THE HAGUE: Senior US and Iranian officials met on the sidelines of a conference on rebuilding Afghanistan in The Hague yesterday.
“In the course of the conference today, our special representative for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, had a brief and cordial exchange with the head of the Iranian delegation,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a news conference.
Clinton said the meeting had been unplanned, but Holbrooke and Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhoondzadeh agreed to “stay in touch.” The fact that Iran was present at yesterday’s meeting, she added, was “a promising sign that there will be future cooperation.”
Clinton said she also delivered a letter to the Iranian delegation about three US nationals in Iran who are unable to return to the United States.
“In the letter we ask Iran to use all of its facilities to determine the whereabouts, and ensure the quick and safe return, of Robert Levinson” and release Roxana Saberi, while giving her and Esha Momeni permission to travel, she said.
Former FBI agent Robert Levinson has been missing for two years since vanishing on the Gulf island of Kish. Dual US-Iranian national Saberi was arrested on the orders of an Iranian revolutionary court and has been kept in Tehran’s Evin prison since January.
Iran, which does not recognize dual nationality, has detained several Iranian-Americans, including academics, in recent years.
Akhoondzadeh earlier told the conference that Tehran was ready to help both in fighting the country’s huge opium trade and in reconstruction of the impoverished state. Clinton welcomed the gesture by Tehran that will be closely watched for any follow-up. “I did think that the Iranian intervention this morning was promising,” she said of Akhoondzadeh’s speech.
Nearly eight years after the US-led invasion to topple the Taleban rulers of Afghanistan, more than 70,000 US and NATO troops are still there battling a growing insurgency, which is also spreading its influence in Pakistan.
In one of several shifts of emphasis by Obama from the former Bush administration’s Afghan policy, Clinton proposed a possible truce with nonviolent Taleban.
“They should be offered an honorable form of reconciliation and reintegration into a peaceful society, if they are willing to abandon violence, break with Al-Qaeda and support the constitution,” Clinton said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai insisted his government should lead conciliation efforts. But he welcomed Obama’s new stress on a regional approach and what he called his “fresh, strong and judicious leadership” of international efforts in Afghanistan.
Clinton had played down any major overtures with Iran at the meeting in The Hague and said beforehand she had no plans for a separate meeting with its deputy foreign minister.
But the joint presence of the US and Iranian delegations was an easing of US policy which has long stuck to a stand-off over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Akhoondzadeh nonetheless reaffirmed Iran’s opposition to the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan, which has left it facing a US military presence there and in neighboring Iraq.
