US foreign policy in one country often finds itself at cross-purposes with the agenda in another country. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Afghanistan, where US efforts to prop up the occupied nation’s collapsing economy is at serious risk.
The cause of that risk? US policy in neighboring Iran. President Trump has been aggressively escalating US sanctions against Iran, oblivious to the impact it would have on other nations in the region, Afghanistan in particular.
Afghans see the Chabahar port project in southern Iran as an economic lifeline to them. Afghanistan’s lone western highway connects to Chabahar, Iran, and would give the landlocked nation’s west a vital shipping corridor.
This has been the plan for awhile, but Trump’s new Iran sanctions have the US threatening Indian companies and financiers looking to facilitate the port’s construction. Despite the port purely being an economic measure for one of the poorest regions in central Asia, the US seems set to derail it.