A recent piece in The New Yorker aptly entitled Preparing the Battlefield reveals that the U.S. government has recently dedicated significant resources to covert operations within Iran. U.S. Special Operations Forces have been operating cross-border missions since last year, but apparently something bigger and bolder is afoot. According to the article, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are now participating in a range of clandestine military activities designed to (1) provide support for groups within Iran thought to be responsive to U.S. interests and (2) gather information about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

It is unclear what JSOC is actually doing inside Iran. In addition to seeking “high value” targets in the President’s war on terror, JSOC seems to be supporting dissident minority groups within Iran who would benefit from a different – or just new – government. What “support” for such groups involves in particular cases is anyone’s guess. For example, in early 2008 a militant Ahwazi group claimed responsibility for killing a member the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. While the Iranian press is increasingly blaming the U.S. for such incidents, it’s not clear whether the U.S. was actually involved in providing any logistical or material assistance. And even though scant evidence exists to link the U.S. to any particular incident, press reports suggest that the U.S. may be supporting Baluchi Sunnis and the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement (Jundallah) – two fundamentalist groups with ties to Al Qaeda.

Wait a minute – we’re helping dissident groups within Iran that have clear ties to Al Qaeda? It gets better. The U.S. has apparently been helping the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (M.E.K.) – which has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for over a decade – by providing covert funds and intelligence, with no strings attached and absolutely no ability to determine how funds are spent. And though the details are murky, we have also been helping the Kurdish party (PJAK) in Iran. PJAK, determined to establish zones of independent political control for ethnic Kurds within Iran, periodically engages Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Make no mistake, PJAK is a terrorist organization that does not pull punches. Credited for vicious attacks on Iran and Turkey, PJAK is widely regarded as the kind of organization a liberal democracy ought to eschew, not embrace. As military strategist Col. Sam Gardiner (ret.) astutely puts it, America’s covert operations in Iran appear to be “harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”

Does providing material support to and working closely with terrorist organizations sound like good or a bad idea? Before answering this simple query, consider this: Iranian covert operations seem eerily similar to the CIA’s approach to helping the Afghans expel the Soviets. Indeed, defenders of this program would surely argue that arms and other forms of support have been given to rebel groups in Iran with the understanding that they will somehow help the United States achieve its strategic objectives. But beneath this similarity lies a stark difference. While it was in our national interest to hasten the end of the Cold War by helping Afghanistan rid itself of the Soviets, the same cannot be said of covert operations in Iran. We are not there to help the Iranian people overthrow a malevolent invader, which means we are not allied with the Iranians to achieve a common purpose. Instead, we have entered into fragile alliances with volatile terrorist groups to, it would appear, destabilize Iran. And while there are plausible arguments for keeping the official threat of military action against Iran on the table, the clandestine approach the United States is now taking has little hope of achieving any meaningful national security objective.