Stephen Hayes: What the U.S.-Iran Talks Will Ignore

STEPHEN HAYES
Thursday, 26-April-2012

 

Everyone's talking nukes, but Iran is a world hub of jihadist terrorism, including al Qaeda.

Top American diplomats will sit down across the negotiating table from their Iranian counterparts this weekend in what Obama administration officials have called a "last chance" for Iran to give up its nuclear-weapons program.

Although the Obama administration and Iran have conflicting long-term objectives—the mullahs want nuclear weapons, President Obama has promised repeatedly to stop them—their short-term goal is the same: to avoid military confrontation. The Iranians don't want their nuclear momentum reversed, and Barack Obama doesn't want a war complicating his re-election. So an agreement of some kind seems likely.

Will it matter? Anything that retards Iran's nuclear progress is helpful. But even if the talks "solved" the nuclear issue—virtually inconceivable, given the measures the Iranians have taken to preserve their program—a bigger problem would remain: the Iranian regime itself. Whatever progress is made in the context of overlapping short-term interests, it will do little to change the long-term strategic problems presented by a hostile Iran. And Iran is hostile.

It is one of the most underreported stories of the past decade: As we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran went to war with us. Tehran has provided weapons to insurgents directly responsible for killing hundreds of American troops in those two countries. It has funded, trained and equipped jihadists—Sunnis and Shiites alike—targeting American forces and interests in the Middle East and beyond. And all along the way it has provided safe haven and support to al Qaeda leaders and those closest to them.

Last July, the Treasury Department identified a network of al Qaeda operatives that "serves as the core pipeline through which al Qaeda moves money, facilitators and operatives." Added one official: "Without this network, al Qaeda's ability to recruit and collect funds would be severely damaged." The network is located in Iran.

"There is an agreement between the Iranian government and al Qaeda to allow this network to operate," David Cohen, undersecretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence told me at the time. "There's no dispute in the intelligence community on this."

Al Qaeda's presence in Iran is not new. According to a 2009 Treasury Department report, Saad bin Laden, one of the late al Qaeda leader's oldest and most trusted sons, "facilitated the travel of Osama bin Laden's family members from Afghanistan to Iran" in 2001. Then-al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri also sent his family to Iran.

Saad bin Laden and Saif al-Adel—who is wanted by U.S. authorities for his role in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania—have used their safe haven in the Islamic Republic to plot attacks and help coordinate the movements of al Qaeda operatives and their families. In response to widespread reporting of these operatives' role in planning attacks, particularly a May 2003 bombing in Riyadh that killed five Americans, Iran placed some of them under a loose form of "house arrest." But this designation did little to stop their terrorist activity, such as working with al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

After a U.S. drone campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan that has left its ranks thin, "Al Qaeda is desperate for mid-level capacity and senior-level managers," a senior Obama administration official told me. "The most ready cadre of those types of al Qaeda personnel—operative types and senior-level managers—are in Tehran."

Tehran's aid and comfort to terrorists hardly stops with al Qaeda central. A 2005 threat report from International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan (made public by WikiLeaks) noted that "Iranian Intelligence agencies brought 10 million Afghanis (approximately $212,800)" into Afghanistan to finance anti-American fighters. A second leaked report 11 days later described how Taliban leaders living in Iran are funding attacks against coalition forces and government officials.

In late 2007 in Afghanistan's Helmand province, according to another classified U.S. threat assessment released by WikiLeaks, U.S. officials broke up a cell of suicide bombers that had been "tasked by Taliban/al Qaeda leaders . . . to carry out suicide attacks on high level officials and Coalition forces in the area." A forensic examination of the vests found "a 92 percent probability of a match against a suspected sample of Iranian C4" explosives. And in October 2010, Afghan officials in Nimruz province, which borders Iran, announced that they had seized 19 tons of explosives coming across the border. There are thousands of similar reports in WikiLeaks, from ISAF and from other U.S. intelligence bodies.

In Iraq, meanwhile, Iranian support for jihadists ran wide and deep as soon as the war began in March 2003. "It is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to the highest levels of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq," said then-CIA Director Michael Hayden in 2008.

Despite the many conciliatory gestures of the Obama administration beginning in 2009, Iran continued its campaign. In the summer of 2010, America's ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, said at a press briefing that "up to a quarter of the American casualties and some of the more horrific incidents in which Americans were kidnapped . . . can be traced without doubt to these Iranian groups." And in June of last year, an Iranian-backed group known as Kataib Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a rocket attack that killed six U.S. soldiers at a U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad.

Major Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan told the Washington Post that the group was one of three Iran-backed militias that together constituted the greatest threat to Americans in Iraq: "Their leadership lives in Iran, they are directly trained by the Quds Force and they are supplied by them." Defense Secretary Robert Gates said before leaving office last year that Iran is "facilitating weapons, they're facilitating training; there's new technology that they are providing." The regime, he said, is "stepping this up."

This weekend's talks in Istanbul will ignore all of this. Instead, they will, as White House spokesman Jay Carney said, focus on "the international community's concerns with Iranian behavior regarding their nuclear program."

Fair enough: The international community isn't interested in holding Iran accountable for these acts of war, and in preparing for high-level talks it's easy to separate one problem from another. But the real world doesn't work that way.

Mr. Hayes, a senior writer for the Weekly Standard, is the author of "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" (HarperCollins, 2007).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

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