Is Iran-Taliban cold peace within reach?
To secure its part in Afghanistan's political future, Iran is actively engaging the Taliban, but the road will be bumpy, given the multiple ideological and geopolitical challenges.
A delegation of senior Taliban officials arrived in Tehran on Nov. 27 for talks with Iranian authorities, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Headed by the group's bureau chief, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the team comprised the Taliban's highest-ranking members to have ever visited Iran.
Since its emergence in the Afghan political landscape in the early 1990s, the Taliban has had hostile relations — chilly, at best — with Iran. Thus, the meetings in Tehran prompted the questions: What is the Islamic Republic set to achieve through engaging the Taliban? How positive are the prospects of Iran's success in its new approach?
Tehran tends to adapt to new circumstances and to play big in new calculations, given its location in a fast-shifting geopolitical and ideological regional environment. The revival of the Taliban as an influential force is part and parcel of those crucial and complicated developments.
The Taliban, with is second reemergence since the Cold War, is currently a major player in the Afghan political landscape. Back in 1990, the group's rise as a Sunni militant organization exposed its geopolitical and ideological fault lines with the Islamic Republic. The Taliban caught everyone in the region off guard after overthrowing the Tehran-backed government in Kabul. It also assassinated the leader of one of the political groups favored by Iran. And to smoothen its advance northward in August 1998, its gunmen launched a deadly ambush on the Iranian Consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, killing nine Iranian diplomats on the spot.
