But the latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran’s account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism” would be regarded as a “hostile regime” and then named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

The Iranian account documented in the report puts the decision to build the Qom enrichment facility in mid-2007.

The report quotes from an Oct. 28 Iranian letter to the IAEA stating, “As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities…[elipses in original].”

No date is cited for that decision, but the IAEA report refers to satellite imagery of the site indicating construction began at least as early as 2002. The agency said it had “informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date.”

The IAEA apparently intended to convey the idea that this was construction on a second enrichment plant. In a story published Nov. 13 – three days before the report was circulated to IAEA Governing Council members – Associated Press reporter George Jahn reported unnamed diplomats as saying Iran had started building the plant in 2002, that the construction had paused for two years in 2004 because of Iran’s suspension of enrichment and had resumed in 2006, when enrichment had been resumed openly.

Independent analysis of satellite imagery has shown, however, that those earlier images were of construction on the general purpose “contingency centres” rather than an enrichment facility. Paul Brannan, a satellite imagery analyst for the Institute for Science and International Security who has analysed imagery of the same site from 2004 and 2005, concluded in a Sep. 29 report that it was probably a tunnel facility for a purpose other than an enrichment facility.

Brannan noted that the Qom site was only one of “many throughout the country” with similar characteristics. Contrary to the IAEA’s account, he observed that construction had continued between June 2004 and March 2005, although it was at a slow pace.

Brannan’s analysis is consistent with the account in the Iranian letter of Oct. 28 of a decision to construct a whole system of “contingency centres” for various purposes in the event of a U.S. air attack.

The Iranian letter quoted by the IAEA said Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency had requested one of the already constructed centres for a “contingency enrichment plant”, which would assure continuation of enrichment should the Natanz Enrichment Plant be attacked. The Qom tunnel facility was made available for that purpose in the second half of 2007 and construction on the enrichment facility then began, according to the letter.

Contradicting the Jahn story, however, the IAEA report says “a number of Member States” have “alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006″. If design work was only started in 2006, the construction work seen in the earlier years obviously could not have been on an enrichment facility.

A senior official of the Barack Obama administration charged in the Sep. 25 briefing on the Qom site that actual construction of the facility had begun before March 2007. The language of the new report indicates for the first time that the United States has taken a much more nuanced approach to the history of the Qom site in its communications with the IAEA.

The IAEA report seems to imply that it does not believe the Iranian account that construction began on the enrichment facility only in 2007. It said the agency has “indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Iran has told the IAEA it has no other nuclear facilities “currently under construction or in operation that had not been declared to the Agency”, according to the report. But it has not yet responded to a Nov. 6 letter from the agency asking whether it is planning to build any other nuclear sites.

The report, which is the last to be published under outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, appears to reflect his waning influence over the agency’s political position on Iran in relation to the director of the Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen.

After IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site and discussed the background of its construction, ElBaradei had commented Nov. 5 that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It’s a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.

The spin in the report itself takes the opposite approach from ElBaradei’s suggestion that the Qom facility is not a threatening development.

It also appears to reflect a common Western view that treating the Qom site as evidence of a covert nuclear weapons-related programme is useful to increase the pressure on Iran to reach agreement with the West to give up the bulk of its low enrichment uranium (LEU) supplies until they could be replenished through more enrichment nearly a year later.

After senior officials of the Obama administration had briefed reporters Sep. 25 on the allegation that Iran had been working on the site secretly for several years, U.S. officials said the discovery of the site would give the United States “leverage” in the talks with Iran that were to start in Geneva Oct. 1.

Western governments proposed at the Oct. 1 meeting that Iran agree to ship up to 80 percent of its LEU to Russia in return for eventual shipments of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel a small medical reactor in Tehran. That would have allowed the Obama administration to declare a diplomatic victory in regard to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and tamp down Israeli pressures to allow it to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At negotiations in Vienna last month under IAEA auspices, outgoing IAEA Director General ElBaradei presented a draft agreement based on that Western proposal. Iran has effectively rejected that deal, however, and made a counterproposal that would allow it to husband its LEU supplies.

Pres. Obama warned Iran on Sunday, “We are now running out of time,” in regard to negotiations on the ElBaradei draft. The United States and other negotiating partners have ignored Iran’s counterproposal.

Obama told reporters Monday that he had emphasised to Karzai in a phone call to congratulate him on his re-election that there would have to be “a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption” and that “the proof is not going to be in words, it’s going to be in deeds”.

The New York Times reported the day after the Obama-Karzai conversation that the Obama administration wants Karzai to prosecute certain high-profile figures who are known to be involved in corruption. The story referred to the president’s brother, Kandahar warlord Ahmed Wali Karzai, former defence minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

And on Wednesday, Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Karzai must “take concrete steps to eliminate corruption”, adding it means “you have to rid yourself of those who are corrupt, you have to actually arrest and prosecute them”.

The new public rhetoric and press stories have given the impression that the Obama administration is now pursuing far-reaching reform of Afghanistan’s system of governance. But the sudden intensification of administration pressure on the issue of corruption is aimed less at far-reaching reform of the system than at avoiding a significant worsening of the problem in the wake of Karzai’s fraudulent re-election.

In return for their pledges to guarantee huge majorities for Karzai in the Aug. 20 election, the Afghan president had to make promises to a number of power brokers or warlords in the provinces. Some of those were promised key ministries in the next government, according to Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The main concern in Kabul and Washington in the wake of Karzai’s reelection is how many of the warlords to whom Karzai is indebted will be rewarded with ministries when the new cabinet is announced,

“Everybody who supported Karzai now expects their payback,” said Dorronsoro, who spent the entire month of August in Afghanistan.

It is understood that the Obama administration’s pressure on Karzai over the corruption issue is aimed in large part at heading off the nomination of some of the most incompetent and corrupt warlords to key ministries, and that Karzai is aware of this U.S. concern.

It now seems very likely, however, that some lucrative ministries will be given to warlord allies of Karzai.

Dorronsoro believes the administration’s influence on Karzai’s new government is going to be constrained by Karzai’s dependence on provincial and sub-provincial warlords who control the actual levers of power outside Kabul. The U.S. pressure on Karzai “can only work on a few ministries and a few issues”, he told IPS.

It is understood here that administration officials are well aware of the political constraints on Karzai imposed by the power of warlords in the provinces. They understand that reforming the governance system of Afghanistan cannot be achieved simply by leaning on Karzai.

“There is no Afghan government in the way there is an American government,” counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen observed on a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace last August. “There are only a series of fiefdoms.”

Kilcullen cited those warlord fiefdoms, and the lack of law and order that accompanies them, as the main driver of popular support for the Taliban insurgency.

The power of the warlords, which U.S. policy abetted by providing them with cash, arms and legitimacy in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, poses serious obstacles to any U.S. initiative aimed at reducing corruption.

Although U.S. commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal warned that U.S. ties with regional power brokers have alienated much of the Afghan population from foreign troops, U.S. and NATO military contingents remain heavily dependent on them for provision of perimetre security for their fixed bases and to protect supply convoys, as IPS reported last week.

Even the idea of prosecuting the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai over his role in the drug trade is likely to generate disagreement within the administration, because the CIA’s operations directorate continues to use his paramilitary organisation for intelligence and counterinsurgency operations.

There is no evidence that the administration is moving toward a more aggressive posture toward the warlords in general. Instead, the problem is viewed as one in which U.S. interests in supporting the central government must be balanced with its interests in cooperation with provincial and sub-provincial power holders, IPS has learned.

National security officials tend to believe, for example, that the way to handle the problem of abuses by the militia personnel and police affiliated with individual warlords is not to take on the warlords but to do more to train national police.

Despite the flurry of activity on the corruption issue, the administration still hasn’t decided what approach it should adopt to promote governance and anti-corruption reforms. Several different options are said to be still under discussion.

One of the approaches being proposed by some officials is to get Karzai to agree to a detailed plan of action which would involve both the United States and other states heavily involved in Afghanistan, as reported by McClatchy Monday.

The report referred to the plan as the “Afghanistan Compact” and said the administration had been working with the Karzai government and other allied governments “for months”, according to McClatchy.

But an intelligence official told McClathchy he was doubtful about such a compact, because it would require Karzai to renege on promises he had made to his warlord allies.

A previous “Compact on Afghanistan”, which was agreed to by the Karzai government and 50 other states at a conference in London on Feb. 1, 2006, has been an embarrassing failure.

That document included benchmarks for progress in bringing about the rule of law, human rights, public administration reform and “anti-corruption”, among other areas, by the end of 2010. In those politically sensitive areas, however, the Karzai regime not only did not deliver on the 2006 pledges but has even retrogressed on many of the targets.

Some officials are suggesting that the administration avoid using the term “compact” altogether, because of the well-known fate of the previous effort.

One of the problems associated with trying to get Karzai to do anything about governance and corruption, IPS has learned, is that it has taken months in the past to work out any agreement with Karzai on any politically sensitive issue. There is now a sense in the administration, however, that it may not have that much time to have an impact on Karzai’s behaviour.

U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan’s predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide.

A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who have “ready-made” private militias which compete with state institutions for power.

The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.

In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.

Col. Khan’s security force protects NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.

Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month — nearly 4.1 million dollars annually — for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.

CanWest News Service’s Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a “General Gulalai” to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.

The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada’s provincial construction team is located.

Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as “Sherzai”, suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.

The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the owner.

In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to “control a significant portion of the province’s lucrative opium industry”, has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.

The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses.

In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government.

Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been “employed, trained, and armed by ISAF” and “Coalition Forces” for security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.

Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any accountability.

In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to “public anger and alienation” toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the perception that ISAF is “complicit” in “widespread corruption and abuse of power”.

That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special Forces’ policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.

Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.

“I don’t see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward operating bases without paying these guys,” said Sherman in an interview with IPS.

Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords “would actually become a security threat”.

Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. to hire more guards.

The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.

The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and the warlords, “While the U.S. government does not view this policy as actively supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords.”

Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a “de-warlordisation” process, in which “we took nasty, sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses.”

But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as “force multipliers”, in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.

The Iranian decision to withdraw from the earlier agreement with the IAEA was prompted, moreover, by the campaign of threats to Iran’s nuclear facilities mounted by the George W. Bush administration in early 2007, as a reconstruction of the sequence of events shows.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters Sep. 25 said, “We know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said they did not feel bound by that [IAEA] obligation.”

The U.S. intelligence assessment of the period, however, makes it clear that Iran did not begin construction on the Qom enrichment facility until long after its public change of policy on informing the IAEA.

The published key judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programme contained a little-noticed statement that the intelligence community judged that Iran’s “covert” uranium conversion and enrichment activity had “probably been halted in response to the fall 2003 halt”, and “probably had not been restarted through at least mid-2007″.

That clearly implied that U.S. intelligence had found no evidence of any undeclared covert enrichment facility.

An intelligence source familiar with the text of the full unpublished NIE has confirmed to IPS that the estimate does not refer to any evidence of a second enrichment site, even though it discusses the central importance of covert enrichment in any Iranian nuclear breakout scenario.

The estimate made no mention of such evidence despite the highly publicised fact that that the Qom site was one of many which were under constant surveillance by U.S. intelligence because of the tunneling system already dug into the side of the mountain.

Despite the claim that construction on the Qom facility began before April 2007, the senior administration official conceded in the Sep. 25 briefing that it was only in early 2009 that U.S. intelligence had seen construction activity consistent with an enrichment facility.

That is consistent with the statement by the Iranian vice president and head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Al Akbar Salehi, that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 and only then began construction on an enrichment facility.

The Iranian decision to withdraw from the “subsidiary agreement” to which it had agreed in February 2003 requiring it to inform the IAEA of any new nuclear facilities as soon as the construction decision was made occurred in the context of a series of moves by the Bush administration to convince Iran that an attack on its nuclear facilities was a serious possibility.

In December 2006, major U.S. news media reported that a second U.S. carrier task group was being sent to the Persian Gulf to send a message to Iran.

The U.S. campaign of threats intensified in January, when Bush accused Iran and Syria of “allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq” and charged Iran was “providing material support for attacks on American troops”. That formulation appeared to be aimed at establishing a legal basis for an eventual U.S. attack on Iranian territory.

The Guardian reported Jan. 31, 2007, “Senior European policy-makers are increasingly worried that the U.S. administration will resort to air attacks against Iran to try to destroy its suspect nuclear programme.”

