New route links Afghanistan to sea, via Iran WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

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As President Obama's foreign policy team tries to make lemonade out of the diplomatic lemons it has inherited around the world, one region could represent low-hanging fruit: the Khyber Pass linking Pakistan with Afghanistan.

The historic bottleneck, through which about 75 percent of U.S. supplies bound for Afghanistan travel, has become a hotbed of Taliban activity. Recent violence - a critical bridge has been destroyed and truck convoys have been bombed - could hamper Obama's plan to send more troops to Afghanistan, but it also might provide an opportunity.

A new land route has just opened linking Afghanistan to the southern seaports of its next-door neighbor, Iran - and that could be the opening the new administration needs to forge a diplomatic relationship with a regional power the United States has, with rare exception, viewed as the Middle East bogeyman.

"I certainly think it represents an opportunity, particularly because it kind of takes up this relationship where it was last at its most amicable: that is, over Afghanistan," said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the toppling of the Taliban government in Kabul a month later represented a remarkable departure from decades of mutual antipathy between the United States and Iran that peaked with Iran's revolution and the hostage crisis.

Brief cooperation

That period of cooperation included direct dialogue at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Bonn two weeks after Kabul fell and ultimately included discreet Iranian permission for U.S. flights over Iranian territory and assurances that any U.S. pilots forced to land or crash in Iran would be returned, Milani said.

Since then, relations between the two nations have sunk over U.S. allegations that Iran has sought nuclear weaponry and fomented violence across the Middle East. Iran has accused the United States of seeking to destroy its government and acting as a regional bully on behalf of Israel.

But last week, Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad each made overtures about their desire to begin talking again. Ahmadinejad's call last Tuesday for "talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere" came less than 24 hours after Obama's similar call in a press conference.

If Obama is looking for openings, Milani and other analysts said, he should look to Iran to help solve the crisis in the Khyber Pass, the ancient mountain corridor trod in antiquity by Alexander the Great and the traders of the Silk Road.

In recent weeks, the Khyber region in northwest Pakistan has shaken with battles between Pakistani troops and Taliban fighters, who blew up an important bridge and attacked NATO convoys heading to Afghanistan, the end of a journey beginning hundreds of miles away at the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

As invaders throughout history have learned, closing the Khyber Pass can create a logistics nightmare for even the largest army. Afghanistan is landlocked, with few good routes connecting it to the seas. The recent violence around the pass has left NATO convoys idling for hours and days awaiting repairs or safe passage.

Alternatives to Khyber

One of the best alternatives is relatively new: a road India built between the Afghan towns of Delaram and Zaranj, which are linked by road with the Arabian Sea - through Iran.

It's not the only alternative - Afghanistan can be accessed from the northwest, but that route is longer and would require traveling through Russia's sphere of influence. And Russia's relationship with the United States and Europe of late has been less than cordial.

Some analysts hope Obama explores the much shorter path through Iran, with an eye toward renewing the two countries' sense of shared interests.

Iran has a degree of self-interest in its next-door neighbor that distant Russia lacks. Iran's hostility toward the Taliban predates Sept. 11: the Taliban's interpretation of Islam holds that the Shiite Muslims who dominate Iran are heretics, and an Iranian diplomat is among those being held by militants. Iranians are also concerned about the boom in opium poppy cultivation that has swept Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion.

"There's a lot of common interests - at a broad level, both countries want to see Afghanistan stabilized, neither country wants to see a resurgence of the Taliban, both countries want to stop drug trafficking," said Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If the U.S. is contemplating when and how to go about engaging Iran, Afghanistan presents the best opportunity to build confidence."

NATO might be reaching a similar conclusion.

"We need to stop looking at Afghanistan as if it were an island," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said late last month. "We need a discussion that brings in all the relevant players: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Russia - and yes, Iran."

A few days later, Gen. John Craddock, an American who is NATO's supreme allied commander, said that if other NATO members wished to talk to Iran about sending supplies through its borders instead of through the Khyber Pass - fine.

But would it be wise?

Some analysts question the wisdom of giving Iran new leverage in the region.

"It's absolutely true to say that every country surrounding Afghanistan wants stability and security, but what you can't forget is they want stability and security on their own terms," said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "Oftentimes Iranian terms and U.S. terms are two different things. I'm not sure the desire for talks is worth gambling our troops' supplies."

Richard Russell, professor of national security affairs at the National Defense University's Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, said any talk of logistical agreements with Iran is grossly premature and should wait until new diplomatic contacts between the United States and Iran in neutral territory and other cultural exchanges bear fruit.

"The Iranians are just not business partners right now," he said.

But other analysts argued that small, practical deals such as opening supply routes can lay the ground for more successful diplomacy later on.

"We need to do these small confidence-building measures that show we can live with each other, we can find ways to work with each other," said Steven Clemons, who directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "Without that, you'll never have enough trust."

State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Wednesday that Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, visited the Khyber region after meeting with Pakistan's political leaders.

"The Obama administration is already thinking about this. I'm sure Richard Holbrooke has this in mind," said Carnegie associate Sadjadpour.