Mystery of the Strange Afghan Triangle: Taliban, Iran, Pakistan, and a Flower for Mullah Omar……..
July 25, 2010: “Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday. The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders. Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul. …..”
May 31, 2010: “The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal has said that Iranian assistance to Afghanistan is "natural" but that some of that aid is military aid to Taliban fighters. McChrystal told reporters at a news conference on May 30 that the training of Taliban fighters takes place "inside Iran" and that weapons from Iran are crossing into Afghanistan. "The training that we have seen occurs inside Iran with fighters moving inside Iran," he said at a news conference in response to a question on Iran's influence, according to Reuters. "The weapons that we have received come from Iran into Afghanistan."……”
Both reports from American sources: Radio Free Europe and N Y Times. So what changed in two months? Maybe the Taliban are playing the field. The Pakistani ISI are jealous lovers (of the Taliban), have been since the 1990s, too jealous to let anyone else so much as present a flower to Mullah Omar. Maybe the Iranians don’t care for a long-term relationship with the Salafis, no wedding bells etc. Maybe they just want to harass the NATO forces.
Cheers
mhg
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