World Agenda: Tehran summit could be a turning point

FROM: www.timesonline.co.uk
Though it attracted little attention, the meeting on Sunday between the leaders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan could prove to be a turning point in international efforts to control drug smuggling, defeat the Taleban and stabilise one of the world’s most dangerous regions.

President Karzai of Afghanistan joined President Zardari of Pakistan in Tehran for a one-day meeting hosted by President Ahmadinejad. It came at a critical time for all three countries, beset by armed uprisings, domestic political struggles and the growing menace of drug smuggling and addiction.

It is the first time that the radical Iranian leader has held a joint meeting with his two neighbours, which are both battling Taleban insurgencies.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are heavily dependent on Western support in their fight against Sunni Islamist extremism. Iran, which is mainly Shia, is an enemy of the Taleban, who regard regard Shia Muslims as apostates. But Tehran has given covert support to the Taleban to encourage their opposition to Nato forces in Afghanistan and to prevent Nato determining a settlement on Iran’s eastern flank.

Until now, the three countries have had strained relations and very different strategic aims. Afghanistan has been intensely suspicious of Pakistan, which it accuses of harbouring Taleban leaders and failing to halt the movement of weapons and fighters across the border.

Pakistan, both under President Musharraf and President Zardari, is wary of the huge Nato presence in Afghanistan and hostile to the growing Indian influence in Kabul. And Iran has long been obsessed by the presence of American troops on both its eastern and western borders, which it has seen as a greater threat than either the instability in Iraq or the Taleban in the east.

Their joint commitment to “eradicating extremism, terrorism and drugs” is therefore deliberately bland, with no detail of the talks or hints of any changes in policy. But it marks a significant shift in Iran at a time when President Ahmadinejad is facing a tough fight for re-election in June and when Iranian hardliners have been put on the spot by President Obama’s conciliatory tone.

For Iran, the immediate threat is the vast drug smuggling operation based in Afghanistan, which supplies 90 per cent of the world’s heroin. Iranian troops have fought battles along the eastern border against well-armed smugglers, sometimes suffering heavy casualties. Within Iran the incidence of drug use and addiction is growing alarmingly.

With the drug trade now controlled by the Taleban, Iran is ready to make common cause with Kabul in halting the trade. At the same time, Pakistan, increasingly alarmed by the groundswell of anti-American opinion in the wake of drone strikes on Taleban hideouts, is looking for regional support in its fight with extremists in the Swat Valley and along its tribal northwest frontier.

Pakistan also has an important economic interest in securing energy from Iran, and at the summit reached broad agreement on a multibillion-dollar pipeline to bring Iranian natural gas to Pakistan within four years. The deal is vital to Iran, which is suffering from Western sanctions on energy investment and is falling behind in exploiting its huge oil and gas reserves.

For all these reasons, President Ahmadinejad is under pressure to improve relations with his two neighbours. The danger for him is that this will be welcomed in the West and will be seen as a sign of a pragmatic moderation of the anti-Americanism that has been Iran’s driving policy.

Iran tried to use the summit to bolster anti-American feeling by insisting that the presence of foreign forces had not stabilised Afghanistan. Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader, told the two visiting presidents that “the United States is hated by the peoples of the region because it is considered responsible for these problems”. That appears to have cut little ice with either man, however: neither has any reason to alienate the United States at the moment.

Nevertheless, the three leaders declared that they would hold regular future meetings, and create a mechanism for joint consultation. That can only help Washington in its attempt to focus regional efforts on defeating the Taleban, rebuilding Afghanistan and drawing Iran out of its self-imposed isolation. And that could be the first step in Washington’s long and difficult talk of re-establishing a working relationship with Iran. The Tehran summit could be more significant than the headlines suggested.