BORZOU DARAGAHI
When the Taliban seized control of Kabul and much of the rest of Afghanistan in a lightning offensive in the summer of 2021, the country’s neighbor to the West, Iran, seemed as surprised as any other interested party including the United States and United Nations agencies. Like other regional and global powers, Iran found itself scrambling to secure its personnel and facilities. Like Afghanistan’s other neighbors, Iran braced for the humanitarian fallout, as thousands of Afghan families sought an escape from what they feared would be unbearable and possibly fatal living conditions under the victorious, self-declared “Islamic Emirate.”
More than any other nation except Pakistan or other institutions closely linked to Afghanistan, Iran was prepared for the cataclysm of August 2021. Despite past confrontations and the sectarian and ethnic divide between Shia, Persian-speaking Iran and the Sunni, Pashtun-dominated Taliban, Tehran had spent at least a decade cultivating ties to the network. While it was apparently as shocked as any nation at the quick collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s Kabul government, Iran clearly had had for months a sense of the potentially impending dangers and opportunities that a US withdrawal would present. It had approached Ghani just months earlier, offering security assistance,1 and it had bolstered refugee camps at its border in anticipation of fleeing Afghans.
“The Iranians knew that one day the Americans would go and the Taliban would be stronger,” said a European official who works closely on Afghan matters but asked not to be named for fear of damaging his role as an intermediary.2 “What they could not imagine was this rapid implosion of the Afghan state.”
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