[The secretary’s vague allegation of Iranian involvement in the Kabul attack surprised regional experts and a former U.S. diplomat, who said it would be unusual for Iran to launch an attack inside the Afghan capital. When asked to clarify the accusation that Iran was somehow linked to the attack in Kabul, the State Department declined to comment.]
By
Siobhán O'Grady
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Afghans
inspect a damaged car in Kabul on May 31 at the site of an explosion that
is
believed to have targeted a U.S. convoy. (Jawad Jalali/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
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On May 31, a suicide bomber targeted a U.S.
convoy in eastern Kabul, killing four Afghan passersby and slightly wounding
four U.S. servicemen and at least three civilians.
At the time, the Taliban claimed
responsibility for the attack, with spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid telling the
Associated Press in a phone interview that 10 U.S. troops were killed — a
common exaggeration for the militant group.
But two weeks later, amid growing animosity
between Washington and Tehran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed to the
Kabul bombing as an example of one “in a series of attacks instigated by the
Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied
interests.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Pompeo
mentioned a number of recent incidents he alleged were linked to Iran,
including a rocket landing near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and what he called
Iranian surrogates launching a rocket into the arrival terminal of an airport
in Saudi Arabia.
His comments came as tensions between Tehran
and Washington escalated this week after the Trump administration reiterated
accusations that Iran was responsible for explosions on Norwegian and
Japanese-owned tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
“Taken as a whole, these unprovoked attacks
present a clear threat to international peace and security, a blatant assault
on the freedom of navigation and an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension
by Iran,” Pompeo said.
The secretary’s vague allegation of Iranian
involvement in the Kabul attack surprised regional experts and a former U.S.
diplomat, who said it would be unusual for Iran to launch an attack inside the
Afghan capital. When asked to clarify the accusation that Iran was somehow
linked to the attack in Kabul, the State Department declined to comment.
“If there was clearly a belief that Iran had
hit troops in Afghanistan, it would have been huge news right away,” said
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Asia program.
“This administration is itching for a fight
with Iran,” he said. “Unfortunately, that sometimes entails making some
accusations against Iran that are somewhat questionable.”
For Tehran to be behind “an actual attack
being carried out in Kabul targeting U.S. personnel, to me, that seems like a
bit of a stretch,” he said.
Just because Iran has “lines of communication
open with the Taliban, [it] doesn’t mean [they have] operational control,” said
Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Pompeo “has a long list of grievances”
against Iran, Vatanka said, and he needs to “convince people that this isn’t
just a long list of events happening to coincide with the maximum-pressure
campaign on Tehran."
James Schwemlein, a nonresident scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former senior adviser to the
State Department’s Afghanistan and Pakistan envoy, said he “really was kind of
confused by where [the allegation] came from.”
The relationship between Iran and the Taliban
has evolved since the mid-1990s, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and clashed
with Tehran, he said. Recently, as the Taliban and Iran have sought to counter
the Islamic State’s influence in the region, they have developed more shared
interests.
“The Iranians are looking for groups that
will combat the Islamic State, and the Taliban have been very willing to,”
Schwemlein said, making it “not entirely out of the question that [in
Afghanistan] there was some operational cooperation” between the Taliban and
Iran.
But the location of last month’s attack in
the Afghan capital, which came immediately after a Taliban delegation met for
peace talks in Moscow and declined to declare a cease-fire, raised questions
about the possibility of Iranian involvement for Schwemlein, who said Kabul was
somewhat outside of Iran’s operational space.
“It doesn’t strike me as an attack that
serves an Iranian political purpose,” he said.
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