Tehran's Game

By Romesh Ratnesar

First there were the trucks. They started rolling into southern and western Afghanistan late last year, full of clothes and food and medical supplies for delivery to a few lucky warlords and their charges, courtesy of Iran. Then came the money, brought by Iranian intelligence agents who entered Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban to try to gain influence over local commanders. An Iranian general named Sadar Baghwani started showing up at Afghan mosques, reportedly telling Afghans to resist the U.S. presence in their country. "The Americans are infidels," he said. And then there are the weapons, which Western officials believe Iran is funneling directly to Ismail Khan--the strongman in the Afghan city of Herat and a longtime client of Tehran who has been reluctant to obey the new Afghan government in Kabul. That has led the U.S. and its Afghan allies to a familiar conclusion: Tehran is up to no good. "Iran's real objective," says Yousef Pashtun, secretary to the governor of Kandahar, "is to create as much instability as possible to the establishment of a permanent government in Afghanistan."

With thousands of American soldiers now calling Kandahar home and post-Taliban stability nowhere in sight, Washington isn't brooking Iranian mischief in Afghanistan. Three weeks ago, responding to reports that Iran was sending arms to pliant Afghan warlords and even harboring al-Qaeda fugitives, President Bush issued an ultimatum: "If they in any way, shape or form try to destabilize the government," he said, "the coalition will deal with them, in diplomatic ways initially." The line played well with most Americans, who are still inclined to believe the worst about Iran. Washington lists Iran as the top state sponsor of terrorism and regularly warns that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons. The U.S. last year cited an Iranian military officer for helping engineer the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. Iran's hard-line establishment continues to support the destruction of Israel and has aided and abetted the radical Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as Lebanon's Hizballah militia. The State Department said on Jan. 10 that "the weight of the evidence" suggests Iran was involved in the thwarted shipment of 50 tons of arms to the Palestinian Authority, despite Iran's denial. As TIME reported, Israel says the shipment was orchestrated by operatives close to Imad Mughniyah, a notorious Hizballah terrorist who has long enjoyed support from Iran.

Does that make Iran a first-order threat? The ongoing struggle between pro-Western reformists, led by democratically elected President Mohammed Khatami, and religious conservatives loyal to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, certainly makes Iran a volatile power. The rhetoric of the country's religious leaders is peppered with anti-American bile, and powerful elements within Iran's conservative security establishment have in the past launched free-lance operations abroad as a way to undermine relations with the West. Now the discord is playing out in Afghanistan. While Khatami is trying to influence post-Taliban political arrangements without alienating the international coalition, U.S. officials believe, security operatives loyal to Khamenei may be stirring up unrest outside the Khatami government's command.

That said, even the country's conservatives have lost interest in returning to the days of exporting revolution and issuing fatwas against novelists. Iran's constitution gives the Supreme Leader final say over foreign relations, but Khatami has increased his clout by reactivating the powerful Supreme National Security Council and working to change the country's image as a regional menace. The President has normalized relations with Iran's Arab neighbors, cozied up to Russia and improved ties with Germany, France and Britain. Iran and Iraq have shown signs of a possible rapprochement, but with the Bush Administration making noise about taking the war on terrorism to Baghdad, a senior Iranian official told TIME, Iran might cooperate in a military campaign to remove its old enemy Saddam Hussein. "Obviously, this can't be our public stance," the official says. "But our history [with Iraq] is bitter enough that we'd be happy to pull another Afghanistan."

Even before Sept. 11, the reformists in Iran had begun nudging the country closer to an accommodation with the U.S. than it had been since 1979, when Washington suspended diplomatic relations after Iranian radicals made hostages of Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Polls show that large segments of the Iranian people--65% of whom were born after the 1979 Islamic revolution--favor a rapprochement with the Great Satan.

The aftermath of Sept. 11 has produced some breakthroughs. Shortly after that day, British Prime Minister Tony Blair phoned Khatami and arranged for Foreign Minister Jack Straw to visit Tehran; his was the highest-level Western delegation to go there in two decades. Iran had an interest in moving toward the mainstream. Its history of sponsoring terrorists made it a potential U.S. target when Bush declared a general war on terrorism. Sources close to Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guards--which are allied with Iran's ruling clerics--say the Guards have withdrawn nearly all their troops from Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, probably out of fear the U.S. might attack them for aiding Hizballah.

Before launching the war in Afghanistan, the U.S., with the British government acting as intermediary, secured Iran's agreement to rescue any American pilots who might be downed over Iran by the Taliban, a regime Tehran loathed and actively sought to remove long before the West took notice. Iran instructed its Northern Alliance clients to cooperate with the U.S., and while registering nominal concerns about civilian casualties, it did not object when American bombers continued strikes during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

The U.S. suspects that several hundred al-Qaeda operatives have slipped out of Afghanistan and into Iran. But that seemed to happen in spite of efforts by Tehran, which tried to keep al-Qaeda fighters out by tightening border patrols and reimposing visa restrictions on gulf Arabs. "Some may have escaped here," says a Western diplomat in Tehran, "but not with government complicity." Iran's Shi'ites detest al-Qaeda's brand of Sunni extremism. Terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were allegedly responsible for the 1994 bombing of the shrine of Imam Reza, Iran's holiest site.

