Iran an ally in Afghanistan?

BERLIN, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- Washington must start talking to Iran in order to win a key ally in the struggle to stabilize Afghanistan, according to officials in Europe.

"We have to think about a strategy change for Afghanistan," Peter Struck, Germany's former defense minister, said recently in Berlin. "We need a more regional approach."

Such a regional approach should include Iran, said Niels Annen, a senior foreign policy expert with Germany's Social Democratic Party.

"Iran's government is not interested in a Taliban-led, Sunni Afghanistan," he told the foreign press corps Wednesday in Berlin. The U.S. unwillingness to engage diplomatically with Iran is counterproductive, he added.

"Speaking to Iran could have a very stabilizing effect on Afghanistan."

Already, Iran is battling the effects of the flourishing narcotics business in neighboring Afghanistan: In Tehran, a gram of heroin these days is cheaper than milk.

Experts agree that Pakistan is another key country for the success of the mission in Afghanistan.

A bipartisan group of U.S. South Asia experts last week in a report called Pakistan the "greatest single challenge" to the next U.S. administration.

Washington has sent almost $11 billion in aid to Pakistan since 2001, but Islamabad has failed to stop the insurgency from regrouping in the border region next to Afghanistan. Aid should be significantly reduced if Pakistan's military fails to fight terrorism, the group of experts said.

Pakistanis recently elected a new government, and observers say Washington should grant it time to take control over the country's security sector -- namely the military spy agency ISI, which the West believes has secretly financed the Taliban to wage war in Afghanistan.

Besides the need for a new approach toward the regional powers, many experts have called for a new strategy to win the war in Afghanistan.

In the southern and eastern provinces, the Taliban are battling U.S. and NATO troops, with an increasing number of casualties on both sides. The previously stable northern provinces also have seen an upsurge in violence, mainly in the form of terrorist attacks, roadside bombings and smaller skirmishes.

Add to that the corruption of the Karzai government, the inability to contain the drug business and a growing number of civilian casualties due to Western air raids, and one can understand why "ordinary Afghans have become much more critical" of the Western military mission, Annen said.

Annen recently traveled to Afghanistan with his party colleague, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and visited the city of Kandahar in the volatile south, where Dutch troops are in the lead.

"In just two days, six soldiers got injured," he said.

Germany in the past was asked to also send troops to the southern provinces, but Berlin denied those requests. Annen said NATO forces from different nations should coordinate and combine reconstruction efforts, but added that a German military contribution in Afghanistan's south isn't realistic at the moment.

"We have enough difficulties to convince our people of the mission as it presents itself right now," he said.

This unwillingness to divert troops south has been criticized, even at home.

"If you want to take part in the decision-making for reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, you also have to show a military readiness for action," Henning Riecke, a trans-Atlantic expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, a Berlin-based think tank, said in a statement.

In Germany, the real issue is the public. Some three out of four Germans oppose the country's presence in Afghanistan, according to the latest polls.

German lawmakers nevertheless are expected to give the green light next week to prolonging German troops' presence by another 14 months. Germany also decided to send in an additional 1,000 troops because of next year's general elections in Afghanistan, boosting the total number of German troops in the country to 4,500.

Yet it is crucial that the government successfully communicates the importance of the mission to ordinary Germans, experts say. So far, none of the major parties in Germany has advocated pulling out of Afghanistan, "but a Parliament can't decide against the will of its own people forever," Annen said.