Picking up where the Bush administration left off, U.S. officials have been claiming in recent months that Iran has been helping the Taliban in Afghanistan—an assertion not backed up by hard evidence and downplayed by others fighting the war. General David Petraeus, commander of CENTCOM, told Congress in April that Iran was “providing opportunistic support to the Taliban,” and later that same month the State Department asserted in its annual terrorism report that the Iranian Qods Force was supplying Taliban fighters with weapons and training. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated this claim in June, telling the media Iran was “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities” to Afghanistan. But an investigation by the Inter Press Service found that the Pentagon had concluded there was no evidence linking Iran to the improvised explosive devices used by the Taliban. Furthermore, according to the Inter Press Service, a senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan told reporters last month in Washington that Iran was neither a “major problem” nor a “growing problem” for the U.S. against the Taliban.
