David Stout responds
I received a response from David Stout to my earlier message regarding his unskeptical reporting of claims that Iran is funding Hamas and the Taliban. In this first message, Mr. Stout appears to be referring to an op-ed piece by Roger Cohen from November 2007: Afghanistan at the Brink.
I appreciate your thoughtful note, and I concede that I should have injected a note of skepticism about Iran's meddling in Afghanistan, etc. HOWEVER, it is not as though such speculation is groundless. I enclose a couple of snippets from a recent article by Roger Cohen:
Other challenges are containing the rampant corruption of governors chosen by President Hamid Karzai, better integrating sometimes contradictory international efforts and limiting the degree to which Pakistan and Iran meddle.
All these problems are redoubled by the unpopularity of Bush's America. Iran sees in Afghanistan another chance to hurt U.S. interests. But it's not alone. Russia likes that game these days. China is not averse
And this additional response came in a little bit later, referencing the article U.S. Weighing Terrorist Label for Iran Guards (NYT, 2007-08-15):
Just to bolster my (partial) defense re Iran and the Taliban, while still conceding your point that I probably should have included a note of skepticism,these snippets are from an NYT article last August:
Iran has repeatedly denied that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons, that it is helping in any way to facilitate attacks on American troops in Iraq or that it is shipping any weapons to the Taliban, a group Iran opposed in the 1990s.
On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again dismissed American complaints that Iran is providing weapons to the Taliban. Speaking in Kabul, Afghanistan, after talks with President Hamid Karzai, he said Iran was ''fully supporting'' its new government.
In June, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the volume of weapons reaching the Taliban from Iran made it ''difficult to believe'' that the shipments were ''taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government.'' In a television interview the same day, Assistant Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said there was ''irrefutable evidence'' that the weapons were coming from the Revolutionary Guard.
Looking at the Cohen piece, it never suggests that Iran is actually funding the Taliban. Indeed, Iran has been working fairly closely with the new Afghanistan government, run by Shi'ites. However, the US military has stated that many weapons used by the Taliban insurgency were manufactured in Iran, and that they suspect that, due to the number of such weapons, the government would have to be aware of this movement of weapons, as is noted in the second piece which Stout quotes.
However, also in the second piece is this gem: "Mr. Karzai played down the dispute over the weapons shipments, as he did during a visit to the White House this month. He said that Afghanistan and Iran were “brothers” and that both the United States and Iran were helping reconstruct his country." If Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan is saying that Iran is still tightly allied with them, I find it difficult to credit assertions of "American intelligence officials" that Iran is trying to destabilize Afghanistan. After all, we've been lied to by "American intelligence officials" several times before - I have no reason to believe that they've stopped now, especially in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.
I've also written a direct response to Mr. Stout, which you can read after the cut.
My response:
Thank you for your response to my letter. I hope that you'll follow through and write more skeptically in the future. I have a couple of points to make regarding your counters to my arguments.
In the first article which you reference, Cohen never makes the claim that Iran is actually funding the Taliban, only that they would like to harm the U.S. As other analysts have noted (e.g. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/21/news/oxan.0321.php), they are unlikely to compromise their interest in advancing Shi'ism to harm the US, unless our relationship with them takes a very bad turn - worse than it has yet taken, I believe.
In the second article, President Harmid Karzai of Afghanistan describes Iran and his nation as "brothers". I give this much more weight than statements by "American intelligence officials", given how many of the statements by such officials leading up to the Iraq war have since been shown to be false. Indeed, the current propaganda on Iran bears a strong resemblance to that in the run-up to our current war in Iraq.