Then the Washington Post reported Feb. 11 that a foreign diplomat had been told by Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser John Hannah that a U.S. attack on Iran was “a real possibility” in 2007.

A few days later Newsweek reported that it was “likely” a third carrier task group would overlap for a period of months with the two existing task forces. The story recalled that the presence of three carrier task groups in the Gulf simultaneously was the same level of U.S. striking power as the administration had in place during the air campaign against Iraq in 2003.

Finally, on Mar. 27, the United States began a naval exercise in the Gulf involving both aircraft carriers and a dozen more warships already in the Gulf, along with about 100 aircraft. The exercise, which took several days to complete, was the first joint naval and air operation since the air campaign against the Saddam Hussein regime.

A front-page article in the New York Times called it a “calculated show of force” which was “part of a broader strategy to contain Iranian power in the region”.

Just two days later, on Mar. 29, Iran notified the IAEA that it was suspending its implementation of the modified version of its “subsidiary arrangement” with the IAEA, signed in February 2003, which required that it provide “preliminary design information” to the agency as soon as the decision to construct a nuclear facility has been taken.

Instead, Iran said, it was reverting to its commitment under the older version of the subsidiary arrangement. That called for Iran to inform the agency of any new nuclear facility no less than 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material into the facility.

Iran was evidently determined to leave no ambiguity about why it was making that change. On Apr. 3, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firoozabadi, predicted publicly that the United States and Israel would launch a massive attack on the region that summer.

And that same day, Hamidreza Taraghi, the international affairs chief of the Islamic Coalition Party, which was part of the pro-government coalition of the conservative parties, explicitly linked the Iranian shift on its IAEA agreement with the heightened threat from the U.S. military.

U.S. military deployments in the Persian Gulf were “very similar to those before the Iraq invasion”, said Taraghi, and therefore, “We should not volunteer information regarding our nuclear sites, as they may be misused by the Americans.”

Taraghi was referring to the fact that any design information on Iranian nuclear facilities would help the U.S. and Israeli air forces prepare for an attack on those targets.

On Apr. 13, Iran sent another letter to the IAEA rejecting the agency’s right to verify design information previously provided on the IR-40 heavy water reactor at Arak.

The sequence of events surrounding the Iranian policy change and the subsequent beginning of construction on a second enrichment facility suggests that Iran was hedging its bets against a U.S. air attack, while retaining the obligation to provide detailed information six months before the introduction of nuclear material – if the threat of an attack were to subside.

The Iranian decision to inform the IAEA of the existence of the Qom site in September appears to reflect a much lower perception of threat of an U.S. attack compared with the perception in early 2007.

News coverage of the Qom site was dominated by the story told by the senior U.S. official at the Sep. 25 briefing that Iran had decided to inform the IAEA of the Qom site on Sep. 21 only because it knew the site had been discovered by U.S. intelligence.

In fact, however, U.S. intelligence was in the dark about why Iran had done so.

An unclassified set of Questions and Answers on the Qom enrichment facility issued by the U.S. government the same day as the press briefing, and later published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, included the following:

Q: Why did the Iranians decide to reveal this facility at this time?

A: We do not know.

In a 63-page paper representing his personal views, but reflecting conversations with other officers who have served in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis argues that it is already too late for U.S. forces to defeat the insurgency.

“Many experts in and from Afghanistan warn that our presence over the past eight years has already hardened a meaningful percentage of the population into viewing the United States as an army of occupation which should be opposed and resisted,” writes Davis.

Providing the additional 40,000 troops that Gen. McChrystal has reportedly requested “is almost certain to further exacerbate” that problem, he warns.

Davis was a liaison officer between the Combined Forces Command – Afghanistan (CFC-A) and the Central Command in 2005, just as the Afghan insurgency was becoming a significant problem for the U.S. military. In that assignment he both consulted with the top U.S. officers and staff of the CFC-A and traveled widely throughout Afghanistan visiting U.S. and NATO combat units.

He also commanded a U.S. military transition team on the Iraqi border with Iran in 2008-09.

In the paper, Davis suggests what he calls a “Go Deep” strategy as an alternative to the recommendation from McChrystal for a larger counterinsurgency effort, which he calls “Go Big”.

The “Go Deep” strategy proposed by Davis would establish an 18-month time frame during which the bulk of U.S. and NATO combat forces would be withdrawn from the country. It would leave U.S. Special Forces and their supporting units, and enough conventional forces in Kabul to train Afghan troops and police and provide protection for U.S. personnel.

The forces that continue to operate in insurgent-dominated areas would wage “an aggressive counterterrorism effort” aimed in part at identifying Taliban and al Qaeda operatives. The strategy would also provide support for improved Afghan governance and training for security forces.

Davis argues that a large and growing U.S. military presence would make it more difficult to achieve this counterterrorism objective. By withdrawing conventional forces from the countryside, he suggests, U.S. strategy would deprive the insurgents of “easily identifiable and lucrative targets against which to launch attacks”.

Typically insurgents attack U.S. positions not for any tactical military objective, Davis writes, but to gain a propaganda victory.

The “Go Deep” strategy outlined in the paper appears to parallel the shift in strategy from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism being proposed by some officials in discussions in the White House in recent weeks.

After reading Davis’s paper, Col. Patrick Lang, formerly the defence intelligence officer for the Middle East, told IPS he regards the “Go Deep” strategy as “a fair representation of the alternative to the one option in General McChrystal’s assessment”.

Lang said he doubts that those advising Obama to shift to a counterterrorism strategy are calling specifically for the withdrawal of most combat troops, but he believes such a withdrawal “is certainly implicit in the argument”.

Davis told IPS he was surprised to hear from one official in a high position in Washington whose reaction to his paper was that what he is proposing in place of the “Go Big” option is still “too big”.

Davis said his views on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been shaped both by his personal experiences traveling throughout Afghanistan during his 2005 tour of duty and by conversations with U.S. military officers who have recently returned from Afghanistan.

“Mostly it was guys who’ve been out there in the field,” said Davis. “They have a different view from those who work in the headquarters.”

“I think there’s a whole lot of folks out there who agree with this,” he said.

He was flown out of Iraq for medical treatment in early June after suffering a partial loss of vision, and has been temporarily reassigned to the Defence Intelligence Agency. However, Davis said he was not assigned to work on Afghanistan and did the work on his Afghanistan strategy paper entirely on his own.

Davis said he had received permission from his immediate supervisor at DIA to circulate his personal analysis and recommendations on Afghanistan on the condition that he used only unclassified, open source information.

In the paper, Davis argues that the counterinsurgency strategy recommended by McChrystal would actually require a far larger U.S. force than is now being proposed. Citing figures given by Marine Corps Col. Julian Dale Alford at a conference last month, Davis writes that training 400,000 Afghan army and police alone would take 18 brigades of U.S. troops – as many as 100,000 U.S. troops when the necessary support troops are added.

The objective of expanding the Afghan security forces to 400,000, as declared in McChrystal’s “initial assessment”, poses other major problems as well, according to Davis.

He observes that the costs of such an expansion have been estimated at three to four times more than Afghanistan’s entire Gross Domestic Product. Davis asks what would happen if the economies of the states which have pledged to support those Afghan personnel come under severe pressures and do not continue the support indefinitely.

“It would be irresponsible to increase the size of the military to that level,” he writes, “convincing hundreds of thousands of additional Afghan men to join, giving them field training and weapons, and then at some point suddenly cease funding, throwing tens of thousands out of work.”

The result, he suggests, would be similar to what followed the U.S. failure to reassemble the Iraqi Army after the invasion of March 2003.

Davis also cites “growing anecdotal evidence” that popular anger at the abuses of power by the Afghan National Police has increased support for the insurgency.

He calls for scaling back the increase in Afghan security forces to the original targets of 134,000 Army troops and 80,000 national police. The crucial factor in determining the future of the country, he argues, is not the numbers of security personnel but whether they continue to abuse the population.

If that pattern of behaviour were to change dramatically, Davis says, “the number of Taliban fighters will dwindle to manageable numbers as those presently filling their ranks will no longer be motivated to fight”.

Davis challenges two arguments now being made in support of the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan based on the Iraq experience: that a troop surge would help establish security and that the U.S. military can reduce insurgency by replicating the “Sons of Iraq” programme of bringing insurgents into militias that oppose their former allies.

The “surge” in Iraq was successful for a variety of reasons peculiar to Iraq and not duplicated in Afghanistan, Davis argues. And the “Sons of Iraq” was primarily the result of the alienation of the Sunni population by al Qaeda, which trumped Sunni opposition to the U.S. presence.

“[T]here is little to suggest,” he writes in reference to the areas where the Taliban has gained power, “that the population as a whole has reached a tipping point whereby they are ready to support the coalition against the Taliban.”

Challenging the argument of supporters of a larger war effort that it is necessary to avoid an increased risk of new terrorist attacks, Davis argues that being “myopically focused” on Afghanistan “at the expense of the rest of the world” increases the likelihood of an attack.

The present level of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, he writes, will “make it more likely that terrorist organizations will take advantage of the opportunity to plan and train elsewhere for the next big attack.”

But two former senior intelligence analysts who have long followed the issue of al Qaeda’s involvement in Afghanistan question the alleged new intelligence assessments. They say that the Taliban leadership still blames Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for their loss of power after 9/11 and that the Taliban-al Qaeda cooperation is much narrower today than it was during the period of Taliban rule.

The nature of the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban has been a central issue in the White House discussions on Afghanistan strategy that began last month, according to both White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones.

One of the arguments for an alternative to the present counterinsurgency strategy by officials, including aides to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, is that the Taliban wouldn’t allow al Qaeda to reestablish bases inside Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 5. The reasoning behind the argument, according to the report, is that the Taliban realises that its previous alliance with al Qaeda had caused it to lose power after the Sep. 11 attacks.

Officials in national security organs that are committed to the counterinsurgency strategy have now pushed back against the officials who they see as undermining the war policy.

McClatchy newspapers reported Sunday that officials have cited what they call “recent U.S. intelligence assessments” that the Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups have “much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11″ and would allow al Qaeda to re-establish bases in Afghanistan if they were to prevail.

McClatchy reporters said 15 mid-level or senior intelligence, military and diplomatic officials they interviewed had agreed with the alleged intelligence assessments.

But John McCreary, formerly a senior analyst at the Defence Intelligence Agency, wrote last week on NightWatch, an online news analysis service, that the history of Taliban-al Qaeda relations suggests a very different conclusion. After being ousted from power in 2001, he wrote, the Taliban “openly derided the Arabs of al Qaida and blamed them for the Taliban’s misfortunes”.

The Taliban leaders “vowed never to allow the foreigners – especially the haughty, insensitive Arabs – back into Afghanistan,” wrote McCreary. “In December 2001, [Mullah Mohammad] Omar was ridiculed in public by his own commanders for inviting the ‘Arabs’ and other foreigners, which led to their flight to Pakistan.”

McCreary concluded, “The premise that Afghanistan would become an al Qaida safe haven under any future government is alarmist and bespeaks a lack of understanding of the Pashtuns on this issue and a superficial knowledge of recent Afghan history.”

The Central Intelligence Agency’s former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Paul Pillar, expressed doubt that the Taliban’s relations with al Qaeda are tighter now than before the Taliban regime was ousted.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Pillar told IPS. “If you look at the pre-9/11 relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda, in many ways it was far more extensive.”

In the civil war between the Taliban regime and its Northern Alliance foes from 1996 through 2001, Pillar observed, “bin Laden’s Arabs and money” represented a far bigger role in supporting the Taliban than the one al Qaeda is playing now.

“You can say that there are more groups which have relationships with al Qaeda now, but I don’t see any as close as that which existed before 9/11,” said Pillar.

The role played by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the Taliban’s struggle against its rival the Northern Alliance from 1996 to 2001 has been documented by journalist Roy Gutman, now foreign editor of McClatchy newspapers, and other sources.

As early as 1997, 300 Arab troops trained by bin Laden troops were fighting alongside the Taliban on the front line north of Kabul, according to Gutman’s book, How We Missed the Story, published in 2008. Later, they were reported to have taken over large sections of that front line.

Bin Laden’s military and financial support became an even more important crutch for the Taliban regime in its final years in power. Gutman says the Taliban’s mid-summer 1998 offensive in northern Pakistan was largely financed by bin Laden.

