While Pakistan’s strongman General Parviz Mosharraf has personally congratulated the new interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and assured him of all Pakistan could do helping reconstruct the war-shattered Afghanistan, no senior Iranian official has talked with Mr. Karzai except the Foreign Minister.

Informed Iranian analysts say the ruling clerics stepping up "palestinisation" of Iran’s foreign policy is not fortuitous, but a deliberate attempt to divert the public opinion from unfolding events in Afghanistan.

The reasons behind Iranian Mollahrchy’s pathological paranoia from the situation in neighbouring Afghanistan following the American military intervention that resulted in the collapse of the ultra-orthodox Muslim Taleban and the appointment of an interim Administration to be led by Mr. Hamid Karzai, a Poshton tribal leader, is manifold, experts say pointing to:

Immediately after the United States entered massively the war-plagued Afghanistan in search of Osama Ben Laden, the Saudi anti-west, anti American crusader believed to be behind the deadly 11 September operations in New York and in Washington D.C. and "uproot international terrorism", Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, the orthodox and fundamentalist leader of the Islamic Republic vehemently denounced the American military intervention against the "defenceless, Muslim people of Afghanistan".

More surprisingly, the Mojahedeen of Islamic Revolution Organisation (MIRO), the largest faction of groups making the Second Khordad Coalition that supports reforms promised by the embattled President Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami, openly called on the government to support the Taleban against "invading Americans", proving the organisation’s primitive "anti-imperialist" stand inherited from the Soviet Union era.

The return of the 87 years-old former Monarch Mohammad Zaher Shah to Afghanistan, as a symbol of Afghans recovered unity, gives shivers to the ruling clerics, as their unprecedented unpopularity among young Iranians that make more than 70 per cent of the population coincides with a visible regain of sympathy, if not popularity, in Iran for both Reza Pahlavi, 40, the son of Shah Mohammad Reza, toppled by the Islamic revolution of 1979, and constitutional monarchy.

The prospect of seeing a modern, secular, democratic government established in Afghanistan under the command of the "troika" formed by Yoones Qanooni, Dr. Abdollah Abdollah and General Moahmmad Qasem Fahim, respectively the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Defence ministers of the interim Administration to be led by Hamid Karzai is another source of insomnia for the present Iranian rulers.

"Anyway, the image the Ben Laden, Mollah Omar, Mollah Ali and other mullahs and ayatollahs have projected about Islam on international public opinion, it does not make any difference whether you name your state Islamic or Terrorist", one Iranian scholar observed, referring to the Saudi anti-Western crusader and leaders of the Taleban and Iran.

Contrary to the Iranian clerical rulers, most of them orthodox and ultra fundamentalists reactionaries close to the Afghan and Pakistani Taleban longing for putting the clock back to the time of Muslim’s prophet Mohammad, most of them in their sixties and over, ignorant of the working of the complicated and complex diktats of the modern time’s "global village", gerontologists who, with some rare exceptions, have seldom set feet outside Iran except for countries such as North Korea and Syria, who speaks no other foreign language than a broken Arabic, the new Afghan officials are young, well-educated, speaks fluently English or other Western languages and determined to create a parliamentary, secular state and government.

These brigs us to Mr. Khameneh’i and his inner circle ruling clan apartheid system’s biggest challenge from the post-Taleban Afghanistan: Human rights and individual liberties such as freedom of expression, press, political parties and above all, equal rights for women, notions grossly ignored, suppressed and violated by the present Iranian Mollahrchy, as they were in Taleban-controlled Afghanistan.

While in Afghanistan women have already been appointed to important ministerial posts as well as deputy Prime Minister, in Iran, they have been denied such jobs due to fierce opposition from the hard-line clergy, the two vice-presidential titles occupied by women being more decorative than commending.

The interim Administration that was agreed upon in Bonn by Afghan groups under the supervision of the United Nations stipulates respect of human rights, freedoms and particularly the situation of women.