(Afghanistan announced Tuesday that Iran had just told President Hamid Karzai that all backed up tankers would be allowed into Afghanistan within four days. But Iran told Afghanistan last month that it was lifting the blockade and it announced last week that there was no holdup at the border, so the meaning of this latest promise remained to be seen.)
Numerous protests have been held outside the Iranian embassy in Kabul and the Iranian consulate in Herat. There are reports of scattered other protests around the country as well.
The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) gave the protesters the back of its hand, saying they were “mercenary, Western elements.” It also accused the Afghan media, which is almost uniformly extremely critical of Iran, of purveying “Western bias.”
The protesters have chanted “Death to Iran,” called Iranians by the insult “Yazidi,” burned pictures of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi and President Ahmadi-nejad, and pelted the embassy building with eggs and rocks.
Last Friday, the Iranian ambassador to Afghanistan, Fada-Hossain Maleki, denounced the protests, held every three or four days, and said that if the Afghan government does not hold the demonstrators accountable, then “the Islamic Republic is likely to reconsider its decisions regarding the transit of fuel trucks and other issues.”
Iran says it is allowing fuel trucks to freely enter Afghanistan, but Afghan officials say far fewer than needed and allowed to leave Iran.
The next day, the Foreign Ministry in Tehran summoned the Iranian ambassador to hear a protest about the protests.
Radi Ferdows, a media aide in the Afghan Presidency, snapped back, “Kabul is not Tehran; everyone has the right to protest here.… Freedom of speech and the right to protest are in the country’s constitution, and the government does not have any plans to act against this.”
A gathering of businessmen in Kabul Tuesday vowed to halt all business transactions with Iran until the fuel trucks are permitted unimpeded access to Afghanistan.
An Afghan political party announced that it had assembled a petition with 200,000 signatures (and fingerprints) from angry Kabul residents protesting the fuel blockade.
The Afghan parliament rocks to angry attacks on Iran almost every day.
The Islamic Republic stopped all tanker trucks from entering Afghanistan December 10. On Christmas Eve, Afghan-istan’s vice president came calling in Tehran and said he won a pledge for an end to the blockade. Iran then allowed three trucks a day to enter Afghanistan and after a week raised that to around 40 trucks a day, still far short of Afghan needs. Aziz Shams, an Afghan Finance Ministry spokesman, said the normal tanker passage before the blockade averaged 250 trucks a day.
But Iran says there is no problem anymore, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said last Tuesday: “The issued was solved.”
Afghan officials say Iran didn’t explain the blockade at first but then said it was imposed because some of the fuel was going to American and other foreign military forces in Afghanistan. The Afghans say they have explained over and over again that all the fuel imports are for the private sector and that the Americans have a separate logistics system of their own to bring in fuel.
American troops have been in Afghanistan for more than nine years. There has been a lot of news coverage about the complicated logistics system that had to be created to move food, fuel, ammunition and other gear into Afghanistan for the troops. Iran has never before suggested that anything for the Americans was moving across Iran.
Gholam-Reza Javidan, a spokesman at the Iranian embassy in Kabul, told the Pajhwok Afghan News, “Afghanistan imported on average 92,000 tons of fuel from Iran annually over the past three years, but there is a threefold increase in its import this [Persian] year.” He said his country feared the additional amount was destined for foreign troops in Afghanistan. But Iran apparently never asked for an explanation of the growth in shipments, just assuming that foreign armies were getting it.
Afghanistan has not said if the Iranian statistics are correct. It is possible that Afghan buyers reduced purchases from other neighbors.
It isn’t clear why the Islamic Republic is continuing the blockade, whose principal result appears to be the promotion of violent hated of Iran among Afghans.
It also shows the Islamic Republic as quite willing to use its power to extract what it wants from a powerless neighboring state, although the Tehran regime seeks to portray itself as the best of neighbors to everyone in its neighborhood.