Afghanistan may be a bellwether for Saudi-Iranian rivalry
Had the United States withdrawn from Afghanistan several years earlier than it did, chances are that Saudi Arabia would have sought to exploit military advances by the Taliban in far less subtle ways than it may do now.
Saudi Arabia was still channeling funds in 2017 to anti-Iranian, anti-Shi’ite militants in the Iranian-Afghan-Pakistani border triangle and further south on the Pakistani side of the frontier. This comes despite efforts by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to distance the kingdom from identification with austere interpretations of Islam that shaped the country’s history and which it shared with the Taliban.
“The Taliban is a religious extremist group which is no stranger to extremism and murder, especially murdering Shi’ites, and its hands are stained with the blood of our diplomats,” noted an Iranian cleric, referring to the 1998 killing of eight Iranian diplomats and a journalist in Afghanistan.
Outgoing Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif outlined the potential tripwire Afghanistan constitutes for Iran.
“If Iran doesn’t play well and makes an enemy out of the Taliban soon, I think some Arab countries in the Persian Gulf and the United States would attempt to finance and direct the Taliban to weaken Tehran and divert its attention away from Iraq and other Arab countries. The biggest threat for us would be the formation of an anti-Iran political system in Afghanistan,” said Zarif…
It is tempting to compare the potential problems for Iran of an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban to Saudi Arabia’s Houthi troubles in Yemen. Saudi Arabia was, before the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban’s control of that country. At the time, it saw virtue in stirring the pot on Iran’s borders.
Much has changed, not only in the last two decades but also in the last few years. Both Saudi Arabia and some Trump administration officials, like national security adviser John Bolton, toyed with the idea of attempting to spark ethnic insurgencies inside Iran. But Afghanistan is not Yemen, and the Taliban are not the Houthis.
The Taliban have sought in recent weeks to assure Afghanistan’s neighbors that they seek cooperation and will not support militancy beyond their country’s borders. Iran recently hosted talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government that ended with a joint statement calling for a peaceful political settlement and declaring that “war is not the solution.”
It has been war ever since…
