Word: tehran
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...Iran experts say Tehran's broad interests in Afghanistan are the same as Washington's. The Islamic Republic doesn't want to see a return to chaos on its eastern flank, which would probably lead to a massive refugee influx. As a Shi'ite state, it would see the return to power of militant Sunni hard-liners as a setback. And Iran, which faces a drug-addiction problem of alarming proportions, shares the U.S. desire to curtail Afghanistan's opium trade. If anything, "Tehran stands to lose much more than Washington if Afghanistan reverts back to an al-Qaeda-infested...
...Obama's Afghanistan plan succeed without cooperation from Tehran? The question may seem moot, since Iran is hardly in a cooperative mood at the moment. After a vaguely conciliatory flutter in the fall, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to have returned to its intransigent position on uranium enrichment. Tehran's suspicion of and hostility toward the U.S. has deepened since the course of the turmoil that followed Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in June...
...Still, the Iranian government has in the past been able to put aside its anti-Americanism to cooperate with the U.S. on Afghanistan. After the 9/11 attacks, Washington and Tehran worked quietly together: Iran had helped train, arm and finance many of the fighters and commanders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which worked with the U.S. to overthrow the Taliban and drive out al-Qaeda. James Dobbins, the Bush Administration's first envoy to Afghanistan after 9/11, worked with Iranian officials to set up the post-Taliban government. But relations soured when President George W. Bush balked...
...Despite its discord with Washington, Tehran has built progressively stronger economic and political ties with Afghanistan, not only with its historical allies among the country's ethnic minorities - the fellow-Shi'ite Hazaras and the Uzbeks and Tajiks - but also with the government of President Hamid Karzai. Still, some U.S. officials charge that the Iranians are hedging their bets and also building bridges to some elements of the Taliban despite their longtime enmity toward the movement. (Iran came close to war with the Taliban in 1998, when the movement murdered nine Iranian diplomats after capturing the northern city of Mazar...
...Tehran certainly has the tools to make trouble. The Quds Force, an élite unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, was able to stir up sectarian tension in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein by helping arm and finance the Shi'ite militias that first fought against the U.S.-led coalition and then conducting a campaign of violence against Sunni Iraqis. The commander of the Quds Force, Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, is also credited with reining in the Shi'ite militias in 2007 - a key factor in helping the U.S. surge strategy succeed...