A staple of observing politics is watching rhetoric curdle into reality. Operation Enduring Freedom, thought up and slapped together in the wake of 9/11, was supposed to put down the ‘global terror threat’ and bring freedom to the subjugated peoples of Afghanistan and the Middle East. It ended last week with images of despairing Afghans tumbling to their deaths from the undercarriages of fleeing US planes.
The rights and wrongs of leaving are sundering US foreign policy elites, but leaving the United States is most certainly doing. So what next? When the United States high-tails it out of the region you can be sure that everyone around is watching — no more so than in neighbouring Iran.
Iran has a peculiar relationship with the Taliban. The two sides almost went to war in 1998 after 11 Iranian diplomats were killed by what the Taliban called ‘renegade forces acting without orders’. And as a largely Deobandi Sunni gang on the one hand and the world’s largest Shia state on the other, each considers the other to be deviant.
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