In the last stage of the conflict, Gutman writes, al Qaeda troops consisted of 1,500 to 2,500 Arabs and Central Asian “Frontline fighters,” and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban, regarded them as his toughest and most committed opponents.

Gutman quotes Massoud telling CIA operative Gary Schroen, “Every time I fight the Taliban, the glue that holds them together is the Arab units.”

Osama bin Laden also financed Taliban military equipment and operations, according to Gutman’s account. A summer 1998 Taliban offensive was fought with hundreds of new Japanese pickup trucks — Massoud claimed a total of 1,200 vehicles — bought with bin Laden’s money.

Today, however, al Qaeda is cash-strapped and has very few foreign fighters in Afghanistan, whereas the Taliban appear to be well-financed.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s expert on terrorist financing, David Cohen, said al Qaeda is “in its weakest financial position in several years” and “its influence is waning”, the BBC reported Tuesday.

Gen. Jones told CNN interviewer John King Oct. 4 the presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan today is “minimal,” adding the “maximum estimate” is 100 foreign fighters. One official critical of the White House position quoted in the McClatchy story suggested the number might be as high as 200 or 250.

Both figures appears to be consistent with the estimate by Western officials of a total of only 100 to 300 foreign fighters in Afghanistan cited in the New York Times Oct. 30, 2007.

Of that total, however, only “small numbers” were Arabs and Chechens, Uzbeks or other Central Asians, who are known to have links with al Qaeda, Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation told Voice of America the following month.

The bulk of the foreign fighters in Afghanistan are Pashtuns from across the border in Pakistan. Those Pashtun fighters are recruited from religious schools in Pakistan, but there is no evidence that they are affiliated with al Qaeda.

Just this month, U.S. intelligence has increased its estimate of Taliban armed insurgents to 17,000, compared with 10,000 in late 2007. Even if all foreign fighters were considered as al Qaeda, therefore, 250 of them would represent only 1.5 percent of the estimated total.

Contrary to sensational stories by the Associated Press and the New York Times, the excerpts on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reveal that the IAEA’s Safeguards Department, which wrote the report, only has suspicions – not real evidence – that Iran has been working on nuclear weapons in recent years.

The newly published excerpts make it clear, moreover, that the so-called “Alleged Studies” documents brought to the attention of the agency by the United States five years ago are central to its assertion that Iran had such a programme in 2002-03.

Whether those documents are genuine or were fabricated has been the subject of a fierce struggle behind the scenes for many months between two departments of the IAEA.

Some IAEA officials began calling for a clear statement by the agency that it could not affirm the documents’ authenticity after the agency obtained hard evidence in early 2008 that a key document in the collection had been fraudulently altered, as previously reported by this writer. As journalist Mark Hibbs reported last week in Nucleonics Week, opposition to relying on the intelligence documents has come not only from outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei but from the Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination.

Since September 2008, however, the Safeguards Department, headed by Olli Heinonen, has been pressing for publication of its draft report as an annex to a regular agency report on Iran.

Heinonen leaked the draft to Western governments last summer, and in September it was leaked to the Associated Press and ISIS. That has generated sensational headlines suggesting that Iran can already build a nuclear bomb.

The draft report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device”. But other passages indicate the authors regard such knowledge only as a possibility, based on suspicions rather than concrete evidence.

It says the “necessary information was most likely obtained from external sources and probably modified by Iran”. But it cites only the 15-page “uranium metal document” given by the A. Q. Khan network to Iran when it purchased centrifuge designs in 1987.

“Based on the information in the document,” it says, “it is possible that Iran has knowledge regarding the contents of a nuclear package.”

The IAEA “suspects” that the 15-page document was part of “larger package that Iran may have obtained but which has not yet come to the Agency’s attention”, according to the leaked excerpts.

But that document only outlines procedural requirements for casting uranium into hemispheres, not the technical specifications, as the IAEA report of Nov. 18, 2005 noted. No evidence has ever surfaced to challenge the Iranian explanation that Khan’s agents threw in the document after a deal had been reached on centrifuges in an effort to interest Iran in buying the technology for casting uranium.

The IAEA affirmed that it has found no evidence that Iran ever acquired such technology.

The only external “nuclear package” ever reported to have been provided to Iran is a set of flawed technical designs for a “high-voltage block” for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon, which was slipped under the door of the Iranian mission in Vienna by a Russian scientist working for CIA’s Operation Merlin in February 2000.

Another far-reaching claim in the draft report is that the IAEA “has information, known as the Alleged Studies, that the Ministry of Defence of Iran has conducted and may still be conducting a comprehensive programme aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system.”

It does not explain how the “Alleged Studies”, which are documents on work done in 2002 and 2003, could have any bearing on whether Iran is now conducting work on nuclear weapons.

Using the same language found in published IAEA reports, the draft suggests that the Alleged Studies intelligence documents represent credible evidence. “The information, which has been obtained from multiple sources, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent,” it says.

But that characterisation of the intelligence first shown to the IAEA by the United States in 2005 has been contested by sceptics in the agency. A senior IAEA official familiar with the documents suggested in an interview with IPS last month that the claim of “multiple sources” may be misleading.

Given the existence of “intelligence sharing networks”, the official said, “one can’t rule it out that one organisation got the intelligence and shared it with others.” That would explain the reference to “multiple sources consistent over time”, he said.

The initial U.S. account, according to the official, was that the documents came from the laptop computer of one of the Iranian participants in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme. Later, however, that account was “walked back”, he said.

“There are holes in the story,” said the official.

The introduction by ISIS to the excerpts from the report, evidently based on conversations with the IAEA personnel, confirms that the documents did not come from Iran on a laptop computer, as U.S. officials had claimed in the past. It suggests that the documents were smuggled out of Iran as “electronic media” by the wife of an Iranian who had been recruited by German intelligence and was later arrested.

That new explanation is highly suspect, however, because an intelligence agency would not confirm the identity of one of their agents, even if he were arrested. Asked about the ISIS account, Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence office for the Middle East when the “laptop documents” surfaced, said it “sounds unusual”.

The draft report also argues that the information in the documents is credible, because it “refers to known Iranian persons and institutions under both the military and civil apparatuses, as well as to some degree to their confirmed procurement activities”.

But the senior IAEA official cast doubt on that claim as well. The names of people working in the relevant Iranian military and civilian organisations are readily obtainable, he observed. “It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official told IPS.

The draft paper states that the agency “does not believe that Iran has yet achieved the means of integrating a nuclear payload into the Shahab 3 delivery system with any confidence that it would work”.

That statement hints at the fact that the reentry vehicle studies were found to have serious technical problems. The senior IAEA official told IPS that the Sandia National Laboratories, which ran computer simulation analyses of the plan, not only found that none of them would have worked, but had expressed doubt that they were genuine.

The paper makes an indirect reference to a plan for a bench-scale facility for uranium conversion, but does not mention that it had several technical flaws, as acknowledged by Heinonen in a February 2008 briefing for members.

Nor do the draft report’s conclusions deal with the fact, confirmed by the senior IAEA official to IPS, that none of the intelligence documents have any security markings, despite the fact they are purported to be part of what presumably would have been Iran’s most highly classified programme.

At a Sep. 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

The U.S. charges on the Qom facility, coming a week before the first opportunity for negotiations with Iran on a full range of issues since 1981, appear to have been a deliberate ploy to make the Obama administration appear tough and on the offensive when the talks started.

Iran’s Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told a news conference Tuesday that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 to begin work on the enrichment facility near Qom.

Meanwhile, a new photo analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) of the Qom site in 2004 and 2005 suggests it was not dedicated to building a uranium enrichment facility at that time.

In a brief analysis posted on the ISIS webpage Tuesday, Paul Brannan, a specialist in interpreting satellite photography at ISIS, said he believed that the site on which the Qom enrichment facility was later constructed was “originally a tunnel facility associated with Iran’s military” rather than a “construction site for a uranium plant”.

Brannan wrote that there was evidence of some construction between June 2004 and March 2005, but that the pace appeared “slow”. That tunneling activity, Brannan wrote, “may not have been originally associated with the later construction activity for the suspected uranium enrichment site”.

Brannan told IPS it is “technically possible” that the relatively slight changes he saw from 2004 to 2005 were associated with the enrichment facility, but said the images of the site at that stage appear similar to many other tunnel facilities built into a mountain that are maintained by the Iranian military.

“The Iranian military has hundreds of these around Iran,” Brannon said.

Brannan said he is now in the process of obtaining satellite imagery for 2006 through 2008 in order to establish more clearly when the construction on the facility began.

In his press conference, Salehi described the second enrichment facility as “a small version of Natanz” – Iran’s large-scale commercial enrichment plant – and explained it as a measure aimed at ensuring the continuity of the programme if its nuclear sites were attacked.

If construction on the Qom site did not begin until 2008, as Salehi claimed, it would have been long after Iran had withdrawn from an agreement with the IAEA — the so-called “modified Code 3.1″ — obligating it to report design information on nuclear facilities as soon as the decision is made.

That would further suggest that Iran is serious about remaining in compliance with its obligations under the Safeguards Agreement.

Iran notified the IAEA in March 2007 that it intended to revert to the earlier version of the “Code 3.1″ Subsidiary Arrangement with the agency, which obligated it to provide design information at least 180 days before introduction of nuclear material into the facility. Subsidiary Arrangements are codicils to the Safeguards Agreement – the document which defines the basic transparency and other obligations of each IAEA member state.

In a briefing for reporters last week a “senior administration official” asserted that Iran had begun construction on the Qom enrichment facility “with the intent that it be secret”, thus giving Iran “an option of producing weapons-grade uranium without the international community knowing about it”.

A key element of that charge was that Iran had violated the “modified Code 3.1″ agreement at the very time it had been ostensibly implementing that agreement.

“We know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said they did not feel bound by that obligation,” the official declared.

But the briefing official seemed to confirm the conclusion of the ISIS analysis of the satellite imagery by suggesting that the site was considered as an enrichment site even though there was evidence that it had a different function. “[A]t a very early stage of construction,” the official said, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.”

There were other hints as well that the U.S. charge was not based on visual evidence of construction but on the supposition that the site was intended for the enrichment facility, even though little or no construction was actually taking place.

“[W]e wanted to wait until the actual construction caught up with that intent,” said the official at one point.

The unnamed senior official declined on three different occasions during the briefing to answer questions on when construction on the facility had started.

When a reporter asked directly, “Do you have a clear idea of when the construction started?” the official flatly refused to answer. The official also refused to answer when asked if the construction was started before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in August 2005.

The official also said, “These kinds of things are always a matter of degree.”

If the satellite imagery for 2006, 2007 and 2008 shows that construction did not begin until after the Iranian withdrawal from its commitment to modified Code 3.1, it would provide new evidence that Iran intended to remain within the letter of its safeguards agreement and was not planning a covert enrichment facility.

President Obama called the second enrichment facility “a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the non-proliferation regime”, saying Iran had broken “rules that all nations must follow”.

Outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei declared in New Delhi Wednesday that Iran is “on the wrong side of the law… insofar as informing the agency about the construction.”

Although it has remained unreported in the news media, however, Iran has a legal case that it has remained in compliance with its Safeguards Agreement.

In March 2009, the director of the IAEA Office of Legal Affairs, Johan Rautenbach, called Iran’s reversion to implementation of the earlier version of the Code 3.1 “inconsistent with its obligations under the Subsidiary Arrangements”.

But he went on to say that it was “difficult to conclude that providing information in accordance with the earlier formulation in itself constitutes non-compliance with, or a breach of, the Safeguards Agreement as such.”

The Safeguards Agreement itself clearly forbids unilateral “modification” of a Subsidiary Arrangement, but it says nothing about withdrawal from such an agreement, which is what Iran is asserting it did in March 2007.

The distinction between “modification” and “withdrawal” from provisions of an international agreement is well established in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

Unilateral withdrawal is permitted under that Convention, provided that the provision in question is separable from the remainder of the agreement, is not the essential basis of consent by the other party and continued performance of the remainder of the agreement would not be “unjust”.

The head of the IAEA Legal Department appears to have accepted that those three conditions applied to the case of Iran’s “Modified Code 3.1″ agreement.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

Iran’s notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the second enrichment facility in a letter on Sep. 21 was buried deep in most of the news stories and explained as a response to being detected by U.S. intelligence. In reporting the story in that way, journalists were relying entirely on the testimony of “senior administration officials” who briefed them at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh Friday.

