Iran offers to help US rebuild Afghanistan

[bemildred]

Source: Guardian.UK

Iran made a significant conciliatory gesture towards the Obama administration today, offering to help US-led efforts to stabilise and rebuild Afghanistan.

At an international conference on Afghanistan at The Hague, in the Netherlands, the Iranian delegate, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh, responded positively to Barack Obama's new strategy for winning the war against the Taliban.

"Welcoming the proposals for joint cooperation offered by the countries contributing to Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran is fully prepared to participate in the projects aimed at combating drug trafficking and plans in line with developing and reconstructing Afghanistan," Akhundzadeh, one of Iran's deputy foreign ministers, said, according to an early text of his remarks provided by Iranian officials.

Akhundzadeh, whose mere appearance at the conference was seen as progress in US-Iranian relations – repeated Tehran's earlier criticism of the Nato role in Afghanistan saying: "The presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective, too."

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/31/iran-afghanistan-obama

[yy4me]

1. Lets us hope that the government has the smarts to at least

start to talk to Iran. This may be a step toward moving things in a positive direction for both countries. There is no harm in trying.

[snappyturtle]

2. Hopeful. nt

[Mari333]

3. this would be a HUGE GOOD PR move by the obama admin IF

they take it up. and get us the hell out of there. fuck this surge crap.why the hell should we rebuild anything but our own country. please, obama, hand off this mess to the world and gtf out.

[harun]

6. Agree. You can't just stay in Iraq and surge in Pakistan. Crazy BS.

I just got an email about this from my Senator Bob Casey. I am going to write him that this constant war BS needs to stop.

[timtom]

4. I would say that announcement alone

justifies Pres. Obama's Nowruz address to Iran.

Let the peace talks begin!

[Soylent Brice]

5. an excellent gesture, and a move towards diplomacy.

i like it!

[bemildred]

7. Israel muddies US-Iran momentum

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At a recent talk at Harvard University, Zvi Shtauber, a former Israeli diplomat and former director of the Institute for National Security Studies, admitted that Israel lacked credible intelligence on Iran and that "no one in Israel can provide a credible analysis of what Iran wants". Shtauber claimed that Israel was unclear how far Iran wanted to take its nuclear program, and did not know whether Tehran would follow the "Japanese model" in which nuclear weapons capability remains dormant.

At the same time, Shtauber reiterated the official Israeli line that Iran's nuclear program represented an "existential threat". Shtauber said that an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would simply "delay" Iran's nuclear program by at most a couple of years. According to Shtauber, no one in Israel expected that an attack on Iran would put to rest any potential Iranian threat.

When asked at what point Israel would consider a military strike, Shtauber said it would be when Iran was "within the striking distance" of acquiring a nuclear bomb.

"I personally think that Iran's nuclear capability is quite legitimate," said Shtauber, adding that his personal view was that he did not see an imminent threat of Iranian nukes being fired at Israel - even if Iran built a nuclear arsenal.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KD01Ak01.html

[starroute]

8. Iran has a massive problems with Afghan heroin

So their interest in "projects aimed at combating drug trafficking" comes as no surprise.

It's also no surprise that googling on Iran and heroin brings up mostly British and French sources -- the story has been consistently under-reported in the US, perhaps because there is every likelihood that the CIA has been using the heroin trade in an attempt to undermine the Iranian regime. (Not that the regime doesn't create its own problems by keeping life in Iran so boring that heroin appears an an attractive escape.)

Stories from 2002 speak of Iran having one of the highest heroin addiction rates in the world, with some two million users. By 2006, that figure was up to three and a half million and there was a growing Aids epidemic as well.

Iran is also a major conduit for heroin trafficking to Europe, with many of the smugglers being Baluchis, who are Sunnis and have intermittently engaged in attacks against the regime in Tehran. (See http://mondediplo.com/2002/03/13drug and http://www.meforum.org/788/domestic-threats-to-iranian-stability-khuzistan) But the Bush administration showed no interest in that problem either -- perhaps because Afghan heroin doesn't wind up in the US, or perhaps because the CIA and Special Forces have been actively encouraging the Baluchi separatists.

In one way or another -- if only as a concession to get more help on Afghanistan from our European allies -- the US may finally have to confront the heroin problem in that region which it has consistently created over the last 30 years.

