Iran Embraces the Taliban
A reverse of the 1990s policy, but it might not be that easy.
I apologize for the delay. I am happy to report that two Afghan Hazaras, a brother and a sister, whom I tried to help to leave Afghanistan are safe and sound in Milwaukee. If anybody’s out there in Wisconsin, they could use some help, especially with clothing. She is 17 and wants to be a computer engineer. He’s 24 and served as an officer in the Afghan military and ministry of defense with an MA in security studies from the University of Delhi. Most importantly, if anybody out there has a job for the brother, that would be fantastic. He speaks English, Dari, Pashto, and Hindi. They don’t have anybody in the world other than each other. Their parents have passed away, and they know nobody here.
Now more Afghanistan, but this time the Iran version.
Here is the summary, before I get into more details. Iran’s officials are saying that this is a defeat for the United States. They are, in a reversal of policy from the 1990s, trying to cooperate with the Taliban out of many concerns, including for their Afghan Shi’ite proxy, Liwa Fatemiyoun, and fear of Sunni extremism in southeast Iran. This will not be as easy as it will only work if the Taliban does not persecute Shi’ite Hazaras, or there will be a backlash from the regime’s base. On top of that, Iran really doesn’t want to take any Afghan refugees, again, putting it at the mercy of the Taliban.
Ali Khamenei is yet to make a comment since the collapse of Kabul. His last comment on Afghanistan was six weeks ago, when he said that the United States was “humiliated” in Afghanistan, despite using “weapons and bombs and fire against defenseless and civilian people.”
Ebrahim Raisi, the recently inaugurated president of Iran, encouraged “all groups” in Afghanistan to seek and reach a “national agreement.” He added that Iran is committed to the “traditions of neighborliness.” All signs show that Iran is going to try a friendly policy toward the Taliban, a break from the 1990s, when Iran supported the Northern Alliance and the Taliban captured and executed Iran’s agents in 1998. (I will post a fascinating story from newly published diaries of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani about when Iran came close to attacking the Taliban in the aftermath, hopefully, tomorrow.) He continued his statement to call this a defeat for the United States.
Ali Shamkhani, former minister of defense and an IRGC admiral, now the secretary of the supreme national security council, which speaks for Ali Khamenei, stated that the collapse of the Afghan government was a result of America’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and the United States’s deep influence on the Afghan government.
At the time of the collapse of the Afghan government, Javad Zarif was a lame-duck foreign minister until the parliament would confirm his successor. He met with China’s new envoy for Afghanistan, Yue Xiaoyang, allegedly to talk about the refugee issue. Iran has issued a statement that it is ready to “temporarily” resettle Afghan refugees. Amir Abdollahian, Zarif’s to-be-successor at the time (now in office) also met with Yue. After the meeting, Yue mentioned that his first trip since taking office in July was to Iran, and the two reported that they discussed issues of territorial integrity, stability, and cleansing Afghanistan from terrorism. (Uighurs in China and Afghanistan and the Baluch people in Iran and Afghanistan should not take any comfort in this statement.) Abdollahian criticized the United States’s “policies of trial and error in Afghanistan,” adding that Afghans have historically proven that they would not tolerate foreign occupations.
The refugee problem will be an issue for the Islamic Republic. Iran is already home to around two million Afghan refugees. Due to systemic and societal racism, the Afghans have failed to assimilate into the larger society. Many of them undocumented, there is a high rate of criminality among them, which feeds into the racist reaction. The situation for Afghans is terribly dire on many levels, and the Iranian people terribly mistreat them for the most part. The admission of Afghan refugees will certainly create further tensions.
Then there is Sunni extremism, which is a problem in the southeast of Iran, where the Rigi network operated for years and conducted terrorist attacks. In addition to the secessionist desires of the Sunni Baluch people, the extremism is also fed by the regime’s discrimination against the Sunnis in Iran. Having both the Taliban and Pakistan on its southeastern border, the regime is certainly worried about being done to what it has been doing for decades, which is having its religious and ethnic minorities supported by its neighbors. This might be a partial explanation for why Iran is now supportive of the Taliban, in a shift of policy, in addition to the enemy of America is Iran’s friend.
There has already been the first instance of this problem. Abdolhamid Ismaeelzahi, also known as Molavi Abdolhamid, a very popular imam in Zahedan, Sistan and Baluchestan Province, had been awarded by the anti-regime Defenders of Human Rights Center, headed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi. It awarded Abdol Hamid in 2013 for his activism for religious minority rights. This week, he praised the Taliban, maybe foolishly, likely to win over support for his cause. The center then retracted the 2013 award. Whether Ismaeelzadeh in fact has ideological sympathies for the Taliban or is using this as an occasion to build an alliance of convenience, it shows a vulnerability for the regime.
There are also foreign policy concerns for Iran. Shi’ite Hazaras and Persian-Dari-speaking Tajiks in Afghanistan have had close relationships with Iran’s governments, even before the 1979 revolution. The current regime’s relationship with them goes as far back as the Iran-Iraq War. In the 2010s, Iran formed Liwa Fatemiyoun, formed by Afghan Shi’ite Hazaras (as well as its sister proxy, Liwa Zainabiyoun, which is comprised of Pakistani Shi’ites). Liwa Fatemiyoun is at least 10,000-man strong, almost certainly much larger. Its headquarters are in Iran, but it has strong ties inside Afghanistan, both as leverage against the government of Afghanistan (now overthrown) and NATO forces, but also to continue its recruitments. It has been designated by several governments as a terrorist group and condemned for using child-soldiers by human rights groups. The unit has fought Iran’s wars in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere and been used by the regime to suppress protests inside Iran. (Another problem that feeds anti-Afghan bigotry among Iranians.)
It is highly anticipated that the Taliban will slaughter the Hazaras in Afghanistan. Iran cannot afford this on several grounds. First, it will disarm Iran from an important proxy. Second, it will create a domestic headache as Iran is trying to play nice with the Taliban, and a massacre of Shi’ites will create a backlash among the regime’s religious/ideological base.
The headache is already gaining steam. Keyhan, the closest newspaper to Khamanei, already ran an editorial, whitewashing the Taliban. On several grounds, especially concerns for Shi’ite Hazaras, other conservative newspapers attacked the editorial for “purifying” the Taliban.
Iran is playing with fire regarding the Taliban. On the one hand, there could be an axis of revisionists—Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and China—forming in that part of the world, and the mutual cause of hatred for the liberal world order and the United States could help them to mitigate their differences. On the other hand, the Taliban has historically shown that it is not as tactically flexible as the other three to make the relationship work, and they might encourage extremism out of ideological sincerity that will damage the relationships with the other three. Maybe they have changed, and that will not be necessarily for the better.
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