But since the fall, the U.S.-Iran warming trend has abated. Iranian officials grumble that they have received precisely nothing for their good behavior during the war and its aftermath. Iran has committed more money ($560 million over five years) than any other country to the international aid package for Afghanistan. (The U.S. has pledged $297 million for Afghanistan in the next year.) Western diplomats praise Iran for helping broker the Bonn agreement that created Afghanistan's provisional government. But that's not enough to pull Iran out of the terror-state doghouse or persuade the U.S. to lift economic sanctions against the regime.

Suspicion about Iran's current agenda in Afghanistan will not help. It's no secret that both Iran's reformist government and its religious establishment want to nurture a Tehran-friendly government in Kabul and prevent the U.S. from gaining a foothold in Iran's backyard. Its ruling clerics distrust interim Afghan President Hamid Karzai because of his long-standing loyalty to exiled King Mohammed Zahir Shah. A Western diplomat told TIME that Iranian officials in Afghanistan began attempting to influence the shape of the future government late last year by providing their preferred candidate, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash so he could buy the loyalty of tribal elders in eastern Afghanistan.

It didn't work, but Tehran has kept at the intrigue. Foreign diplomats in Kabul told TIME that in a meeting this month with Afghanistan's interim Defense Minister, Mohammed Fahim, Iranian intelligence agents encouraged Fahim to resign from the new government and take his forces with him--a move, the diplomats say, that was intended to topple Karzai's government and spoil U.N. plans to hold a grand tribal assembly in May. The sources say Fahim spurned the Iranians, but that has not stopped Ismail Khan, a Persian-speaking Tajik, from continuing to take their arms and money.

Iran defends its support of Khan and claims it has told him to fall in behind Karzai's government in Kabul. "There's no truth to allegations of supporting a faction," says Deputy Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. "The objective of this exchange is to enhance cooperation, not to provoke rivalry." The Iranian government says it has little interest in fomenting chaos in Afghanistan that would give rise to another Taliban. A Western diplomat in Tehran gives credence to Iran's defense: "There's a more negative spin than is warranted. Right now, Iran's game is to be publicly obstructive and privately constructive."

Not everyone sees it that way. Western intelligence sources told TIME that elements of the Revolutionary Guards have encouraged Hazaras--ethnic minorities in Afghanistan who, like most Iranians, practice Shi'ite Islam--to turn against the U.S. troop presence. "They're not telling the Hazaras to drive the Americans out," says an official. "But we're worried this will be a green light to take action."

Meanwhile, Khan's arms buildup in Herat has irked Pashtun warlords in southern Afghanistan, who say Iranian money and rifles have made their way to pro-Tehran commanders as far south as Helmand province, near Kandahar. Last week a group of 70 local leaders met in Kandahar to discuss mounting an anti-Khan offensive. An Afghan source told TIME that a proposed attack on Khan's forces was quashed at the last minute by a U.S. official who attended the meeting flanked by special-ops soldiers. But the warlords may be hard to restrain. "Our army is prepared. We will take Herat in no time," says a senior commander. "And we do not need the government's permission to do it."

The U.S. has started to take action against Iran's intrusions. Over the past two weeks, the white vapor trails left by B-52 bombers have been a fixture in the skies over Herat. The U.S. bombed a cache of Iranian arms that Khan was hoarding at the Khol-Urdu base on Herat's outskirts. Last week Khan tried to distance himself from Tehran, telling the bbc that he was "grateful" to the U.S. and has no quarrels with Kabul. He has also allowed U.S. special-ops forces to conduct search-and-destroy missions for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters holed up in Herat.

How far Iran's hard-liners will push to win proxies in Afghanistan remains to be seen. They say they support the establishment of a modern Islamic regime in Afghanistan, perhaps headed by Fahim or Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. "Iran respects the interim government and will cooperate with it," says Abbas Maleki, a conservative former foreign-policy adviser. "But naturally the Afghan people may want others in power, to reflect the real choice of the Afghan people."

Whether Iran will aggressively try to influence that choice may depend on whether Khatami can face down the conservatives, who in the past have supported operations to sabotage the reformist agenda. Khatami has largely purged the military and intelligence apparatus of the rogue squads and increased oversight of the unregulated religious funds that financed them. Reformists have tried to increase their influence through the foreign-policy commission in Parliament, which supports dialogue with the West and wants to cut funding to groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

"We're willing to say anything the mullahs want," says a prominent legislator. "But we're trying to make sure not a cent more of Iranian money goes to these groups." Yet in recent months forces loyal to Khamenei have clamped down on the reformists. Hard-liners in the ruling Guardian Council have paralyzed the Parliament by blocking reform legislation, while the conservative-controlled judiciary has imprisoned one legislator and is prosecuting 30 others on trumped-up charges.

Some Western officials think that because of the uncertainty of Iran's political situation, the U.S. and its allies should throw their support squarely behind Khatami, despite his nationalism and refusal to give up Iran's weapons program. "It's up to the West to give him as much support as it can," says a senior British official. "You want to think about how you use the tools you have to help it make a break with terrorism."

That's one argument for easing sanctions against Tehran. And it's another reason the West's long-term commitment to rebuild Afghanistan looms so large. The West now has the opportunity to show that countries can reap benefits for renouncing terrorism, not simply avoid punishment. Many Iranians are watching to see whether Afghanistan, with American help, can become a modern, functional state freed from the grip of fundamentalism--the kind of country they want for themselves. The U.S. has never had a better chance to convince Iranians they can get it too.

--Reported by Scott MacLeod/Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Tim McGirk/Kabul, Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran, Michael Ware/Kandahar and Adam Zagorin/Washington

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Tim McGirk/Kabul, Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran, Michael Ware/Kandahar and Adam Zagorin/Washington