Quote Originally Posted by Hax View Post
I call . I don't believe it, there's no way that the Iranian government would deal with the same Taliban that murdered the Iranian diplomats at Mazar ê-Sharif less than a decade earlier. Perhaps that the Iranian government funded some Shi'ite splinter group, but it doesn't make any sense for them to fund the Taliban as a whole. There's one sentence I find troubling in particular:



The Taliban aren't just "Sunni militias", they are hardcore Sunnite fundamentalists to the extreme. It would not make any sense for them to forge even a temporary alliance with the Iranians, as the Shi'ites are worse than non-believers, they are apostates. Or something. I find it hard to believe.

A different explanation might be that there is a lot of corruption within Iran itself. It might be that the government either didn't know or didn't care about weapons smuggle to Afghanistan.
No offense dude, but your linear view of alliances, associations and state sponsored hate is kind of comical.

So let me break it down for you:
Iran is no fan of the Taliban.
Iran is no fan of the US.
Iran can fuel a proxy war between two of its enemies by providing weapons.

It's not a question of "are they?" its a question of "why wouldn't they?" You do know that Iran shares a border with Afghanistan, I am sure, and that Iran has a huge stake in the future of the country. This is evident enough in the violence levels between the east and west. Iran is in a tug of war with Pakistan.

I should also point out that the Taliban is not the only hostile force in the region, as there are a dozen anti-government splinter groups operating in Afghanistan, both Sunni and Shia. They do, however, tend to get overshadowed by the Taliban and people talking geopolitics tend to refer to all insurgents in Afghanistan as the Taliban, either for simplicity or due to ignorance.