Exclusive: US, NATO Talking With Iran About Afghanistan

This week Iranian representatives will join those of other countries at the US-led conference on Afghanistan at The Hague. Most of the media will note this, rightly, as a breakthrough in US-Iran engagement.

Guess what? Those discussions have already started. The Voice of America reported Friday:

Asia's six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, held a meeting in Moscow Friday to discuss ways of combating terrorism, drug-trafficking, and organized crime in Afghanistan. Among those invited to the meeting were diplomats from the United States and Iran.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick Moon, and Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhonzadeh spoke within minutes of one another at the SCO's Special Conference on Afghanistan.

While Iranian and US representatives repeated the political line that, in VOA's words, "it is not unusual for them to attend the same international forums", a senior American official emphasised that "the U.S. considers Iran to be an important player related to Afghanistan".

So, while Bush Administration officials (and US military commanders like David Petraeus up to last month) accused Tehran of running weapons to the Taliban across the Afghan border, their Obama successors are discussing how to work with Iran to secure that border. Even more importantly, those talks are coming in a regional context: the other members of the Shanghai group are Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The significance of the evolving US-Iran relationship of Afghanistan was reinforced by the confirmation that an Iranian diplomat had held informal talks with NATO officials for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Senior NATO negotiator Martin Erdmann met with Iran's ambassador to the European Union, Ali-Asghar Khaji, and commented, "This is another good step in engaging Iran in the international community."

A NATO spokesman confirmed that the talks with Mr Khaji had concentrated on Afghanistan.