Taliban will make India more vulnerable to insurgency: Iran

India will become more vulnerable to insurgent activities if foreign-supported Taliban militia succeed in their mission to dethrone moderates from war-ravaged Afghanistan, Iran's ambassador to India Ali Reza Sheikh Attar said in New Delhi on Monday.

The activities of the Taliban, which are getting solid moral and material support from various nations, would have a destablising impact on India and other neighbouring nations, he said, adding that it will give a fillip to insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. The ambassador also strongly advocated that India should play an important and crucial role in ending the Afghan crisis.

Iran had invited India to take part in the conference on Afghanistan recently in Teheran.

Attar said India was a major regional power and had the right to play a role in defusing the crisis in Afghanistan, which may endanger the security of the whole region. He said some neighbouring nations had already been affected by the Afghan conflict and there was a need to end it.

The ambassador demanded that foreign interference in Afghanistan stop forthwith, claiming Iran had always supported the view that the Afghan crisis should be resolved through negotiations and peaceful means. The solution should be based on sharing of powers by all important groups.

On Iran-US relations, he alleged that the US administration had given financial assistance to some nations to destablise Iran. He said Iran is willing to settle problems with Washington, especially the issue of assets.

He said the new Iranian government would follow the policy of good neighbourly relations with all its neighbours.

Meanwhile, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief, who is visiting Teheran, faces a tough time since his country and Iran have major differences over Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

The main item on the agenda though is to open a ''candid dialogue'' with Iran on war-torn Afghanistan, which shares a border with both countries.

Iran and Pakistan are big players in a proxy war being waged in Afghanistan for the last 15 years, by Afghanistan's neighbours, and by Russia and the United States, for the control of a strategic area en route to the oil-fields of Central Asia.

Though they are now on opposing sides, until the Taliban student warriors swept out of seminaries in Pakistan to challenge the government in Kabul in late 1994, Iran and Pakistan did not have serious misunderstandings over Afghanistan.

Shi'ite Iran feels threatened by the radical Sunni Taliban militia, whose firepower and fighting skills has surprised the world. Within a year of their advance into Afghanistan, they have captured two-thirds of the southern and western provinces, and laid siege to Kabul.

For Islamabad, the Taliban victories were causes for celebration. Even as its relations with the Kabul government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik, and his general Ahmad Shah Masoud deteriorated, Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan grew.

In October 1995 when the Taliban occupied Herat and Nimroz provinces, Afghanistan's westernmost provinces along its border with Iran, Teheran through its state-controlled press accused Islamabad of ganging up with its ''enemies'', the United States and Saudi Arabia, to destabilise the country's eastern provinces which have pockets of minority Sunni populations.

Taken aback by the public attack, Pakistan's then prime minister Benazir Bhutto dashed to Iran to placate her hosts, but she was not able to convince Teheran that the Taliban was not a ''Pakistani creation but a home-spun Afghan entity,'' recalls a political commentator in Islamabad.

Nawaz Sharief's visit will be Pakistan's third damage-control mission. In September 1996 after Taliban tanks rolled into Kabul, putting to flight the Iran-supported Afghan government forces, Khalid Mahmud, Pakistan's ambassador in Teheran, was summoned to the foreign office and asked why Teheran had not been kept informed by the Pakistan government.

Islamabad's fire-fighting response then was limited to dispatching its foreign minister to Teheran to meet with his counterpart Dr Ali Akbar Velayati. But the extent of Iranian displeasure was obvious when Velayati left Teheran before the Pakistan foreign minister arrived.

Consequently, the prime minister's special envoy, Zafar Hilali, was sent off to reassure the Iranians, and weeks later Bhutto, who was visiting New York arranged to meet with the Iranian foreign minister during the UN general assembly session. Velayati bluntly told her then that Iran had irrefutable proof of Pakistan's backing for the Taliban.

Neither side has been willing to let go an inch on Afghanistan. Instead both sides have takes swipes at each other at every occasion. Islamabad says Teheran too is embroiled in Afghanistan, with military support for the anti-Taliban forces, including the Shi'ite Hizb-i-Wahdat and Masoud's fighters.

Recently, when Teheran sought Islamabad's help to protect its embassy in Kabul following the June 2 Taliban decision to close down the embassy, Pakistani officials recalled Teheran's indifference towards Islamabad's plea for support following the September 6, 1995 attack on the Pakistani embassy in Kabul.

''We had to request the Turkish diplomats in Kabul to help us. They took charge of whatever was left of our ransacked embassy. The Iranians did not even issue a strong condemnation of the attack by Masoud's men,'' recalled a Pakistani official.

Fear and distrust run deep between the two historical allies. Teheran is convinced that the Riyadh-Washington-Islamabad nexus has created the anti-Iran and anti-Shia Taliban to strategically encircle and politically destabilise Iran. Iranians recall the late 1995 murder of Ayatullah Mazari of the Hizb-i-Wahdat by the Taliban to prove their anti-Shi'ite credentials.

On Afghanistan consequently, there has been no meeting ground, increasing Pakistan's isolation in the region. Teheran has the support of India and the Central Asian states, who too are wary of the effect of the Taliban's zealous Islamic radicalism.

Islamabad is worried that Teheran's vision of an 'Asian axis', which was articulated for the first time by Iranian President Rafsanjani in a meeting with the Indian foreign minister in March 1994, might exclude Pakistan. Others included are China, Russia and the Central Asian states.

''Teheran's high profile involvement in the Indian Ocean region and the recent formation of a South Asian sub-regional grouping, all point to the definite new trends of regional economic and political cooperation taking root in Pakistan's neighbourhood,'' says a regional expert.

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