problems of the Afghan people so that the establishment of peace in Afghanistan would strip the outsiders of a pretext for occupation,” the top Iranian diplomat added, referring to the NATO-led train, advise and assist mission commanded by US Army Gen. Austin S. Miller.
The Taliban delegation also met with Rear-Adm. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
Iran is at complete odds with the US. Iran will try to provoke Afghans against the US, thus causing instability in Afghanistan
Dr. Muhammad Naeem Wardak, spokesperson at the Taliban’s Political Office in Doha, Qatar, said “the meeting focused on border issues and the movement of Afghan traders and travelers; and matters concerning Afghan refugees in Iran and the strengthening of relations between the two countries were also discussed.”
The two sides also discussed the importance of intra-Afghan dialogue, and lasting peace and security in Afghanistan and the region, Naeem Wardak said in a statement.
Mariam Wardak is a Kabul-based former senior adviser to two Afghan national security advisers and the founder of “Her Afghanistan,” a global online platform that works to support Afghan women in the fields of security, peace and foreign policy.
“It is quite evident that the Afghan Taliban maintains close relationships with all neighboring countries,” she told The Media Line.
The group is “closely engaging Iran because Iran is one of the countries that provided it financial support,” Mariam Wardak said.
Turning to another neighbor of Afghanistan, she said that “the world community is well aware of the close relationship that the [US] Democratic Party has with Pakistan.”
There were many occasions when President Joe Biden, before he held the US’s highest office, “disagreed with Afghan [government] leaders who came to Pakistan. I think that taking into account Pakistan’s recommendations to Afghanistan will be the biggest” factor and Biden will continue to support former President Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban, Mariam Wardak added.
“It seems the American people are tired of hearing about war-torn Afghanistan. The media has a responsibility to change that,” she also said.
“The US is aware of the fact that nations are not going to follow you just because you are a superpower. There’s a new generation provoking one another. However, diplomatic relations have an important role,” Mariam Wardak said.
She points out that Iran, as a neighbor of Afghanistan, “is very important for Afghans.” As a close US ally, the Afghan government needs “to manage the relationship between the US and Iran, and the Afghan leadership will be able to do that,” she said.
“Iran is at complete odds with the US. Iran will try to provoke Afghans against the US, thus causing instability in Afghanistan,” Mariam Wardak predicted.
Farzana Shah is a Peshawar, Pakistan-based expert on Afghanistan’s armed groups and editor of The Global Conflict Watch, a defense and strategic affairs magazine.
Shah told The Media Line that “Iran’s relations with Afghanistan had been somewhat complicated over the years, stemming from its desire to influence the large Dari-speaking Afghan population, especially Shi’ite Muslims, to further its own strategic ambitions.”
Dari, a variety of Persian, and mutually intelligible with Persian, is the mother tongue of about half of the people in Afghanistan and the country’s lingua franca. About 15% of the nation’s population is Shi’ite.
“Despite having a long history of ideological differences and political rivalry with the [Sunni] Afghan Taliban, Iran, a predominately Shi’ite country, had been accused of supplying arms to the Taliban even when Ahmad Shah Massoud was fighting them,” Shah added.
Iran-Taliban engagement in the past has mostly been under the table. However, given the recent Afghan peace deal, both have publicly acknowledged having contacts
After the Taliban seized control of most of Afghanistan in 1996, Massoud was the leading opposition commander fighting against their regime, until his assassination in 2001.
“Iran-Taliban engagement in the past has mostly been under the table. However, given the recent Afghan peace deal, both have publicly acknowledged having contacts,” Shah said.
“The recent warming of relations between Iran and the Taliban can be viewed as an effort by Iran to fill the gap left by the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard,” in January 2020, she continued. “Soleimani not only successfully engaged the US in the Middle East but had also secured the Iranian border with Afghanistan against the Taliban.”
“Iran’s unremitting opposition to the United States has pushed it toward the Taliban to the extent that both are onboard to tackle ISIS in Afghanistan,” Shah said. “Iran had been funding the Taliban to take out ISIS fighters in recent years,” she claimed.
“The Taliban leaders’ recent visit to Tehran is rendered more significant because Biden was elected US president, since the latter wants a review of the Afghan peace deal,” which could delay the withdrawal of US-led forces and prolong Afghanistan’s civil war, Shah said.
Tahir Khanzada, a Kabul-based political analyst, told The Media Line that “during the Russian invasion in Afghanistan, Iran supplied Stinger [portable surface-to-air] missiles and heavy funding to the Afghan Mujahedeen so, in that context, relations between the Taliban and Iran have never been strained.”
He said that there is a “strong belief” that Tehran hosted the Taliban’s high-level delegation at the behest of the administration of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
“The new US administration has signaled that it wants to review the [conditional US-Taliban] Doha peace agreement, so obviously the Afghan government and even the Taliban are looking forward to having a new but influential mediator for peace in the war-torn country, and it would be a welcome development,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Afghan Taliban rejected Western countries’ allegations on Sunday that “the Taliban is continuing the war and killing civilians and destroying infrastructure,” Khanzada said.
Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, rejected the allegations, telling The Media Line that “the Taliban is not involved in killing civilians and neither have we destroyed any civilian infrastructure, rather it is concerned with safeguarding and securing public places.”
“Unfortunately, most countries, including the European Union, are involved, either directly or indirectly, in the tragedies, destruction, bombings or killing of innocent civilians,” he said.
“If the Doha peace accord is implemented, it will benefit the Americans and all other countries that are involved in the US-led invasion,” Mujahid added.
“If someone is going to sabotage the peace accord and wants to continue the war in our country, history will once again prove that the Afghans can valiantly defend their values, soil, homeland and rights,” the Taliban spokesperson warned. “We have a legal right to defend our homeland and to free it from the invaders.”
He added, however, that “we still believe that all issues must be resolved through negotiations.”
Mujahid ended by urging the Biden Administration to implement the Doha agreement, saying there is no military solution to the Afghan problem.
Earlier on Sunday in Kabul, the EU delegation and the diplomatic missions of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the NATO senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, in a joint statement strongly condemned the continuation of assassinations, kidnappings and destruction of infrastructure in the country.
“The Taliban bears responsibility for the majority of this targeted violence, and its attacks undermine state institutions and contribute to an insecure environment in which terrorist and criminal groups can freely operate,” the joint statement also said.
Irina Tsukerman, a New York-based national security expert, told The Media Line that “Iran claims that it is offering itself as a mediator due to the stalling of the ongoing talks in Qatar.”
Iran, she said sarcastically, “is demonstrating ‘good faith’ to the Biden administration in the same way it claimed to be cooperating with [former President Barack] Obama’s intelligence in anti-drug trafficking and anti-ISIS operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“For Biden, this will signal that there is no need for the US to continue to be involved and that Iran is not only a legitimate partner in future negotiations, but that it’s trying to be helpful on important regional issues and therefore can be counted on to handle the security issues in the absence of the US,” Tsukerman said.
