“Iran is going to be harmed immensely by chaos and civil war in Afghanistan,” said Fatemeh Aman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, citing in particular Tehran’s fear of the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate gaining ground. “They see partial rule as the best-case scenario, with the Taliban in power.”
But Iran’s increasingly public overtures to the Taliban “could be a miscalculation,” said Aman, as “Iran believes they are using the Taliban, but some could argue that the Taliban is using Iran to present themselves as more powerful, worthy of ruling a country.”