Drug Trade: Afghanistan-Iran-NATO: Consider the poppies
A joint Nato-Iran venture tackling the Afghan drug trade could deliver great
political fruits for allRoger Howard
The Guardian, Friday July 11, 2008
Despite rising casualties and shattered dreams, Nato's Afghan mission need not
turn out to be entirely futile. After all, events of recent years have proved
Afghanistan to be a land full of surprises, and it might now have some
dramatic, and wholly unexpected, political fruits to bear.
Although the architects of the campaign doubtlessly never dreamed it, Nato's
intervention opens a window of diplomatic opportunity. For just as tensions
have been fuelled so dramatically by Iran's test-firing and by talk of
impending Israeli or US military action, Afghanistan offers a means by which
the Tehran regime and the west can finally reach out to each other.
If Nato is to have any hope of curbing Afghanistan's poppy trade it will have
to cooperate with Iran - more than half of the country's poppy production seeps
through the long, porous Iranian border towards its international market
places. But the drug runners would find life much tougher if Nato patrols
worked with their Iranian counterparts, pooling their severely stretched
resources.
At the moment cooperation is non-existent. Yet calls for very much closer
dialogue with Nato would be warmly received by Iran, where drug addiction is an
even more serious problem than in the west. And Tehran would recognise that
closer patrolling of the Afghan frontier would also check the flow of the Sunni
insurgents, weapons and refugees that it, like the west, regards as a threat.
The potential to establish such a joint venture emerged in the wake of 9/11
when, in a series of secret meetings, Iranian officials met US counterparts.
Colin Powell knew that Iranian help was vital, and President Khatami offered
Washington its full cooperation - even the use of Iranian airbases. But it
wasn't long before this ground-breaking dialogue was torpedoed by Washington
hawks and Israeli allegations that Tehran had shipped a vast arsenal to the
Palestinian Authority. By January 2002, Iran had been named as part of the
"Axis of Evil".
Six years on, the prospect of a Nato-Iranian joint venture could play a pivotal
role in negotiations over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. At the very least it
would help address Iran's security concerns. It would reduce the deep,
lingering sense of mutual mistrust between Iran and the US, reinforcing the
vital message that both countries have some complementary aims, and need each
other's cooperation.
Above all, it would face up to the deeply held Iranian ambition to be treated
as a key regional power, a role that Tehran sees not just as a way of
maintaining its territorial security but, most importantly, of gaining a
certain prestige in the eyes of the watching Arab world. It is this ambition
that lies behind its drive to acquire nuclear weapons - or at least maintain
its "right" to enrich uranium "without discrimination".
A joint venture in Afghanistan might well bestow this status upon the Iranians,
making them more willing to renounce their nuclear ambitions. Western
governments have hitherto tried to dissuade Tehran with "incentives" based on
aid and trade, but these reflect our own, highly materialistic, priorities
rather than Iran's particular concerns.
The viability of Nato's mission in Afghanistan, and the organisation's wider
credibility, are being called into question. At the same time, Israeli
ministers and defence chiefs are talking about an "unavoidable" military
campaign. So when he visits Tehran later this month, Javier Solana, the EU's
high representative, will have nothing to lose, and no time to waste, in trying
to coax Iran with promises of a joint Afghan venture.
ยท Roger Howard is the author of Iran in Crisis? and Through the Looking Glass:
Foreign Policy and Political Correctness, to be published this month
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