Wikileaks make Iran look very bad

Iran Times International July 30, 2010:The treasure-trove of clas- sified documents pub- lished Monday by Wiki-leaks provides more details about Iranian assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan and implicates the Islamic Republic far more than any U.S. officials have ever done. Comparing what U.S. officials have said publicly and what the leaked documents say makes it look like the United States has been trying protect Iran from critics. There is, however, an important qualification. The 90,000 leaked documents are often raw reports and contain unevaluated intelligence. The problem with leaked intelligence is that sometimes analysts find the raw material to be false. There is no way to know what the judgment of the professional analysts were on the leaked documents published this week. One document dated March 2009, for example, says a group of more than 100 Afghan and foreign Taliban had traveled from Iran to Afghanistan to launch suicide attacks. No American official has ever publicly linked Iran to suicide attacks in Afghanistan. Another document said Iran offered blood money payments for every Afghan killed. The gist of what U.S. officials have been saying in recent years is that Iran provides some small scale aid to the Taliban, enough to buy some friendship or immunity from the Taliban, enough to cause some pain to the Americans, but not enough to enable the Taliban to win a military conflict and not enough to prompt the Americans to declare war on Iran. The documents, however, show Iran waging a more intense covert campaign against US-led forces in Afghanistan by providing money, arms, training and safe haven to Taliban insurgents. Reports from Afghan spies and paid informants, described in the US documents published by Wikileaks, accuse the Iranian government of directly supporting the insurgents. These “threat reports” cannot be corroborated, the Guardian newspaper of Britain said in a report summarizing the findings, but high-level US diplomatic communications in the documents indicate concern over Iran’s growing involvement in the country. “Iran has taken a series of steps to expand and deepen its influence in Afghanistan,” reads a summary of a secret cable sourced to the US embassy in Kabul. The cable relayed claims from within the Afghan Foreign Ministry that Iran was bribing Afghan MPs with millions of US dollars and working to oust reformist ministers. In May of last year, General Stanley McChrystal, then the US and NATO commander, said, according to the documents: “The training [of insurgents] that we have seen occurs inside Iran with fighters moving inside Iran.” A threat report dated February 2005 alleged Taliban leaders in Iran were planning attacks in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces. “The leaders travel into Afghanistan to recruit soldiers,” said the report. It added the Iranian government had offered each leader about $1,750 for any Afghan soldier killed and $3,500 dollars for any Afghan government official killed. Another report from January 2005 said that Iranian intelligence services paid 10 million Afghanis ($212,000) to the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin rebel militia. A statement sourced to “human intelligence” in June 2006 said Iranian officials were training members of the Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin in Birjand, Iran. Bombs and vehicles for suicide bombers were sent into Afghanistan from there, the same report said, while two other reports also spoke of bomb-making equipment coming from Iran. One report dated February 2007 said Helmand residents believed Iran had supplied the Taliban with a poison to be slipped into the tea or food of government officials. At least one document referred to the Afghan govern-ment’s reluctance to publicize Iran’s alleged involvement with its enemies, stressing that President Hamid Karzai wanted “to avoid additional friction with Afghanistan’s neighbors.” That may explain in part the very modest public charges American officials have leveled at Iran.

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