U.S. Says Iranian Arms Seized in Afghanistan

This stuff is becoming relentless.

A shipment of Iranian-made weapons bound for the Taliban was recently captured by allied forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s top officer said Tuesday.

It was the first time that a senior American official had asserted that Iranian-made weapons were being supplied to the Taliban. But Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it was not clear if the Iranian government had authorized the shipment.

“We have intercepted weapons in Afghanistan headed for the Taliban that were made in Iran,” General Pace told reporters. “It’s not as clear in Afghanistan which Iranian entity is responsible.”

The shipment involved mortars and plastic explosives and was seized within the past month near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Markings on the plastic explosive material indicated that it was produced in Iran, General Pace said.

Now, the problem I have with this is that the Iranians aided the US in the bringing down of the Taliban, so why would they now have switched sides so dramatically?

Indeed, at a time when the US were sending $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the Iranians were funding the Northern Alliance, so they have a rather better record of opposing the Taliban than the Bush administration do.

“The overall Iranian role has been to work closely with us to bring Karzai into power,” said Barnett Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan at New York University. “However, the Iranians believe the No. 1 threat is an American attack to overthrow their government. They may do anything it takes to make the United States and its allies uncomfortable there.”

Whatever would have given them that idea? Oh, that's right. Bush took help from them to overthrow the Taliban and then turned on them and named them part of an "Axis of Evil".

So now, not only are the US once again peddling rumours that Iranians are supplying their enemies - which, once again, they can't prove that any governmental Iranian agency is involved in - they are even admitting that it is Bush's naming of them as part of this evil axis that might be encouraging them to do so.

Now we all know that the Iranians have denied all these charges and have claimed that the US is making these claims concerning both Iraq and Afghanistan to cover up their own incompetence, as we witnessed during the only meeting they have had recently when what amounted to a bun fight took place.

But General Pace has constructed a great way around the tricky issue of whether or not the Iranian government are behind this.

“We then surmise from that one or two things,” he said. “Either the leadership of the country knows what their armed forces are doing, or that they don’t know. And in either case that’s a problem.”

You see, guilty if they do, guilty if they don't.

Maybe when Bush had them assisting as allies in Afghanistan it might have been a good time to help the reformist Khatami by ending US sanctions against Iran instead of betraying him by labelling his country as part of an "Axis of Evil".

Were Bush serious about aiding the Iranian people that would surely have been the precisie time to help them.

Instead, we now have Bush and Pace flailing around trying to find any excuse to attack them and accusing them of various crimes for which they supply no proof. It's Iraq all over again. It's not only boring but it will convince only the very few people in the US who share Bush's mindset.

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Tags: Bush, General Pace, Afghanistan, Iran, weapons supply