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As President Obama's foreign policy team
tries to make lemonade out of the diplomatic lemons it has
inherited around the world, one region could represent
low-hanging fruit: the Khyber Pass linking Pakistan with
Afghanistan.
The historic bottleneck, through which
about 75 percent of U.S. supplies bound for Afghanistan
travel, has become a hotbed of Taliban activity. Recent
violence - a critical bridge has been destroyed and truck
convoys have been bombed - could hamper Obama's plan to send
more troops to Afghanistan, but it also might provide an
opportunity.
A new land route has just opened linking
Afghanistan to the southern seaports of its next-door
neighbor, Iran - and that could be the opening the new
administration needs to forge a diplomatic relationship with
a regional power the United States has, with rare exception,
viewed as the Middle East bogeyman.
"I certainly think it represents an
opportunity, particularly because it kind of takes up this
relationship where it was last at its most amicable: that
is, over Afghanistan," said Abbas Milani, director of the
Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the
toppling of the Taliban government in Kabul a month later
represented a remarkable departure from decades of mutual
antipathy between the United States and Iran that peaked
with Iran's revolution and the hostage crisis.
Brief cooperation
That period of cooperation included direct
dialogue at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Bonn two weeks
after Kabul fell and ultimately included discreet Iranian
permission for U.S. flights over Iranian territory and
assurances that any U.S. pilots forced to land or crash in
Iran would be returned, Milani said.
Since then, relations between the two
nations have sunk over U.S. allegations that Iran has sought
nuclear weaponry and fomented violence across the Middle
East. Iran has accused the United States of seeking to
destroy its government and acting as a regional bully on
behalf of Israel.
But last week, Obama and Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad each made overtures about their desire
to begin talking again. Ahmadinejad's call last Tuesday for
"talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere"
came less than 24 hours after Obama's similar call in a
press conference.
If Obama is looking for openings, Milani
and other analysts said, he should look to Iran to help
solve the crisis in the Khyber Pass, the ancient mountain
corridor trod in antiquity by Alexander the Great and the
traders of the Silk Road.
In recent weeks, the Khyber region in
northwest Pakistan has shaken with battles between Pakistani
troops and Taliban fighters, who blew up an important bridge
and attacked NATO convoys heading to Afghanistan, the end of
a journey beginning hundreds of miles away at the Pakistani
port city of Karachi.
As invaders throughout history have
learned, closing the Khyber Pass can create a logistics
nightmare for even the largest army. Afghanistan is
landlocked, with few good routes connecting it to the seas.
The recent violence around the pass has left NATO convoys
idling for hours and days awaiting repairs or safe passage.
Alternatives to Khyber
One of the best alternatives is relatively
new: a road India built between the Afghan towns of Delaram
and Zaranj, which are linked by road with the Arabian Sea -
through Iran.
It's not the only alternative -
Afghanistan can be accessed from the northwest, but that
route is longer and would require traveling through Russia's
sphere of influence. And Russia's relationship with the
United States and Europe of late has been less than cordial.
Some analysts hope Obama explores the much
shorter path through Iran, with an eye toward renewing the
two countries' sense of shared interests.
Iran has a degree of self-interest in its
next-door neighbor that distant Russia lacks. Iran's
hostility toward the Taliban predates Sept. 11: the
Taliban's interpretation of Islam holds that the Shiite
Muslims who dominate Iran are heretics, and an Iranian
diplomat is among those being held by militants. Iranians
are also concerned about the boom in opium poppy cultivation
that has swept Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S.
invasion.
"There's a lot of common interests - at a
broad level, both countries want to see Afghanistan
stabilized, neither country wants to see a resurgence of the
Taliban, both countries want to stop drug trafficking," said
Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. "If the U.S. is contemplating when and
how to go about engaging Iran, Afghanistan presents the best
opportunity to build confidence."
NATO might be reaching a similar
conclusion.
"We need to stop looking at Afghanistan as
if it were an island," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer said late last month. "We need a discussion that
brings in all the relevant players: Afghanistan, Pakistan,
India, China, Russia - and yes, Iran."
A few days later, Gen. John Craddock, an
American who is NATO's supreme allied commander, said that
if other NATO members wished to talk to Iran about sending
supplies through its borders instead of through the Khyber
Pass - fine.
But would it be wise?
Some analysts question the wisdom of
giving Iran new leverage in the region.
"It's absolutely true to say that every
country surrounding Afghanistan wants stability and
security, but what you can't forget is they want stability
and security on their own terms," said Michael Rubin, a
resident scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at
the American Enterprise Institute. "Oftentimes Iranian terms
and U.S. terms are two different things. I'm not sure the
desire for talks is worth gambling our troops' supplies."
Richard Russell, professor of national
security affairs at the National Defense University's Near
East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, said any talk
of logistical agreements with Iran is grossly premature and
should wait until new diplomatic contacts between the United
States and Iran in neutral territory and other cultural
exchanges bear fruit.
"The Iranians are just not business
partners right now," he said.
But other analysts argued that small,
practical deals such as opening supply routes can lay the
ground for more successful diplomacy later on.
"We need to do these small
confidence-building measures that show we can live with each
other, we can find ways to work with each other," said
Steven Clemons, who directs the American Strategy Program at
the New America Foundation. "Without that, you'll never have
enough trust."
State Department spokesman Robert Wood
said Wednesday that Obama's special representative to
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, visited the
Khyber region after meeting with Pakistan's political
leaders.
"The Obama administration is already
thinking about this. I'm sure Richard Holbrooke has this in
mind," said Carnegie associate Sadjadpour.
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