tehran -- They do the jobs that few Iranians would consider. For $11 a day, the Afghans mend shoes, haul bricks, dig drainage channels, push giant wheelbarrows of scavenged debris through treacherous ribbons of cars.
It has been this way since the various wars in Afghanistan sent an estimated 2 million refugees flooding into neighboring Iran. Since April, however, more than 160,000 Afghans have been rounded up and sent home.
Iran plans to expel up to 1 million in what it asserts is an effort to cut down on illegal immigrants and open up new jobs for Iranians. But Afghanistan warns that the exodus could jeopardize its fragile new stability, and for the U.S. and others, the move by Tehran offers an unsettling hint of Iranian mischief-making in the region.
One of the givens of the Middle East's dense diplomacy is Shiite Iran's enduring hostility toward the Taliban, the radical Sunni movement whose fall from power in 2001 was welcomed nowhere as much as in Tehran.
Yet the growing international pressure aimed at Iran's nuclear program appears to have prompted a more complex new strategy for Iran in Afghanistan, interviews with Iranian analysts here suggest. Iran still supports the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, they say, but the Islamic Republic is also not averse to asserting itself in a conflict that Washington once thought was over.
"It is better for Iran if America is entangled in Afghanistan with the Taliban," said Abulfazl Amooei, a political analyst for the Hamshahri diplomatic magazine, which closely reflects the views of Iran's Islamic hard-liners. "Because as soon as the U.S. has no problem in Afghanistan, it can turn to the next area in the Middle East. It can come to Iran and say, 'I am in your neighborhood, and I will attack you if you do not suspend your nuclear enrichment activities.' "
Iran appears to be mounting a high-profile anti-U.S. publicity campaign to the west in Iraq and neighboring Sunni nations. At the same time, it is working below the radar to keep its options open to the east, in Afghanistan.
For years, Iran's power in the Middle East was held in check through a combination of U.S. sanctions and a long war in the 1980s with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, whose regime received aid from the United States and Sunni Arab nations that feared the growing influence of the Islamic Republic and the potential expansion of its hard-line theological revolution.
