Iran's Deadly Ambition (9 page)

The idea generated a firestorm of criticism in Washington. “It’s sometimes true that very different countries can cooperate against a common enemy, as the United States and Soviet Union did during World War II,” noted Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations in the
Washington Post
in the summer of 2014. “But the suggestion of a united U.S.-Iran front is more reminiscent of the wishful thinking among conservatives who argued in the 1930s that Britain and the United States shared a common interest with Nazi Germany in countering communism.”
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This skepticism is undoubtedly warranted, for Iran’s long and sordid history as a sponsor and instigator of international terrorism puts it squarely on the wrong side of today’s struggle against radical Islam.

BLOODY ROOTS

Chalk it up to the Islamic Republic’s roots in the radical, religious-based protests that coalesced against the secular rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the 1970s—or to Ayatollah Khomeini’s deep-seated belief that, once established, the ideology of his extremist state could become an export commodity and a way to reorder the prevailing geopolitics of the Muslim (and eventually the entire) world. Whatever the reason, since its inception in 1979, Iran’s current regime has harnessed terrorism as a key tool of strategic influence and foreign policy.

The formative years of Khomeini’s regime saw his government erect an elaborate domestic infrastructure to support and propagate terrorism, spanning multiple ministries and agencies, as well as invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the cause of global Islamic “resistance.”
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In the process, the
Iranian regime created a massive terror machine dedicated to the exportation of its radical ideas.

The United States felt the results of this architecture firsthand in April 1983, when a truck bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people, and then again that October, when a similar explosive device targeted the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241. Both attacks were definitively traced back to the Islamic Republic, which—working through proxies such as Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad Organization—sought to dislodge the American presence in the Levant.
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In response, the Reagan administration formally designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism the following year.

So the situation remains. Today, the Islamic Republic still ranks as the world’s foremost sponsor of international terrorism—a designation its leaders wear proudly in the name of resistance against the Great Satan (United States) and, more broadly, the West. If anything, the thirteen-plus years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent start of the war on terror have seen the Islamic Republic continue, and even deepen, its investment in global instability. It has done so through what some scholars have described as an “action network”: a web of official and proxy organizations that are “involved in crafting and implementing the covert elements of Iran’s foreign policy agenda, from terrorism, political, economic and social subversion; to illicit finance, weapons and narcotics trafficking; and nuclear procurement and proliferation.”
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The results are striking. In its most recent assessment of global terrorism trends, the U.S. State Department points out that Iran has

       
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maintained its “support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza,” as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah
militia, which it has helped rearm after the latter’s 2006 conflict with Israel;

       
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“increased its presence in Africa and attempted to smuggle arms to Houthi separatists in Yemen and Shia oppositionists in Bahrain,” and;

       
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used its terror vehicles and proxies to “provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East,” and has continued “to provide arms, financing, training, and the facilitation of Iraqi Shia fighters” to reinforce the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria against its opposition.
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The scope of Iran’s investment in terrorism is far broader than could be comfortably covered in these pages. But the challenge it poses to the United States and its allies is clear. As scholars Scott Modell and David Asher note, despite years of economic and political pressure, “Iran seems undeterred in its mission to confront the ‘enemies of Islam’ and create new centers of non-Western power around the world.”
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Today, one such potential center is emerging on Iran’s eastern border.

EASTERN PROMISES

For Iran, the start of the war on terror in 2001 was a significant existential challenge. The incursion of the Great Satan, the United States, and its coalition partners into Afghanistan on their eastern flank worried Iran’s ayatollahs, while the rapid way in which the United States and its allies dismembered the Taliban regime in Kabul raised concerns that the coalition might soon set its sights on the Islamic Republic. This sense of siege would only be amplified by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq two years later and the assumption of control over the country by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority thereafter.

In response, Iran adopted a two-pronged strategy toward its eastern neighbor. On the one hand, Tehran sought to expand its influence and political clout in post-Taliban Afghanistan, both as a way to prevent a possible tilt toward the West on the part of the central government in Kabul and to carve out a zone of influence that could serve as a strategic buffer. On the other, Tehran worked to counter the presence of foreign forces on Afghan soil and raise the cost for the coalition to remain there.
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In pursuit of the first priority, Iran expanded its economic stake in Afghanistan. Over the course of five years, the Islamic Republic invested heavily in various infrastructure, mining, and industrial projects throughout the country. As of 2012, more than 2,000 Iranian companies were estimated to be operating in Afghanistan, and 110 technical-engineering projects totaling some $360 million in business were said to be active.
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These economic links were cemented by a massive trade deal between the two countries in May 2012 that, among other things, granted Afghanistan access to Iran’s port of Chabahar.
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Trade between the two countries ballooned. In 2008, Iran’s exports to Afghanistan totaled a mere $800 million annually. By 2011, that figure topped $2 billion.
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And just three years after that, total bilateral trade more than doubled, reaching $5 billion annually and making the Islamic Republic one of Afghanistan’s most important trading partners.
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Politically, Iran progressively co-opted Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban government. Iran had played a key role in organizing Afghanistan’s various political factions in support of President Hamid Karzai in the run-up to his election in December 2004.
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Thereafter, it sought to expand its influence among the country’s politicians, using cultural ties, payoffs, and bribes to subvert the independence of Karzai’s government, with considerable success. A 2012 assessment
by the Institute for the Study of War noted that “Iran’s influence permeates the Afghan government at all levels,” with many Afghan politicians and government functionaries on Iran’s payroll.
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This rot extended to the very top of Afghanistan’s political power structure. In October 2010, President Karzai himself acknowledged accepting $2 million from Iran.
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Karzai’s admission was a telling reminder to Washington of who wielded the real power in Afghanistan.