[Idealism]

11. Those are "official" figures of Iranian drug addicts.

According to an Al Jazeera documentary with Omar Rageh, the figure is in the vicinity of 15-20 million (out of 70 million total Iranians).

Hashish, heroin, and cocaine are huge problems in Iran, but also signs that the US-led sanctions have not worked and we need a new strategy. Since the Islamic Revolution, the US has sanctioned Iran with little to no effect on the Iranian people, their government, or their economy. Arguably the only thing sanctions does it cause inflation, because to get certain goods Iran has to reroute them through Bahrain or Dubai and pay an intermediary.

[starroute]

13. Something else I'm starting to wonder about

I was just listening to the latest Seymour Hersh interview on NPR, and he said two things that really caught my attention.

One was that the Joint Special Operations Command has had a large ongoing operation within Iran. This would presumably involve coordinating with the Baluchis and some of the other ethnic minorities to try to unravel the coherence of that nation -- a strategy based on the writings of Bernard Lewis.

However, Hersh also stated that Cheney was so unwilling to let anybody in Congress know about what JSOC was up to that he had their operations funded off-the-books, at least for a time.

Hersh had already spoken about this in the same Minnesota forum where he discussed Cheney and USOC. Emptywheel has a good post on the question and quotes Hersh as saying that "they had a meeting after 9/11 of the people who were in, in the White House, who worked in Iran-Contra--that would be Abrams and Cheney, and there were others involved who were also in the White House and they had a meeting of lessons learned. ... And at the meeting, here were some of the conclusions: that the Iran-Contra thing, despite the disasters, proved you could do it, you could run operations without Congressional money and get away with it." (http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/03/23/cheneys-assassination-squads-and-iran-contra-and-findings/)

Now, off-the-books funding can come from a couple of different sources. One might be the Iran-Contra model, where the money for the Contra operations came from illegal arms sales to Iran. But there were also the CIA's operations against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 80's, which were supported by creating an Afghan heroin industry that had never previously existed.

And here is that same incredibly massive Afghan heroin industry still going today, with much of what it produces being smuggled through Iran, particular through Baluchistan. And here also is JSOC running around in Iran stirring up the Baluchi separatists/terrorists/drug smugglers. And meanwhile over there is Cheney, plotting how to fund JSOC through off-the-books methods.

Given all of that, it should be no surprise that the Iranians are really, really interested in "projects aimed at combating drug trafficking" -- should it?

[dtotire]

9. Iran Offers Help for Afghanistan

Source: nytimes

Iran Offers Help for Afghanistan


THE HAGUE — Iran pledged on Tuesday to help Afghanistan with reconstruction and to cooperate in regional efforts to crack down on the booming Afghan drug trade, which has spilled over the border.
Iran’s statements at a conference on Afghanistan here suggest that Tehran is willing to coordinate its policies more closely with its neighbors and other countries — something that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she hoped would come out of the gathering.
But the Iranian government also said sending more foreign troops to Afghanistan would be ineffective, arguing that the “the presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country.”

Iran’s statement came after Mrs. Clinton explained the Obama administration’s decision to deploy 17,000 additional soldiers and 4,000 more military trainers to help build up Afghan security forces.

The United States and Iranian delegations sat across a horseshoe-shaped table at the conference here that grouped more than 80 countries and international organizations to discuss policy toward Afghanistan.

Noting that Afghanistan’s opium poppy production far outpaced efforts to crack down on drug trafficking, the Iranian representative, Mohammed Mehdi Akhondzadeh, said “carrying out coordinated measures” will be “effective steps in line with blocking smugglers’ access to consumer markets.”

Iran’s participation in the conference has been closely watched, in part because of the long border it shares with Afghanistan, and in part because of the possibility that the meeting could provide the first face-to-face encounter between officials from Iran and the Obama administration.







Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/world/middleeast/01diplo.html?_r=1&hp

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This is a hopeful sign. It would be in the interest of Iran to have a stable and prosperus Afghanistan

[knowbody0]

10. indeed

very good sign. breaking the barrier of not speaking without conditions?

[SpartanDem]

12. It's amazing

how quickly Obama's reaching out to Iran has moved things foward. The neocon must being having fits over this news.