U.S. intelligence had “learned that the Iranians learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised”, one of the officials said, according to the White House transcript. The Iranians had informed the IAEA, he asserted, because “they came to believe that the value of the facility as a secret facility was no longer valid…”

Later in the briefing, however, the official said “we believe”, rather than “we learned”, in referring to that claim, indicating that it is only an inference rather than being based on hard intelligence.

The official refused to explain how U.S. analysts had arrived at that conclusion, but an analysis by the defence intelligence consulting firm IHS Jane’s of a satellite photo of the site taken Saturday said there is a surface-to-air missile system located at the site.

Since surface-to-air missiles protect many Iranian military sites, however, their presence at the Qom site doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran believed that Washington had just discovered the enrichment plant.

The official said the administration had organised an intelligence briefing on the facility for the IAEA during the summer on the assumption that the Iranians might “choose to disclose the facility themselves”. But he offered no explanation for the fact that there had been no briefing given to the IAEA or anyone else until Sep. 24 — three days after the Iranians disclosed the existence of the facility.

A major question surrounding the official story is why the Barack Obama administration had not done anything — and apparently had no plans to do anything — with its intelligence on the Iranian facility at Qom prior to the Iranian letter to the IAEA. When asked whether the administration had intended to keep the information in its intelligence briefing secret even after the meeting with the Iranians on Oct. 1, the senior official answered obliquely but revealingly, “I think it’s impossible to turn back the clock and say what might have been otherwise.”

In effect, the answer was no, there had been no plan for briefing the IAEA or anyone.

News media played up the statement by the senior administration official that U.S. intelligence had been “aware of this facility for years”.

But what was not reported was that he meant only that the U.S. was aware of a possible nuclear site, not one whose function was known.

The official in question acknowledged the analysts had not been able to identify it as an enrichment facility for a long time. In the “very early stage of construction,” said the official, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.” Intelligence analysts had to “wait until the facility had reached the stage of construction where it was undeniably intended for use as a centrifuge facility,” he explained.

The fact that the administration had made no move to brief the IAEA or other governments on the site before Iran revealed its existence suggests that site had not yet reached that stage where the evidence was unambiguous.

A former U.S. official who has seen the summary of the administration’s intelligence used to brief foreign governments told IPS he doubts the intelligence community had hard evidence that the Qom site was an enrichment plant. “I think they didn’t have the goods on them,” he said.

Also misleading was the official briefing’s characterisation of the intelligence assessment on the purpose of the enrichment plant. The briefing concluded that the Qom facility must be for production of weapons-grade enriched uranium, because it will accommodate only 3,000 centrifuges, which would be too few to provide fuel for a nuclear power plant.

According to the former U.S. official who has read the briefing paper on the intelligence assessment, however, the paper says explicitly that the Qom facility is “a possible military facility”. That language indicates that intelligence analysts have suggested that the facility may be for making low-enriched rather than for high-enriched, bomb-grade uranium.

It also implies that the senior administration official briefing the press was deliberately portraying the new enrichment facility in more menacing terms than the actual intelligence assessment.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer the day after the denunciation of the site by U.S., British and French leaders to allow IAEA monitoring of the plant will make it far more difficult to argue that it was meant to serve military purposes.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that Iran never intended to keep the Qom facility secret from the IAEA but was waiting to make it public at a moment that served its political-diplomatic objectives.

The Iranian government is well aware of U.S. capabilities for monitoring from satellite photographs any site in Iran that exhibits certain characteristics.

Iran obviously wanted to make the existence of the Qom site public before construction on the site would clearly indicate an enrichment purpose. But it gave the IAEA no details in its initial announcement, evidently hoping to find out whether and how much the United States already knew about it.

The specific timing of the Iranian letter, however, appears to be related to the upcoming talks between Iran and the P5+1 — China, France, Britain, Russia, the United States and Germany — and an emerging Iranian strategy of smaller back-up nuclear facilities that would assure continuity if Natanz were attacked.

The Iranian announcement of that decision on Sep. 14 coincided with a statement by the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, warning against preemptive strikes against the country’s nuclear facilities.

The day after the United States, Britain and France denounced the Qom facility as part of a deception, Salehi said, “Considering the threats, our organisation decided to do what is necessary to preserve and continue our nuclear activities. So we decided to build new installations which will guarantee the continuation of our nuclear activities which will never stop at any cost.”

As satellite photos of the site show, the enrichment facility at Qom is being built into the side of a mountain, making it less vulnerable to destruction, even with the latest bunker-busting U.S. bombs.

The pro-administration newspaper Kayhan quoted an “informed official” as saying that Iran had told the IAEA in 2004 that it had to do something about the threat of attack on its nuclear facilities “repeatedly posed by the western countries”.

The government newspaper called the existence of the second uranium enrichment plan “a winning card” that would increase Iran’s bargaining power in the talks. That presumably referred to neutralising the ultimate coercive threat against Iran by the United States.

The version of the classified McChrystal assessment published on the Washington Post website Monday has many redactions, indicating that it had been prepared especially for the purpose of leaking it the press.

What may be even more important about McChrystal’s assessment, however, is that it presents a highly discouraging picture of the situation in Afghanistan – and that the Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan to which he had agreed just three weeks earlier was even more pessimistic than his “initial assessment”.

The integrated campaign plan, signed by McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry on Aug. 10, said that popular rejection of the Afghan government in the Pashtun region of the country is already so pronounced that “key groups” are supporting the Taliban as the only available alternative to a government they regard as abusive.

The integrated campaign plan is marked “Sensitive but Unclassified”, and has not been released to the public, but a copy has been obtained by IPS.

Both documents acknowledge fundamental socio-political realities that raise serious questions about the feasibility of the counterinsurgency programme that McChrystal outlines in his assessment, but McChrystal’s assessment altered or softened some central conclusions of the integrated campaign plan.

The most important difference between the two documents is their conclusion about how much popular support the insurgents have already gained. The McChrystal assessment suggests that the insurgents have been unable to obtain uncoerced popular support.

“Major insurgent groups use violence, coercion and intimidation against civilians to control the population,” the assessment says. It concludes that “popular enthusiasm” for the Taliban and other insurgent groups “appears limited, as does their ability to spread beyond the Pashtun areas”.

Pashtuns are by far the largest ethnic group in the country, with 40 to 45 percent of the population, and predominate across most of Afghanistan’s territory, from the far west across the entire south to the east.

While denying popular support for the insurgency, however, McChrystal admits that some factors, such as “a natural aversion to foreign intervention” and tribal and ethnic identities that are reinforced by “historical grievances” have resulted in “elements of the population tolerating the insurgency and calling to push out foreigners”.

The integrated campaign plan goes further, suggesting that the Taliban have gotten support because they are seen as the only feasible alternative to an abusive government. It notes that most Afghans reject the “Taliban ideology”, but concludes, “Key groups have become nostalgic for the security and justice Taliban rule provided.”

The two documents use different terms to describe the political failure of the Afghan government and its consequences. The McChrystal assessment refers to a popular “crisis of confidence” in the government. But the integrated campaign plan calls it a “crisis of legitimacy” and says the insurgents have “derived some legitimacy by appealing to ideological affinities and fears of ‘foreign occupation’ as well as in quick provision of local justice.”

The two documents also differ on what progress can be expected in carrying out an ambitious agenda for change outlined in the integrated campaign plan.

McChrystal’s assessment simply presents the broad strategy and the objectives that must be achieved in regard to providing security, increasing Afghan government security forces and reform of governance. It does not consider the risks or likelihood of failure in regard to any these objective.

The integrated campaign plan, however, does consider risks and the possibility of failure. It makes the identification of corrupt local officials and punishing them or changing their behaviour a priority objective, for example.

But it also warns that the Afghan government and its warlord allies in the provinces, who have no real interest in changing the status quo, may well be able to frustrate such efforts at reform. The plan even suggests Karzai might “replace several effective government officials with ineffective or corrupt individuals”.

It raises the possibility that “dashed hopes” about reducing Afghan government corruption could create a “backlash” against the ISAF.

Another risk anticipated by the plan is that the Afghan elections of Aug. 20 would be “widely viewed as unfair” and would lead to “a political crisis and/or increased perception of GIRoA [Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] illegitimacy”. Reporting during the month since the election suggests that such an expectation was quite realistic.

Although it clearly pulls its punches on some key issues, the McChrystal assessment nevertheless contains some remarkably candid language for an official document – let alone one clearly intended to justify the escalation of the war.

McChrystal acknowledges the problem of warlords – referring to them as “local and regional power brokers” – who have autonomy from the government and in some cases hold positions in the Afghan National Security Forces, particularly the Afghan National Police.

He also refers to the fact that ISAF has “relationships” with the warlords, these “individuals”, meaning that foreign military contingents have many contracts with them to provide security services and rely heavily on them for intelligence.

Those relationships, McChyrstal observes, “can be problematic”. For one thing, he observes, the Afghan public perceives the ISAF as “complicit” in official Afghan abuses of power.

This degree of realism about the fundamental socio-political conditions bearing on the success or failure of a counterinsurgency war found in both the McChrystal assessment and the integrated campaign plan is highly unusual, if not unparalleled, in U.S. military policymaking. In this case, it apparently helped precipitate a crisis in U.S. Afghan policy.

Along with the blatantly fraudulent election run by President Hamid Karzai’s regime and the sharp downturn in domestic U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan, the fundamental obstacles to success discussed candidly in the two documents were part of the context of Obama’s scepticism about McChrystal’s troop request.

Thus they contributed to his decision to engage in what one senior administration official has called “a very, very serious review of all options”, according to the report by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post Monday.

The United States and other Western states have cited Iran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on resolving issues related to intelligence documents on a purported covert nuclear weapons programme as further evidence of its guilt.

“They’ve been asking for Shahab-3 drawings for about a year,” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview. “We found out a year ago and that’s when we stopped the meetings with IAEA.”

A senior official of the IAEA familiar with the Iran investigation, who insisted on anonymity as a condition for being interviewed, confirmed to IPS that the agency had requested not only that Iranian officials discuss the details of the Shahab-3’s reentry system, but access to the actual engineering designs for the missile.

“We want them to explain to us that the design studies are not for nuclear weapons,” said the official. “We’re saying, you say you’ve done reentry vehicle reengineering [on Shahab-3], so show us some documentation.”

The latest IAEA report, dated Aug. 28, notes that the agency “has been unable to engage Iran in any substantive discussions about these outstanding issues for over a year”, but it does not link the Iranian disengagement to the demand for military secrets.

The Sep. 15, 2008 report said, however, that in a Sep. 5 letter Iran had “expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities.”

Asked whether this request would not compromise Iran’s national security secrets, the official conceded to IPS, “Yes there will have to be some compromise on their part, because the charges are serious. If someone is accused of nefarious crimes, it is in their interest to share a little of their security to show they are baseless.”

Defending the IAEA’s request, the official said, “All verification is a compromise of national security. Natanz [the Iranian uranium enrichment facility] is the most heavily verified enrichment plan in the world. It’s a compromise of national sovereignty.”

Soltanieh said he had protested the demand for such conventional military secrets at meetings of the IAEA Governing Board in 2008 and 2009. “They denied they asked for this information,” said Soltanieh.

The Iranian ambassador first expressed concern about being asked to give the IAEA access to national security secrets about its missiles and other conventional military technology in a letter to ElBaradei Sep. 5, 2008.

The September 2008 IAEA report strongly implied without saying so explicitly that the agency was seeking access to actual plans for the missile. It said the IAEA had “proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters on the reentry body from the time of the missile launch to payload detonation.”

The most recent report of the IAEA, dated Aug. 28, 2009, referred to “the need to hold discussions with Iran on the engineering and modeling studies associated with the re-design of the payload chamber referred to in the alleged studies documentation to exclude the possibility that they were for a nuclear payload.”

In a letter to IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei Sep. 4, 2009, Soltanieh complained that the report which had just been released had “reflected the unjustified previous requests by your staff in Tehran [for] discussing with Iranian military staff the issue of missiles and explosives!”

He noted that the director general had on several occasions “emphasised that the Agency is not intending to enter into the domain of the national security of Member States”.

