Last Thursday, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi received Dr Abdollah Abdollah, the Northern Alliance’s Foreign Affairs Minister. The anti-Taleban movement of resistance to the Taleban came to tighten the ties with its nearest ally, who sustains it flawlessly since six years.

The enthusiasm the Northern Alliance showed towards the American intervention in Afghanistan made cough Tehran. Since the following day of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Iran asked that the UN to be in charge of the operations.

The following day, the Iranian minister flew off for Dochanbé, to Tajikstan, in order to converse with president Emamali Rahmonov. Sunday, as the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez finished his visit, centred on oil questions, aides of the chief of the Iranian diplomacy received Mr. Pierre Lafrance, a Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) special envoy, in a fact-finding mission to the region.

Monday, Kamal Kharazi had appointment with Renato Ruggiero, the Italian minister of the foreign Affairs and, in the evening, he received a call from the Afghan president in exile, Borhaneddin Rabbani, who informed him about his recent discussions with the Russian and Tajik presidents.

Yesterday Tuesday), it was the tour of a British messenger, Robert Cupper, Tony Blair’s special adviser for Afghanistan, to converse with Foreign Ministry’s high-ranking responsible. At the same moment, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad Ben Khalifa al-Thani, would arrive in Tehran to go directly to the presidential palace of Mohammad Khatami. Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister arrived on the same evening while the Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schlüssel, is awaited today.

Little information filtered from this impressive set of talks, that would have all been dominated by the question of the future Afghan government.

According to diplomatic source, Europeans have proposed the project of a sort of "governorate" of the United Nations for Afghanistan, to which Iran, qualified of "a pole of regional stability", has answered positively.

However, since the condemnation of the 11 September terrorist operations, the position of Iran did not stopped evolving, in a sense that the Westerners judge "very positive". "The chancelleries decided to concentrate on the moderate orientations of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and not to be impressed by the staunch anti-American speeches of the supreme guide Ali Khameneh’i, that are rather destined to reassure the conservatives", an observer estimated.

Hence, the reformers near President Khatami who criticises more the Iranian diplomacy. "We could have become the centre of the world diplomacy and could have play a leading role in Afghanistan", regret the deputy Haidar Ibrahim Baisalami, reporter of the Majles Special Commission for Afghanistan. Listening to him, one gets the impression that members of the Parliament don't exclude an integration of the moderate Taleban in the future government in Kabol, don't have any problems with the ex-king Zaher Shah and even advocate direct discussions with the United States.

It is therefore a radical revision of the Iranian foreign policy that the lawmakers are calling for, in the name of a crisis "unprecedented in the world", in the one hand and on the other, of two terms very in vogue currently in Tehran: "the national interest" that, in the mind of those that extols it, would call a restoration, even partial, of relations with the United States and the "national security" that the anarchy reigning for years in Afghanistan threatens.

The Foreign Affairs, to which the supreme guide Khameneh’i gives a special interest, cannot evidently adventure much more. For as much, it showed a lot of pragmatism: after having qualified the American attacks as «unacceptable", the collaborators of Kamal Kharazi now ask to the same United States to "finish work", that means to topple the Taleban and to re-establish president Rabbani back in his functions.