Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates traded barbs on Wednesday during briefly overlapping visits to Afghanistan, where Washington has troops at war but Tehran has growing clout.
Ahmadinejad, who arrived as Gates was wrapping up a three-day visit, told a press conference alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai that US and Western troops would never defeat terrorism by waging war in Afghanistan.
Gates said earlier in the week Iran was playing a “double game” in Afghanistan by being friendly to the government, while trying to undermine the US. He said on Wednesday he had passed those concerns on to Karzai.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband joined the fray during a speech in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was focused on strategies to end the war in Afghanistan.
Miliband rapped Ahmadinejad’s latest comments in Kabul as “unhelpful posturing and bombast.”
Washington, which will have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan by the end of this year, says it believes Iran provides some support for militants there, although not nearly on the same scale as in Iraq, another Iranian neighbor where US troops are fighting.
The Afghan insurgency is mainly led by Sunni Islamists, who are sworn enemies of Shiite Iran.
Tehran blames Western military intervention in Afghanistan for causing instability, however, and Ahmadinejad turned Gates’ earlier comment around.
“Why is it that those who say they want to fight terrorism are never successful? I think it is because they are the ones who are playing a double game,” Ahmadinejad said. “They are the ones who set the terrorists on their course and now they say: ‘Now we want to fight them.’ Well they cannot, it is impossible.”
As if addressing Gates, he said: “What are you even doing in this area? You are from 10,000km over there. Your country is on the other side of the world. What are you doing here?”
Shortly before the news conference started, Afghan security guards anxiously collected half-empty bottles of mineral water from reporters. One said it was to prevent anyone from throwing the bottles at Ahmadinejad.
Gates left Kabul shortly after Ahmadinejad landed. Before leaving, he described the timing of the Iranian leader’s visit as “clearly fodder for all conspiratorialists.”
“I told President Karzai that we want Afghanistan to have good relations with all of its neighbors, but we also want all of Afghanistan’s neighbors to play an upfront game dealing with the government of Afghanistan,” Gates said.
Iran was the only major regional country to reject an invitation to an international conference on Afghanistan in London in January.
Miliband called that decision “completely short-sighted” on the part of Iran’s leadership.
“The Iranian regime ... must acknowledge that the best way to protect its investments or promote the interests of Afghans that share its Shia faith is to work to promote peace, not undermine it,” Miliband said in a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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