The agency also requested “additional information and documentation, and access to individuals, in support of [Iran's] statement about the civil and conventional military applications of its work in the area of EBW detonators,” according to the September 2008 IAEA report.

The IAEA further asked to meet individual scientists named in one of the intelligence documents as being part of the purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme. The senior IAEA official acknowledged in the interview with IPS, however, that it would be relatively easy for an outside agency to identify individuals who belonged to an organisation.

“It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official said.

In his letter to ElBaradei, Soltanieh said these IAEA requests represented “interference in confidential conventional military activities of a Member State, related to its national security…”

The IAEA has offered to “discuss modalities that could enable Iran to demonstrate credibly that the activities referred to in the documentation are not nuclear related, as Iran asserts, while protecting sensitive information related to its conventional military activities.”

But the senior IAEA official interviewed by IPS made it clear that such modalities would not preclude access to the documentation on the Shahab design.

Iran’s enemies, especially the United States and Israel, are eager for intelligence on the design of the Shahab-3’s reentry vehicle.

According to a detailed analysis by the Armed Combat Information Group (ACIG), the upgraded version of the Shahab-3 has an improved guidance system and warhead, as well as completely new re-entry vehicle with a different guidance system based on rocket-nozzle steering rather than a spin-stabilised re-entry vehicle.

The new reentry vehicle is smaller than the previous version, according to the former head of Israel’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation. That gives the improved version greater precision.

But the most significant feature of the new variant, according to the ACIG analysis, is the capability for changing trajectory repeatedly during re-entry and in the missile’s terminal phase. That capability allows the Shahab-3 to evade the radar systems associated with Israel’s Arrow 2 missile.

If Israeli and the United States were able to get more information on the design of the reentry vehicle, they would be able to make adjustments in the Arrow 2 system to increase its effectiveness against the Iranian missile.

The IAEA secretariat is well-known to be major source of intelligence on Iran for the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, 10 of the 35 members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna were Central Intelligence Agency personnel, according to the 2007 book The Italian Letter, by journalists Peter Eisner and Knute Royce.

Ambassador Soltanieh told IPS that the IAEA safeguards department, to which the Iranians pass much sensitive information, has repeatedly leaked that information — usually out of context — to journalists for stories portraying the Iranian nuclear programme in a menacing light.

“Leakage of confidential information is a matter of serious concern,” said Soltanieh. “In many cases, we give information to inspectors and soon it is in the media.”

A Western diplomatic source in Vienna who insisted on not being identified said, “I don’t think it would help a lot to get the specific plans of Shahab-3.” For one thing, he observed, “They could be working on other studies and we wouldn’t know about it.”

The official admitted that it was “always difficult to prove that something is nonexistent”.

Nevertheless, it would be “much safer for Iran to compromise on these issues than to keep its present attitude,” the official said.

But the IAEA has refused to acknowledge publicly significant evidence brought to its attention by Iran that the documents were fabricated, and has made little, if any, effort to test the authenticity of the intelligence documents or to question officials of the governments holding them, IPS has learned.

The agency has strongly suggested in its published reports that the documentation it is supposed to be investigating is credible, because it “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent”.

IAEA Safeguard Department chief Olli Heinonen signaled his de facto acceptance of the “alleged studies” documents when he presented an organisational chart of the purported secret nuclear weapons project based on the documents at a February 2008 “technical briefing” for member states.

Meanwhile, the IAEA has portrayed Iran as failing to respond adequately to the “substance” of the documents, asserting that it has focused only on their “style and format of presentation”.

In fact, however, Iran has submitted serious evidence that the documents are fraudulent. Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview he had pointed out to a team of IAEA officials in a meeting on the documents in Tehran in spring 2008 that none of the supposedly top secret military documents had any security markings of any kind, and that purported letters from defence ministry officials lacked Iranian government seals.

Soltanieh recalled that he had made the same point “many times” in meetings of the Board of Governors since then. “No one ever challenged me,” said the ambassador.

The IAEA has never publicly acknowledged the problem of lack of security markings or official seals in the documents, omitting mention of the Iranian complaint on that issue from its reports. Its May 26, 2008 report said only that Iran had “stated, inter alia, that the documents were not complete and that their structure varied”.

But a senior official of the agency familiar with the Iran investigation, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be identified, confirmed that Soltanieh had indeed pointed out the lack of any security classification markings, and that he had been correct in doing so.

The “alleged studies” documents include purported correspondence between the overall “project leader” in Iran’s Defence Ministry and project heads on what would have been among the regime’s most sensitive military secrets.

Even though the official conceded that the lack of security markings could be considered damaging to the credibility of the documents, he defended the agency’s refusal to acknowledge the issue.

“It’s not a killer argument,” said the official.

The official suggested that the states that had provided the documents might claim that they had taken the markings out before passing them on to the IAEA. It is not clear, however, why an intelligence agency would want to remove from the documents markings that would be important in proving their authenticity.

“We don’t know whether the original letters were marked confidential or not,” he said, indicating that the IAEA had not questioned the United States and other states contributing documents on the absence of the confidential markings.

The IAEA’s apparent lack of concern about the absence of security markings and seals on the documents contrasts sharply with the IAEA’s investigation of the Niger uranium documents cited by the George W. Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq in 2002-2003.

In the Niger case, the agency concluded that the documents were fabricated based on a comparison of the “form, format, contents and signature” of the documents with other relevant correspondence, according to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s Mar. 7, 2003 statement to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran has also provided the IAEA with evidence that the handwritten notes on a May 2003 letter, which supposedly link a private Iranian contractor to the “alleged studies”, were forged by an outside agency. The letter was from an engineering firm to the private company Kimia Maadan, which other documents in the collection identify as responsible for part of the alleged covert nuclear weapons programme called the “green salt project”.

The letter itself has nothing to do with any “green salt” project, but handwritten notes on the copy of the letter given to the IAEA by an unidentified government referred to individuals who are named in other intelligence documents as participants in the “alleged studies”, according to the latest IAEA report.

But the original letter, which Iran has provided to the IAEA, has no handwritten notes on it. Amb. Soltanieh recalled that he showed that original letter to an IAEA team led by the deputy director of IAEA’s Safeguards Department, Herman Nackaerts, in Tehran Jan. 22-23, 2008.

He said the IAEA team was able to compare the original document with the copy that they had been given as part of the alleged studies documents and that Nakaerts declared that his team accepted the authenticity of the original they were shown.

The IAEA confirmed in its Aug. 28, 2009 report that it had been given access to the original letter. But the report suggested that the existence of the original letter supports the authenticity of the alleged studies documents, because it “demonstrates a direct link between the relevant documentation and Iran”.

That argument appears to have deliberately conflated the original letter, which the agency admits has nothing to do with the alleged studies, and the copy with the allegedly incriminating handwritten notes on it.

The senior official sought to discredit the original letter by suggesting that the Iranians might have “whited out the handwritten notes”. But the official then offered an alternative theory, asserting that there were two original letters, one of which was kept by the sender, and that the handwritten notes had been found on the second original.

But the IAEA could have checked with the engineering firm that sent the letter to ascertain whether a second original exists and whether the Iranian government had obtained the letter from it.

The senior IAEA official gave no indication that the IAEA had done so.

Iranian officials have also claimed other inaccuracies in the documents, involving technical flaws and names of individuals who they say do not exist.

The IAEA has not referred in its reports to any specific efforts to subject the “alleged studies” documents to forensic tests or to get data about such tests from governments holding the documents.

The senior IAEA official recalled that Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer had written that the documents had been sent to three different labs, and that two had said they were credible, whereas the third had expressed doubt about their authenticity.

But Linzer’s February 2006 story reported only that the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico had run computer simulations on the studies of a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle — which suggested that they were aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon — and had concluded that none of the plans would have worked.

Contacted by phone last week, Linzer, now a senior reporter for the public interest journalism organisation Pro Publica, told IPS she had never reported that two other labs ran tests on the documents.

Linzer expressed doubt that any other national labs would have had the capabilities to do the kind of tests carried out at Sandia labs.

When asked if the IAEA had sought to obtain the Sandia simulation results, the official refused to comment, except to say, “Our people follow up.”

But the Taliban commander’s claim is contradicted by evidence from the U.S. Defence Department, Canadian forces in Afghanistan and the Taliban itself that the increased damage to NATO tanks by Taliban forces has come from anti-tank mines provided by the United States to the jihadi movement in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Taliban claim was cited by ODNI in written responses to questions for the record from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence following testimony by Blair before the Committee Feb. 12, 2009. The responses were released to the Federation of American Scientists under the Freedom of Information Act Jul. 30.

ODNI wrote that Iran was “covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government”. As evidence of such covert Iranian arms supply, the ODNI said, “Taliban commanders have publicly credited Iranian support for their successful operations against Coalition forces”.

That statement was taken almost word for word from the subtitle of an article in The Telegraph Sep. 14. “A Taliban commander has credited Iranian-supplied weapons with successful operations against coalition forces in Afghanistan,” read the subtitle.

The single Taliban commander quoted became plural in the ODNI version.

In the article, British journalist Kate Clark quoted an unnamed Taliban commander as saying, “There’s a kind of landmine called a Dragon. Iran’s sending it. It’s directional and it causes heavy casualties.”

The commander said the new mine would “destroy” large tanks “completely”, whereas “ordinary” anti-tank mines had only caused “minor damage”.

If true, the revelation that an improved Iranian anti-tank weapon had been killing U.S. and NATO troops in larger numbers would have been a major development in the war in Afghanistan. Roadside bomb attacks are acknowledged by U.S. and NATO officials to be the cause of most of the casualties and deaths of foreign troops in the country.

The rapid rise in casualties over the past two years is attributed in part to the increased lethality of the Taliban mines.

But according to the Pentagon agency responsible for combating roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the increased Taliban threat to U.S. and NATO vehicles comes not from any new technology from Iran but from Italian-made mines left over from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s military assistance to the anti-Soviet jihadists in the 1980s.

In response to an inquiry from IPS, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) said in an e-mail that Italian-manufactured TC-6 anti-tank mines are “very common” in the Taliban-dominated areas of the country and that they have been modified to increase their lethality in IED attacks.

The JIEDDO response said TC-6 mines are being “arrayed in two or three in tandem to ensure the charge is large enough to inflict damage against Coalition vehicles.” The TC-6 mines “continue to pose a significant threat to Coalition Forces”, JIEDDO said.

The combining of two or three anti-tank mines into a single, more destructive bomb would account for the increased lethality of the anti-tank mines being used by the Taliban.

The claim by the alleged Taliban commander of new, more effective weaponry supplied by Iran appears to have been deliberate misinformation for the Western press.

British writer Jason Elliot, who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan since 1979, reported in a 2001 book “Min(d)ing Afghanistan” that the Italian-made TC-6 was the most commonly used anti-tank mine used in Afghanistan. The 15-pound charge of TNT, wrote Elliot in the TC-6, he wrote, could “flip a tank the way a seagull flips a baby turtle.”

Millions of mines remained buried in the ground from the Soviet occupation period, Elliot observed. However, only some 20,000 anti-tank mines have been destroyed since 1989, according to the United Nations.

Further evidence that the Taliban are relying heavily on the TC-6 to damage NATO tanks is a picture published by al-Jazeera on May 1, 2007 in a Taliban storeroom of explosives in Helmand province. The photograph, taken by a cameraman accompanying correspondent James Bays, showed two insurgent bomb-makers working on what was clearly identifiable as an Italian TC-6 anti-tank mine.

The insurgents told the photographer that the explosives in the room were in the process of being converted into “anti-tank bombs”.

Canadian forces in Kandahar province have encountered some of the heaviest Taliban use of anti-tank mines in Afghanistan. According to casualty data on the website of the Canadian Forces, since the beginning of 2007, 57 of 81 deaths of Canadian troops in Afghanistan have come from roadside bombs and anti-tank mines.

Capt. Dean Menard, a spokesman for Canadian forces in Kandahar, told IPS in a telephone interview that some of the ordnance used by the Taliban against Canadian tanks “are definitely attributable to the Soviet occupation era” – a reference to mines supplied by the United States through Pakistan during the anti-Soviet war.

The insurgents have obtained anti-tank weapons from “legacy minefields” dating from the period of Soviet occupation, according to Menard. Canadian forces also have intelligence that the Taliban obtain such mines from a “vast black market,” he said.

