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October 8, 2009

Iran supplying Taliban in Afghanistan (Video)

Topics: Afghanistan, Political News and commentaries

The White House wants the military to keep quiet about Irans' sending money and weapons onto the Afghan battlefield.

Via CBS News:

U.S. military officials have told CBS News that Iran is sending money and weapons onto the Afghan battlefield. But U.S. commanders are not allowed to comment publicly and it's unclear to them what the U.S. strategy is for dealing with Iran's increasingly deadly involvement.

The deadliest form of roadside bomb on the Iraqi battlefield - explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) - is now being found in Afghanistan.

Lethal armor piercing bombs that can slice through U.S. humvees are also an Iranian specialty.

More worrying still: U.S. intelligence believes Iran is supplying surface to air missiles to the Taliban - the very same weapon the U.S. supplied to the Afghan resistance to bring down the Russians.

"We are losing this war every day," said Bruce Reidel, with Brookings.

Reidel led the Obama Administration's strategy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year. But he's also worried about Iran.

"It's clear that U.S.-Iranian relations now are going to go into an increasingly difficult period," Reidel said. "If I was sitting in Teheran, I'd be looking for the place where you could hurt the Americans the most and that's Obama's war right next door in Afghanistan."

Iran knows the U.S. is already stretched to the limit in southern and eastern Afghanistan, so opening a new front in the west can only make it even more difficult for the U.S. to succeed.

"It is more violent already but it could get a lot more violent yet," Reidel said. "In a sense Iran has fired a few warning shots across our bow."

That growing Iranian threat means there is even more at stake for the U.S. in Afghanistan than ever before.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

As Ed Morrissey points out, this should put to rest the silly assertion that Sunni and Shi'a radicals hate each other so much that they won't partner with each other against the West:

[...] Shi'ite Iran has funded Hamas for years, which is primarily a Sunni radical group (Hezbollah is primarly Shi'ite). The Taliban are Sunni, as is the leadership of al-Qaeda, but they share a common enemy in the West, especially the US and Israel. Iran has every reason to support the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the fight against the NATO alliance as a means of weakening our position and strengthening the hands of Islamist radicals, no matter what sect they follow.

Iran sits at the nexus of radical Islamist terrorism, and has since its 1979 revolution. Obama may want to hush the military to keep that "secret," but all it does is make the US look weak and ignorant. We should have pushed harder this summer to assist those in Iran who wanted freedom from the radical mullahs instead of giving the mullahs more legitimacy.

Worthy of note is that the revelation that Iran has been supplying the Taliban is in fact - old news, and that heavy weapons were known to be streaming across the Afghan border from Iran - as far back as June, all while Barack Obama naively attempted to enlist Iranian support (with outstretched hands) in tackling rampant arms and opium traffic across the border.

Posted by Abdul at October 8, 2009 3:31 PM

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• Iran supplying Taliban in Afghanistan (Video) - Oct 08, 2009