Bob Gates Says Iran Arming Taliban ... He Can't Be Trusted

There's a lot going on in this article about Defense Secretary Robert Gates' assertion that the Taliban have the upper hand in Afghanistan, and his prediction that the American public's support for the conflict will soften if progress doesn't become apparent soon.

This statement certainly jumped out for me:

Mr. Gates also said Iran was harming U.S. interests in Afghanistan by sending weapons to the Taliban and other armed groups. He expressed particular concern that Tehran might step up its shipments of explosively formed penetrators, powerful roadside bombs capable of punching through even the strongest armor.

Afghanistan is known as the "Graveyard of Empires," and with good reason -- everyone's fought (and lost) there, leaving a country awash in weapons. In Pakistan's "tribal areas" bordering on Afghanistan, even very modern, heavy weapons are easily found -- here's a brief but fascinating documentary that reveals just how easy it is to get Soviet, American and even old British hardware for a song.

And, according to an investigation by The New York Times, there's evidence that Gates' DoD is itself supplying the Taliban with arms:

Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior U.S. and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents' corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with U.S. officers and arms dealers.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near the Afghan border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against U.S. troops.

 Also, the reference to "explosive formed penetrators" raises a huge red flag ...

Recall how we first learned of the allegation of a dastardly Iranian plot to arm America's enemies with these deadly roadside bombs. It was in Iraq, where occupation officials rolled out the supposedly sophisticated IEDs as a "smoking gun" that would prove once and for all that Iran was arming Iraqi militants. The story was amplified by the stenography of Michael Gordon -- Judith Miller's old writing partner -- in the New York Times, and soon became part of the conventional thinking about the conflict.

The revelation had been delayed because, as the National Journal reported, "even as U.S. officials in Baghdad were ready to make the case, administration principals in Washington who were charged with vetting the PowerPoint dossier bowed to pressure from the intelligence community and ordered that it be scrubbed" -- intelligence officials had pushed back. When unnamed officials finally briefed reporters in Baghdad's sprawling Green Zone, they argued that the devices were too sophisticated to be home-made by Iraqi insurgents -- they had to be imported. But just a couple weeks after the claim was made, Reuters reported that during a sweep of the city of Diwaniya, "troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced 'explosively formed penetrators' (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches." Oh well.

But they had hard evidence -- actual EFPs captured in battle -- which they eventually revealed to reporters. Which turned out to be a mistake, as question after question popped up about the veracity of the evidence. (Also see Gareth Porter's excellent piece, "US's Smoking Gun on Iran Misfires.")