The Canadian spokesman confirmed that the Taliban are “making bigger mines” from the ordnance obtained from those sources.

In 2007 and 2008, Afghan military and police discovered two major caches of weapons in Herat province on the Iranian border that included anti-tank mines which some Afghan officials suggesting had originated in Iran.

But one picture of mines discovered in Herat, published by the Revolutionary Women’s Association of Afghanistan, clearly shows nine Italian TC-6 mines and one which resembles the top from a U.S. M-19 landmine, which was among those found in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

One mine cannot be clearly identified from the picture, but it does not resemble any known Iranian mine.

A picture of the 2007 cache in Herat published by AFP shows more Italian C-6 mines, along with a number of what appear to be U.S. M-19 anti-tank mines. The picture shows an Afghan policeman pointing to a mark on one of the latter, suggesting that it is of Iranian origin.

A copy of the U.S. M-19 mine has been manufactured by Iran, according to Jane’s Mines and Mine Clearance 2005-2006. However, long-buried Iranian-made M19s provided to the Jamiat-I Islami Mujahedin faction fighting more extremist Hezb-e Islami fighters in the 1992-96 period exploded accidentally in Kabul as recently as 2006.

Moreover, a 2009 study of arms deliveries to Afghanistan in the 1990s by the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies shows that Iran’s large-scale arms aid to the Northern Alliance forces in 1999 included anti-tank mines.

The prominence of the Italian-made mines among weapons found in Herat indicate that the anti-tank mines discovered in Herat in 2007 and 2008 were not assistance from Iran to the Taliban but weapons provided either to the Mujahedin during the Soviet occupation or to the Northern Alliance troops fighting the Taliban in the late 1990s.

Former CIA officer Phil Giraldi, who monitors U.S. intelligence analysis on Iran, told IPS he doubts the ODNI statement on Iranian policy in Afghanistan accurately reflects the analysis.

“If you were to read the original analytical report,” said Giraldi, “you would probably find that it’s caveated like mad.”

The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that “several” officials from those states had said the IAEA has “credible information” suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was “incorrect.”

The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran’s nuclear programme in early September.

The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published August 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons.

Charbonneau referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.”

Jahn explained ElBaradei’s refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to “avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency” and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear sites.

He also suggested ElBaradei had made “barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy” in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as “overtly political.”

In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei’s public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger — later known as the “Niger forgeries” — were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House.

Charbonneau quoted a “senior Western diplomat” as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, which the IAEA has referred to as “alleged studies”.

What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as Charbonneau’s report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an “annex” to the coming report.

What AP and Reuters failed to report, however, is that there has long been a deep division within the IAEA between those who support the “alleged studies” documents, led by safeguards department chief Olli Heinonen, and those who have remained sceptical about their authenticity.

The doubts of the sceptics were reinforced, moreover, when new evidence came to light last year suggesting that some of the key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

A Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA told IPS that the reason ElBaradei has never endorsed the “alleged studies” documents is that they have not met his rigorous standards of evidence.

The United States and other governments refused to give the documents to the IAEA, because ElBaradei had insisted that all the “alleged studies” documents should be shared with Iran and should be authenticated. U.S. officials, supported by Israel, argued that allowing Iran to study the documents carefully would compromise intelligence “sources and methods”, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the matter.

The most important such document to be denied to the IAEA and Iran is a one-page letter from an Iranian engineering firm to an Iranian private company, Kimia Maadan, which is identified as having participated in the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons project.

The letter reportedly had handwritten notes on it referring to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle, and is thus a primary piece of evidence for the claim that the missile reentry documents were genuine.

However, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it, as Heinonen confirmed in a February 2008 briefing for member states.

That suggested that the copy of the letter with handwriting on it was a fabrication done by an outside intelligence agency in order to prove that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

There were other problems with the one-page flowsheets showing a plan for a “green salt” conversion facility, which were attributed to Kima Maadan and said to be part of the military-run nuclear weapons project.

According to a February 22, 2008 IAEA report, Iran submitted documentary evidence to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had been created in 2000 solely to plan and construct a uranium ore processing facility under contract with Iran’s civilian atomic energy agency, and that it was in financial difficulty when it closed its doors in 2003.

The IAEA, which had been investigating whether the company was working for the Iranian military, as charged by the United States and other Western countries, declared in its February 2008 report that it “considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage”.

Furthermore, Iran pointed out that the flowsheets for a “green salt” conversion facility portrayed in the documents as done by Kimia Maadan have “technical errors,” and IAEA safeguards director Heinonen conceded that point in his February 2008 briefing.

Questions had also been raised about the technical quality of the alleged Iranian designs for a missile reentry vehicle that was apparently aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon. Experts at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico who ran computer simulations on the studies determined none of them would have worked, according to Washington Post investigative reporter Dafna Linzer in February 2006.

After the new information surfaced, some IAEA officials, including experts involved in the investigation, argued privately that the agency should now state publicly that it could not authenticate the documents, according to a Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.

The AP’s Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran’s intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. “Iran’s stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring,” he wrote, “has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use.”

Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed August 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.

Two U.S.-financed polls published during the past week showed support for Karzai falls well short of the 51 percent of the vote necessary to avoid a runoff election. A poll by Glevum Associates showed Karzai at 36 percent, and a survey by the International Republican Institute had him at 44 percent of the vote.

Those polls suggest that Karzai might have to pad his legitimate vote total by much as 40 percent to be certain of being elected in the first round.

But Karzai has been laying the groundwork for just such a contingency for many months. By all accounts, he has forged political alliances with leading Afghan warlords who control informal militias and tribal networks in the provinces to carry out a vote fraud scheme accounting for a very large proportion of the votes.

Karzai chose Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the ethnic Tajik warlord who had been vice-president and defence minister in his government until the 2004 elections, as his running mate. In return for their support, he promised Hazara warlords Haji Muhammad Moheqiq and Karim Khalili that new provinces would be carved out from largely Hazara districts in Ghazni and Wardak provinces, as reported by Richard Oppel of the New York Times.

The socio-political structure of Afghanistan remains so hierarchical that warlords can deliver very large blocs of votes to Karzai by telling their followers to vote for him, and in some provinces – especially in the Pashtun south – by forcing local tribal elders to cooperate in voter fraud schemes.

The system in which warlords pressure tribal elders to deliver the vote for Karzai was illustrated by a village elder in Herat province who said he had been threatened by a local commander with “very unpleasant consequences” if the residents of his village did not vote for Karzai, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

As early as last May, the country’s independent election monitoring organisation, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), had documented a suite of voter registration practices that laid the groundwork for massive voter fraud.

FEFA observers, who observed voter registration in 194 of 400 voting registration centres in four provinces during one stage of the process, found that nearly 20 percent of the voters registered, on average, were under age – in many cases as young as 12 years old.

It is now estimated that 17 million voter registration cards have been issued, which means that nearly 3.5 million cards may have been issued to children.

FEFA observers also found rampant distribution of multiple voting cards. During the third phase of registration, they observed at least four incidents of such abuses in 85 percent of the centres. The voter registration staff was seen handing out cards even before applicants had been registered.

In one case, the FEFA observers saw about 500 voting cards being given to a single individual.

Another element in the Karzai scheme involves the registration of women without their actually being physically present, often on the basis of lists of names given to the registration officials. The list system for registering women was found in 99 percent of registration stations in Paktika province and 90 percent of those in Zabul and Khost provinces.

During the final phase of the registration, many centres were found to be allowing males to take the registration books home, where they supposedly obtained the fingerprints of the women.

In some of the most insecure and traditional provinces, such as Logar and in Nuristan, more than twice as many cards were issued to women as to men in 2009, and in Paktika, Paktia and Khost, 30 percent more women were registered than were men.

In Kandahar, women represent 44 percent of those with voting cards. The young female MP Fawzia Koofi told The Australian that such levels of women registered could not be genuine.

The result has been to create a vast pool of voting cards, very few of which will be used by women to vote.

Reports by journalists about the acquisition of voting cards by the local strongmen indicate that this distribution of voting cards to people who would not vote was part of a plan to stuff the ballot boxes to increase the vote for Karzai.

The Times of London quoted a tribal elder in Marja district of Helmand province last week as saying that the warlord and former governor Sher Mohammad Akhudzada was organising the vote for Karzai in the province, and that he and other tribal elders were responsible for buying voting cards from voters who had registered.

Independent analyst Alex Strick van Linschoten, who is based in Kandahar, has reported schemes using police to purchase voter registration cards in several districts in the province.

Writing in the New York Times magazine Aug. 9, Elizabeth Rubin reported that an unnamed political figure in Kandahar told her in June he had manufactured 8,000 voter “fake” registration cards that had sold for 20 dollars each.

Some observers believe that various factors may constrain Karzai’s effort to use warlords to swing the election. Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald E. Neumann told IPS he is counting on the use of indelible ink on the voters’ fingers to make it impossible for people to vote more than once.

He recalls, however, that the “indelible” ink used in the 2005 election turned out to be washable after all.

Neumann also hopes the existence of the Election Complaints Commission, an independent body with three international members nominated by the United Nations, will be a check on massive vote fraud.

That body investigates complaints of voter fraud and has the right under Afghan election law to order the invalidation or recounting of votes or even the conducting of new polling where it finds evidence of fraud. But it has no sub-national presence and will be heavily dependent on the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), which handles all the documentary evidence pertaining to such complaints.

More problematic is the fact that the IEC is not “independent” of the Karzai regime at all. Its seven members were all appointed by Karzai, and its chairman has made no secret of his partisan support for the president.

The IEC will likely seek to cover up complaints of major fraud, and the complaints body may not be able to do much about it.

Neumann put the odds of an election that would be “good enough” in the eyes of the Afghans at “50-50″.

But counterinsurgency specialists are more pessimistic. Larry Goodson of the U.S. Army College, who was on the U.S. Central Command team that worked on a detailed plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year, told IPS, “The reality is there is going to be a lot of cheating and fraud.”

Goodson said the danger for the United States in the Karzai election plan is that it “could be perceived by Afghans as promoting the legitimisation of someone who is widely perceived as illegitimate.”

Australian counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, who will shortly become a senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, declared at the U.S. Institute of Peace Aug. 6, “The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping up an illegitimate government.”

Those officials, led by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, have been arguing that Kayani is committed to ending support the Taliban and other radical Islamic movements receive from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, but that he is not yet able to control ISI operatives.

Late last year, U.S. officials were reportedly pressing Kayani for far-reaching changes in the ISI that would end its role in support of insurgents in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) demanded that the ISI be put under civilian control and threatened to introduce legislation making military assistance to Pakistan conditional on evidence that the Pakistani military had ended such support to the Taliban.

But Kerry dropped his proposal for conditioning U.S. military assistance to Pakistan on ending the ISI-Taliban program. In February Kerry said conversations with Mullen and “other players” had persuaded him that Kayani and his choice for new ISI chief, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, had “a willingness to engage in transformation” of the ISI.

The Kerry-Lugar legislation passed by Congress in June provides 2 billion dollars in military aid as well as 4 billion dollars in economic assistance to Pakistan over five years and makes no mention of evidence of military aid to the Taliban. It merely requires the Secretary of State to certify that the “security forces of Pakistan” are making concerted efforts to prevent the Taliban and associated militant groups from using the territory of Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch attacks within Afghanistan.”

Obama’s national security team established a critical basis for its argument to Congress by leaking a story to the New York Times asserting that Kayani would not be able to control the activities of ISI in the short run.

The story, published March 26, acknowledged “direct support from operatives” of the ISI for the Afghan Taliban insurgency, but quoted anonymous U.S. officials saying it is “unlikely that top officials in Islamabad are directly coordinating the clandestine efforts” — a carefully chosen formula that does not deny that they are presiding over a policy of aiding the Taliban.

The story said unnamed U.S. officials “have also said that mid-level ISI operatives occasionally cultivate relationships that are not approved by their bosses.” That statement diverted attention away from whether the Pakistani military leadership has approved military assistance to the Taliban.

Mullen has been suggesting that Kayani has demonstrated good faith by purging the ISI. He told Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer in early April that the new head was “handpicked” to change the ISI.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee May 21, Mullen emphasised that Gen. Kayani had changed “almost the entire leadership of ISI” over the previous six months.