Simultaneously, Iran forged an alternative center of gravity in Afghanistan’s western provinces. In provinces such as Herat and Farah, Iranian influence—in the form of commercial goods, religious sway, and cultural pressure—facilitated a tilt away from Kabul, toward Tehran.
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And what Iran did not succeed in achieving there by engagement, it did through pressure. In August 2014, Herat’s police chief, General Samiullah Qatrah, accused Iran of being partly responsible for a wave of attacks in the province and demanded that “countries friendly with Afghanistan . . . [not] train elements of terror and fear on their soil.”
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Qatrah’s comments were proof that in Afghanistan’s wild east, the real power broker was not the Afghan central government but Iran’s clerical regime.

Expanding its influence is not Iran’s only priority, however. Iran also seeks to deny it to others, most prominently the United States and its allies. Over the past several years, Iran carried out a major covert campaign aimed at undermining the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. The extent of this effort was neatly summarized by the U.S. State Department in its 2012
Country Reports on Terrorism
, which noted that, “[s]ince 2006, Iran has arranged arms shipments to select Taliban members, including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives.” According to the same assessment, “Iran has shipped a large number of weapons to Kandahar, Afghanistan, aiming to increase its influence in this key
province.” Iran has also “trained Taliban elements on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons, such as mortars, artillery, and rockets.”
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The goal of these efforts wasn’t success for the Sunni Taliban, which Shiite Iran saw as both a regional rival and a strategic competitor. Rather, Iran sought to blunt the coalition’s political impact and lessen its chances for strategic success. As General David Petraeus, at the time the commander of U.S. Central Command, noted in 2009, Iran does not want “an extremist Sunni regime running their eastern neighbor . . . but they don’t want us to succeed too easily either.”
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Nevertheless, Iran’s assistance helped bolster the capabilities of Afghan insurgent groups, at significant cost measured in U.S. and Afghan lives.

The Obama administration’s announcement in mid-2011 of plans for a formal exit from Afghanistan kicked Iran’s efforts into high gear. By the following year, Western observers noted the “soft power” gains made by the Islamic Republic. An October 2012 expose in the
Wall Street Journal
disclosed that Iran was “funding aid projects and expanding intelligence networks across Afghanistan” in anticipation of coalition withdrawal, using proxies such as the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee as agents of influence.
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The formula employed by Iran was simple and effective. It offered economic aid in the form of loans, stipends, and medical supplies in exchange for loyalty and actionable intelligence on coalition activities.
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The fruits of Iran’s labor became visible in August 2013, when the two countries signed the Afghanistan-Iran Strategic Cooperation Agreement.
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The significance of the deal, and the message behind it, was unmistakable: a year and a half before the coalition’s exit, Kabul already understood that Tehran, not Washington, was the long-term power broker in Southwest Asia.

So it remains. Afghanistan’s tumultuous election in October 2014 may have seen the rise of a new president, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, and a new power-sharing coalition in Kabul, but Iran’s influence remains significant, and so does the control it exerts over Afghanistan’s political trajectory. Ghani himself said as much in September 2014, when he told visiting Iranian vice president Hossein Shariatmadari that “Afghanistan relations with other countries shall not undermine its relations with Iran,” and that “no countries will face any threat from the soil of Afghanistan.”
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A WAR ON ISRAEL

In the summer of 2014, a new round of hostilities broke out between Israel and the Hamas terrorist movement in the Gaza Strip. Over the course of some fifty days, Hamas rained hundreds of rockets down on Israeli cities and towns, terrorizing the country’s population and precipitating a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s military forces.

When the dust cleared, the two sides reached what Israeli officials termed a “strategic tie.”
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The Israeli government proved the operational effectiveness of its new Iron Dome missile defense system, which successfully destroyed an estimated 85 percent of incoming projectiles. Israel’s subsequent incursion into the Gaza Strip, too, yielded tangible benefits, allowing the Israeli military to identify and eradicate most (although not all) of Hamas’s “terror tunnels” and, in the process, foil at least one major planned attack.
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But the benefits were arguably greater for Hamas, for whom the conflict was nothing short of a bid for continued relevance. Indeed, before the war, the group was on the ropes, both politically and economically. This was an unexpected development: Hamas’s sudden (and surprising) dominance in the late 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip made the group a power broker in Palestinian
politics. This position was cemented several months later, when it successfully undertook a hostile takeover of the Gaza Strip, wresting control of the territory from the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Fatah faction. Since then, a series of reversals—including Israel’s successful Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 and an ongoing blockade of maritime imports into Gaza—greatly dented the group’s legitimacy and mystique. But no event was more damaging to Hamas’s political and economic fortunes than falling out with its chief power broker, Iran.

Historically, the Islamic Republic has been a longtime key backer of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But, beginning in late 2011, the two underwent what amounted to a strategic divorce over Syria. While Iran assumed a pivotal role as a defender of the Assad regime, Hamas came out vocally against Syria’s dictator and in support of the various opposition groups organizing his overthrow. In response, an irate Iran virtually zeroed out its financial support to Hamas and ceased its military cooperation with the group.
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Adrift, Hamas became critically short on cash, unable to pay salaries for its officials or administer basic governmental functions.
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And in the acrimonious negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas over the creation of a “unity” government during the spring of 2014, Hamas unexpectedly found itself thrust into the role of junior partner to Abbas’s Fatah faction. Against this backdrop, the Gaza war of August–September 2014 can be seen as a last grasp for political relevance on the part of the movement.