BEIRUT AND TEHRAN — It was an eye-popping bust: 4.5 tons of opium, hashish and other drugs seized from nine alleged smugglers last weekend in two cities near the Iranian capital.
Two days later, police in eastern Iran, near Afghanistan, stopped a pickup packed with a quarter of a ton of opium in compartments under the floorboards, according to local news reports. And cops in the border town of Zabol recently seized another quarter-ton of Afghan opium.
Whatever Iranian officials might feel about U.S. troubles in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is a rising alarm in Tehran over the torrent of drug dealing, human trafficking and violence connected to the mayhem in the region that is washing across Iran's eastern border.
The Islamic Republic announced Thursday that it will join the United States in dispatching official delegations to two international conferences on Afghanistan. The Obama administration has welcomed Tehran's intended participation at one in the Netherlands.
U.S. and Iranian interests overlap in Afghanistan, perhaps more than on any other issue. The Obama administration, which has committed itself to diplomatic outreach to Tehran, has favored a greater Iranian role in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan as a way of building trust between the long-estranged U.S. and Iran and resolving disputes, especially over Iran's nuclear program.
But Iranians say they're wary of getting burned, as they say they were after quietly cooperating with the Bush administration in 2001 and '02 when the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan and brought President Hamid Karzai to power. That brief flowering of diplomatic contacts ended with former President George W. Bush labeling Iran as part of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
Since then Iran has ramped up its nuclear program, which it says is for civilian purposes, in defiance of U.S. demands to halt it. It has also increased its support for Arab militant groups fighting Israel, a key American ally. But increasingly, Tehran finds its interests coinciding with the U.S. in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the resurgence of the Taliban and the warfare have created a vortex of chaos drawing in Iran.
"Iran and the United States have a fundamental point of interest in the region vis-a-vis Afghanistan," said Sadegh Zibakalam, professor of political science at Tehran University. "Both want to see a moderate, democratic, stable Afghanistan because if there is chaos in Afghanistan, it means opium to Iran and Afghan refugees in Iran."