After a conversation with Mullen, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius quoted him in a June 29 article as saying that Kayani and his choice for ISI Chief “have committed very specifically to change the culture of ISI,” but that “that’s not going to happen overnight.”

Mullen has carefully avoided saying that Kayani has given assurances he intends to halt the military assistance to the Taliban, however.

The historical evidence on Kayani’s past relationship to the issue suggests that he has no intention of changing Pakistani policy toward the Taliban.

Kayani himself served as head of ISI from late 2004 to late 2007 and presided over the development of a major logistical and training program for the Taliban forces operating out of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

The ISI military assistance program was first revealed in a NATO report of a two-week battle by NATO forces against a determined Taliban offensive in Kandahar province in September 2006.

During the battle, NATO forces captured a number of Pakistani fighters who detailed the ISI role in supporting the Taliban offensive. The NATO account, reported in The Telegraph by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid on Oct. 6, 2006, described two ISI training camps for the Taliban near Quetta in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. It also documented the provision by the ISI of 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition — just for that one Taliban campaign.

The size and scope of the programme of support described in the report were hardly consistent with the idea that assistance to the Taliban is a rogue operation by ISI operatives.

Mullen and Defence Secretary Robert Gates presumably know about Kayani’s past support for the Taliban assistance program. Evidence of continuing ISI assistance to, and safe have for, Taliban forces after Kayani replaced Musharraf as the top Army general was compiled in an intelligence assessment circulated to the top national security officials of the George W. Bush administration in mid-2008, according by David Sanger’s book The Inheritance.

Kayani was also overheard in a conversation intercepted by U.S. intelligence referring to a high-ranking Taliban leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, as a “strategic asset,” according to Sanger’s account. Haqqani was a Taliban minister during that organisation’s brief period in power during the late 1990s, and his network has been a key target for the U.S. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan during 2008 and 2009.

Kayani is not the first Pakistani military leader to assure the U.S. that he is purging the ISI of pro-Taliban elements. President Perverz Musharraf did the same thing to ease pressure from Washington to toe the line on Afghanistan in early October 2001.

Musharraf claimed he had made far-reaching changes in the ISI by removing its director, Mahmood Ahmad — who he said had been affiliated with Islamic extremists. But Musharraf never changed his pro-Taliban policy; despite his pledge to do so immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The March 26 Times story reported Pakistani officials as portraying their Taliban policy as “part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan for the day when American forces would withdraw” leaving “a power vacuum to be filled by India.”

After the Times story, Gates began arguing that the U.S. must convince Pakistani leaders that it will not abandon the war in Afghanistan.

In a March 29 interview with Fox News, Gates said the Pakistanis had ties with the Taliban “partly as a hedge against what might happen in Afghanistan if we were to walk away or whatever.” The U.S. has to convince the Pakistanis that “they can count on us and that they don’t need that hedge,” Gates said.

Mullen and other U.S. military leaders have an interest other than Afghanistan — which appears to driving their willingness to overlook Kayani’s past and present support for the Taliban. They once had close ties with the Pakistani military, which they touted for decades as a basis for U.S. influence in the country, despite persistent and sharp divergences in U.S. and Pakistani strategic interests.

Those ties were cut off in the 1990s because of legislation requiring an end to military cooperation over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Mullen and other military leaders now argue that close relations must be a top U.S. priority.

As Mullen told the Inquirer’s Rubin, “One of my strategic objectives is to close this gap in the relationship with the Pakistani military.”

But that strategy poses an acute problem: The police in the province, who are linked to the local warlord, have committed systematic abuses against the population, including the abduction and rape of pre-teen boys, according to village elders who met with British officers.

Anger over those police abuses runs so high that the elders in Babaji just north of Laskgar Gah warned the British that they would support the Taliban to get rid of them if the national police were allowed to return to the area, according to a July 12 report by Reuters correspondent Peter Graff.

Associated Press reporters Jason Straziuso and David Guttenfelder, who accompanied U.S. troops in Northern Helmand, reported July 13 that villagers in Aynak were equally angry about police depredations. Within hours of the arrival of U.S. troops in the village, they wrote, bands of villagers began complaining the local police force was “a bigger problem than the Taliban.”

The brutality of the Afghan police toward the civilian population in Helmand was no surprise to Ambassador Ron Neumann, who was the U.S. envoy in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Such abuses, including rape of pre-teen boys, “are part of the larger problem of repression and oppression” in Afghanistan, Neumann told IPS.

Neumann said the problem of police abuses against the population can be traced back to the creation of the national police after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001. The Afghan police were not created afresh by U.S. and NATO force, Neumann recalls but were “constituted from the forces that were then fighting the Taliban.”

In Helmand province, the police came from the militia of the local warlord, former Mujihideen commander Sher Mohammed Akhunzadeh, a member of the Alizai tribe, who had dominated the province before the Taliban took control of the Pashtun south in 1994. Akhundzada became the governor of Helmand province in 2002.

The rivals of the Alizai in Helmand are members the Ishaqzai tribe, who become influential in the province during the Taliban period, as noted by Antonio Giustozzi in his book Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop, published this year.

The restoration of Akhundzada to power gave the warlord and his militia the opportunity to use the police to take revenge on their Ishaqzai rivals. If you are the police under these circumstances, Neumann said, “you take the people’s land, their women, you steal from them – it’s all part of one package.”

The predatory rule of Akhundzada and his militias was interrupted for a second time when the Taliban took control of large areas of the province in 2008.

The Scotsman’s Jerome Starkey quoted a shopkeeper in the city of Lashkar Gah, not far from the headquarters of the British and U.S. marine contingents in northern Helmand Jul. 16, as saying that the Taliban “were good for the welfare of ordinary Afghans, for poor people like us.” The reason, he explained, was that, “[i]n Taliban times, there was punishment for criminals.”

The British and U.S. forces in Helmand province appear to be unprepared to deal with the popular anger over police abuses. The spokesman for the U.S. 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Captain William Pelletier, told IPS in e-mail that he had “no information about the allegations of misconduct” by police reported to British officers, despite the fact that the Marine brigade’s headquarters in Helmand are right next to those of the British Task Force Helmand.

Pelletier had not responded as of Wednesday to an IPS query about popular allegations to U.S. officers of police abuses in the U.S. area of responsibility in Helmand.

The spokesman for the British Task Force Helmand, Lt. Col. Nick Richardson, asked in an interview with IPS about the grievances voiced by village elders to British officers, said, “We are aware of those.”

He refused to specify what grievances against the police had been aired to the British, but said, “If there is any allegation, it will be dealt with by the appropriate authorities.”

That meant the “the chain of command of the Afghan national police,” Richardson explained.

But the Afghan national police command has little real power over the police in Helmand Province. As of mid-2007 the national police command controlled the appointments of only four of the 13 districts in Helmand Province, according to an International Crisis Group (IGC) study in August 2007. The remaining nine were evidently controlled locally – meaning that the Akhunzada was able to keep his own men in position in most of the districts.

Although the IGC study did not specify which districts were not controlled by the national police command, the districts which are the objects of the U.S.-British military operation in Helmand are especially sensitive because they include the main opium poppy fields in the province.

Akhundzada maintains his power in Helmand in part because of a firm political alliance with President Hamid Karzai.

Karzai was forced by British pressure to remove Akhundzada from office in January 2006, after a British-trained counter-narcotics team found nearly 10 tonnes of heroin in the warlord’s basement.

But Karzai also ensured that Akhundzada retained his full power in Helmand, forcing Akhundzada’s replacement as governor, Mohammad Daud, to accept the warlord’s brother Amir Mohammed, as his deputy. That signaled that Akhundzada was effectively still in control.

Then Karzai began forming what would eventually be called “Afghanistan National Auxiliary Police,” the new recruits for which came straight out of Akhundzada’s 500-man private army and those of other warlords.

By the end of 2006, Karzai had removed Daud, a favourite of the British, because he was free of links with the drug lords. Karzai replaced him with an aged and infirm official who was less likely to refuse to cooperate with Akhundzada.

As recently as September 2008, Karzai was hinting to Afghan MPs that he would have reinstated Akhundzada had it not been for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s threat to withdraw British troops from Helmand if he did.

Helmand province is the epicenter of the Afghan drug industry, which generates an annual income for those who manage it estimated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime at three billion dollars. Much of that income is siphoned off by the local warlords like Akhundzada who protect the drug lords’ operations.

Although poppy fields in Helmand were supposed to have been eradicated under official government policy, large areas of poppy fields owned by wealthy farmers were untouched, as reported last April by the Telegraph.

Ambassador Neumann told IPS he believes the police should be excluded from security responsibilities in the province. It is not clear, however, whether British and U.S. forces in Helmand will prevent the return of the very police who committed crimes against the population in the province.

The U.S. solution appears to be more training. U.S. troops in Aynak sent the police stationed in the local police headquarters out of the province for several weeks of training, replacing them with a unit they had brought with them, according to an Associated Press report.

But British spokesman Richardson told IPS that both the Afghan military and police, who had been absent from the area before the British offensive in Northern Helmand, “are returning to the area bit by bit.”

For the Barack Obama administration, as for the George W. Bush administration before it, the Iranian detainees had become symbols of what Washington steadfastly insisted was an Iranian effort to use the IRGC to destabilise the Iraqi regime.

But high-ranking Shi’a and Kurdish officials of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had never shared the U.S. view of the IRGC or of the Iranian role. They have acted on the premise that Iran is interested in ensuring that a friendly Shiite regime would remain in power.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly expressed concern that the five Iranian detainees being released were “associated with” the Quds Force of the Iranian and could endanger U.S. troops in Iraq.

The idea that the Quds Force was fighting a “proxy war” against U.S. and Iraqi troops was the justification for the George W. Bush administration’s decision in late 2006 to target any Iranian found in Iraq who could plausibly be linked to the IRGC.

Three of the five Iranian detainees, who had been grabbed in a January 2007 raid, were working in an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil. The U.S. military, hinting that it actually had little information about the Iranians seized, said they were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces”.

Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to get the U.S. officials to understand that the Iranians seized in Erbil were not part of a “clandestine network” but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari explained that they were working for the IRGC because that institution has the responsibility for controlling Iran’s borders.

After Mahmoud Farhadi was kidnapped by the U.S. military from a hotel in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in September 2007, a U.S. military spokesman made the spectacular claim that Farhadi was an IRGC commander responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq.

Kurdish officials acknowledged Farhadi’s IRGC affiliation, but the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed that Farhadi was a civilian official of the neighbouring Iranian province of Kermanshah on a “commercial mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the government of Kurdistan”.

Although Farhadi had indeed been a military commander at one time, the Kurds pointed out that he was now carrying out only civilian functions.

Iraqi officials also rejected the idea that the IRGC’s Quds Force itself was hostile to the Iraqi regime. They had personal relationships with the Quds Force commander Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and they acknowledged that he had ties with all the Shi’a factions in Iraq.

They knew that Iran had trained officers of Shi’a nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and provided some financial support to Sadr. But they also believed that the purpose of that relationship was to exert influence on Sadr in the interest of peace and stability.

After Sadr declared a unilateral ceasefire in late August 2007, the Maliki regime, including Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, argued publicly and privately to Bush administration officials that Iran had used its influence on Sadr to get him to agree to such a ceasefire. They used the argument to urge the Bush administration to release the Iranian detainees.

Even the Bush administration itself was divided sharply over the Iraqi government argument that Iranian influence on Sadr was benign. The State Department was inclined to accept the Iraqi argument, and privately urged the release of the five in fall 2007.

In December 2007 the State Department’s coordinator on Iraq, David Satterfield, went so far as to agree publicly that the Sadr ceasefire “had to be attributed to an Iranian policy decision”.

But Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, strongly resisted that conclusion, insisting that it was U.S. military operations against Sadr’s Mahdi Army that had brought about the ceasefire. The internal debate was resolved in favour of Petraeus, and the five Iranian detainees were not released.

A series of events in 2008, however, showed that the Iraqi regime was much more comfortable relying on personal relationships with of the Quds Force than on U.S. military might to deal with the problem of the Mahdi Army.

First, Maliki refused in March to allow U.S. ground forces to participate in an operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Then, only a few days into the battle, the government turned to the Iranian Quds Force commander, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, to lean on Sadr and broker a ceasefire in Basrah only a few days into a major battle there.

Iraqi President Talabani met with Suleimani Mar. 28-29, 2008 at an Iran-Iraq border crossing and asked him to stop the fighting in Basra. Suleimani intervened to bring about a ceasefire within 24 hours, according to a report by McClatchy Newspapers Apr. 28, 2008.

And in a second meeting a few days later, revealed by Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor May 14, 2008, Suleimani called Sadr the biggest threat to peace in Iraq. The Quds Force commander vowed support for the Maliki regime and referred to “common goals with the United States”.

In a gesture to Washington, Suleimani asked Talabani to tell Petraeus that his portfolio included not only Iraq but Gaza and Lebanon, and that he was willing to send a team to Baghdad to “discuss any issue” with the U.S.

Petraeus refused to talk with Suleimani, according to Peterson’s account, supposedly on the ground that his offer was part of an Iranian bid to become an “indispensable power broker” in Iraq and thus establish Iranian influence there.

But Petraeus understood that Suleimani had indeed achieved just such a position of power in Iraq as arbiter of conflict among Shi’a factions. “The level of their participation, centrality of their role, should give everyone pause,” Petraeus told journalist and author Linda Robinson. “The degree to which they have their hands on so many lines was revealed very starkly during this episode”.

In late April, Petraeus tried to get the Maliki regime to endorse a document that detailed Iranian efforts to “foment instability” in Iraq. But instead an Iraqi government delegation returned from Iran in early May saying they had seen evidence disproving the U.S. charges.

Then, Maliki again used Gen. Suleimani to reach an agreement with Sadr which ended a major military campaign in Sadr City just as the United States was about to launch a big ground operation there but also allowed government troops to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold.

Within weeks, the power of the Mahdi Army had already begun to wane visibly. Militia members in Sadr City were no longer showing up to collect paychecks and the Iraqi army had taken over the Mahdi Army headquarters in one neighbourhood.

The Maliki regime saw that Suleimani had made good on his word. Prime Minister Maliki then began calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2010. He had opted to depend on Iranian influence rather than U.S. protection.

Nevertheless, the U.S. military has continued to maintain the pretense that it is pushing back Iranian influence in Iraq. The successor to Petraeus, Gen. Ray Odierno, continues to denounce Iran periodically for aiding Shi’a insurgents.

The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between NATO officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO’s logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan.

Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States.

The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing the political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, despite NATO’s need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Apr. 1, “In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban.”

Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels Jun. 12, “Iran is playing a double game” in Afghanistan by “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and coalition forces.”

The State Department’s annual report on terrorism, published Apr. 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian Qods Force had “provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons.” It also charged that Iran had “arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members.”

The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report.

A military official who refused to be identified told IPS the charge of Iranian assistance to the Taliban is based on “an intelligence assessment”, which was limited to “suspected” Iranian shipment of arms to the Taliban and did not extend to training. That admission indicates that the charge of shipments of weapons to the Taliban by Iran is not based on hard evidence.

The only explicit U.S. claim of specific evidence relating to an Iranian arms shipment to insurgents in Afghanistan has been refuted by data collected by the Pentagon’s own office on improvised explosives.

In an April 2008 Pentagon news briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said in reference to Iranian authorities, “[W]e’re seeing some evidence that they’re supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan”.

When pressed by reporters for the evidence, however, Mullen admitted that there was no “constant stream of arms supply at this point” and that the basis for the charge was primarily “evidence some time ago” that Iranians were providing amour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed projectiles) to the Taliban.

That was a reference to a July 2007 allegation by the U.S. command in Afghanistan, under obvious pressure from the White House, that Iranian-made EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan.

Col. Tom Kelly, a U.S. deputy chief of staff of the ISAF, told reporters Jul. 18, 2007 that five EFPs that had been found in Herat near the Iranian border and in Kabul were “very sophisticated”, and that “they’re really not manufactured in any other places other than, our knowledge is, Iran”.

That was the same argument that had been used by the U.S. command in Iraq to charge Iran with exporting EFPs to Shi’a insurgents there.

But in response to a query from this writer last July, the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO), which is responsible for tracking the use of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, provided the first hard data on EFPs found in Afghanistan. The data showed that there was no connection on which to base even an inferential connection between those EFPs and Iran.

Every one of the 13 EFPs reported to have been found in Afghanistan up to that time were “crude and unsophisticated”, according to Irene Smith, a spokesperson for Gen. Anthony Tata, JIEDDO’s deputy director for operations and training. In fact, the insurgents in Afghanistan had not shown the ability to make the kind of EFPs that had been found in Iraq, Smith said.

The U.S. command in Afghanistan, moreover, does not appear to be an enthusiastic supporter of the administration’s political line on the issue. NATO officials began a serious dialog with Iran last March which focused on the possibility of moving supplies for NATO troops to Afghanistan from Iranian ports.

At an off the record seminar in Washington last month, a senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan said the Iranian policy toward Afghanistan is neither a “major problem” nor a “growing problem” for the war against the Taliban, according to one of the attendees.

The lack of enthusiasm of the U.S. command in Afghanistan for charges of Iranian support for the Taliban suggests that the impetus for such charges is coming from those in the administration who are trying to ramp up the overall pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme.

Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says he sees sharp differences between the position of those responsible for Afghanistan and those whose primary concern is Iran’s nuclear programme.

“You have one discourse of officials in Afghanistan, who would support collaboration with Iran,” Dorronsoro said in an interview with IPS. “It’s very clear that those people don’t want a crisis with Iran and don’t want to push Iran too far.”

But those who want to put pressure on Iran to stop its enrichment programme, he said, “are acting as though they are building some kind of legal case against Iran.”

The Bush administration initially claimed it had evidence of Iranian aid to the Taliban in 2007 that didn’t exist, only to have it refuted by the U.S. command in Afghanistan.

In April and May 2007, NATO forces in Helmand province found mortars, C-4 explosives and electrical components believed to have been manufactured in Iran. Then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns asserted that the United States had “irrefutable evidence” that those weapons were provided to the Taliban by the Qods Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

When State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was questioned about the Burns statement on Jun. 13, 2007, McCormack admitted that the charge was an inference.

Gen. Dan McNeill, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, rejected the idea that any official Iranian role could be reasonably inferred from Iranian weapons showing up in Afghanistan.

“[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here,” he told Jim Loney of Reuters. McNeill said he had “no information to support that there’s anything formal in some arrangement out of Iran to provide weapons here.”

The obvious alternative explanation for Iranian weapons in arms shipments is that drug lords and the Taliban have used commercial arms smugglers to get the weapons from Iran into the country. Arms dealers have close ties with Afghan officials, and have been reported to use police convoys to carry smuggled arms, according to a BBC2 television report last September.

As expected, the stories told by the detainees recapitulated the outlines of the Shi’a plot that had already been described by the Saudis two years earlier. Now there were even more tantalizing details of direct Iranian involvement.

One of the detainees said Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Ahmad Sherifi had personally selected the Khobar barracks as a target. Another said the Saudi Hezbollah members had been not only trained but paid by the Iranians.

“We came away with solid evidence that Iran was behind it,” says a former FBI agent.

There was one problem with the evidence the FBI team collected: the Saudi secret police had already had two and half years to coach the Saudi Hezbollah detainees on what to say about the case, with the ever-present threat of more torture to provide the incentive.

But Freeh was not about to let the torture issue interfere with his mission. “For Louis, if they would let us in the room, that was the important thing,” one former high-ranking FBI official told Inter Press Service (IPS). “We would have gone over there and gotten the answers even if they had been propped up.”

When Freeh took the accounts from the Shi’a detainees in interrogations witnessed by the FBI team, however, the Justice Department didn’t buy them as valid testimony. The department refused to go ahead with an indictment as Freeh had desired, evidently based on the same objection that had been raised two years earlier: the Shi’a had been subject to torture.

But in January 2001, President George W. Bush kept Freeh on as FBI director. Freeh told the new president that Iran had masterminded the Khobar bombing, according to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and the Justice Department then began collaborating with Freeh on an indictment of the Saudi Hezbollah which implicated Iran in the Khobar bombing.

The indictment was announced on Jun. 21, 2001 — Freeh’s last day as FBI director.

Highly credible evidence soon showed, however, that the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, did indeed use torture and coercion to get detainees to tell the stories demanded by the Saudi regime — even in front of foreign observers — and that they did so to protect al Qaeda from investigation by the United States.

Three car bombings in Riyadh in November 2000 that had resulted in the death of a British citizen were generally believed to have been the work of al Qaeda. But four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian had confessed to the bombings, and their confessions had been broadcast on Saudi television.

After being released in 2003, however, the Canadian citizen, William Sampson, made public his dramatic account of beatings administered by the Mabahith while being hung upside down, including blows that made his testicles swell to the size of oranges. Sampson said the Saudis told him from the beginning what they wanted him to confess to, repeating it over and over while the beatings continued, and refined the story over time, constantly adding new details.

Six weeks into the interrogation, after Sampson began to tell them what they wanted, they started videotaping his confession, using a wall chart to help him remember in detail the movements he was supposed to have made.

The Saudis even coached Sampson on what to say when he was visited by Canadian embassy personnel, threatening him with further torture if he told the embassy officials the truth. When the embassy personnel came to talk with him, Sampson’s two torturers were present for the entire interview, just as they were presumably present at the questioning of the Shi’a detainees observed by the FBI team.

The other foreigners told similar stories of coerced confessions under torture. Sampson and the five foreigners were released only after a May 2003 suicide bombing by al Qaeda on a Riyadh compound housing 900 expatriates forced Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef to acknowledge al Qaeda as a terrorist threat in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, once out of office, Freeh became virtually a defense lawyer for the Saudi regime on the Khobar Towers bombing.

Testifying before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees on Oct. 9, 2002, he whitewashed the Saudi policy toward the FBI investigation. Omitting any mention of the Saudi deception over the explosives smuggling incident and refusal to allow the FBI to pursue essential investigatory tasks, Freeh suggested that the Saudis had done everything that could be expected of them.

“Fortunately, the FBI was able to forge an effective working relationship with the Saudi police and interior ministry,” he said. Any “roadblock or legal obstacle” that “would occur,” Freeh asserted, was because of the “marked difference between our legal and procedural systems.”

Freeh paid tribute to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, as “critical in achieving the FBI’s investigative objectives in the Khobar case” and suggested that any such temporary problems “were always solved” by Bandar’s “personal intervention.”

Freeh misrepresented the arrangement under which the FBI team had observed the interrogation as “making these witnesses directly available.”

In an interview for a fawning biography of Prince Bandar, Freeh even went so far as to call the Saudi beheading of four jihadists who confessed to the OPM SANG bombing after refusing to allow the FBI to question them as “swift justice” on a “Saudi domestic matter.”

The final chapter of Freeh’s connection with Bandar and the Saudis, however, was still to come. In April 2009, Freeh appeared as Bandar’s defense lawyer in a British court case in which Bandar is accused of illegally taking two billion dollars in graft on a Saudi-British arms deal.

In the context of Freeh’s straightened financial situation and his very close relationship with Prince Bandar, this sequence of developments in Freeh’s relationship with the Saudis, culminating in being put on Bandar’s payroll, should have raised eyebrows in Washington.

With a wife and six children to support, Freeh had been far more vulnerable to Saudi blandishments than most senior administration officials. And Bandar had made no secret that he was willing to use the promise of financial benefits to influence U.S. officials while they were still in office.

He once told an associate, according to a February 2002 article by Robert G. Kaiser and David Ottaway of the Washington Post, “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”

Freeh declined to be interview for this series.

In light of the history of Freeh’s relations with Bandar, his conduct of the investigation of Khobar Towers deserves new scrutiny. Freeh effectively shut down a probe of a terror bombing in which bin Laden was clearly implicated when the Saudis had refused to cooperate; he refused to pursue any investigation of a bin Laden role in the bombing; and he pushed a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing despite the fact that it was tainted by the likelihood of torture.

The result of Freeh’s blatant pro-Saudi bias was that Osama bin Laden was allowed more years of unhindered freedom in which to plan terrorist actions against the United States. Had Freeh not become an advocate of the interests of the regime whose representative in Washington eventually put him on his payroll, U.S. policy would presumably have been focused like a laser on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda two years earlier.

And perhaps the disinterest of the George W. Bush administration’s national security team toward al Qaeda before 9/11 would have been impossible.

* (This is the final installment of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden.” The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)