The United States says Iran will be invited to a proposed regional meeting to map out Afghanistan strategy. Such a move is a reflection both of how untenable the situation in Afghanistan is becoming, and also of the appeasing foreign policy of the new U.S. administration.

On the opening day of the nato summit in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Iran would be invited to a proposed high-level regional conference on Afghanistan to be held March 31, the Kuwait News Agency reports. “If we go forward with such a meeting, Iran will be invited as a neighbor of Afghanistan,” Clinton said on Thursday. Iran and the U.S., she said, “face a common threat and a common challenge” in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This follows discussions on February 19 between Italy’s Foreign Affairs Minister Franco Frattini and Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the possibility of Iran taking on a greater role in Afghanistan. Two days earlier, Frattini said that it was essential to find a way for Iran to become a “positive interlocutor.” Italy holds the rotating presidency of the Group of Eight Nations this year. As such it is organizing a conference on the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan to be held in late June.

It is ironic that the West would turn to the world’s primary state sponsor of terror to assist in countering a raging insurgency. When one considers that Iran has actually been fueling and supporting that insurgency, however, its relevance becomes apparent. But rather than confront the source of that support, the West would rather co-opt it. A similar scenario has been underway in Iraq.

If Tehran does indeed agree to be involved diplomatically in Afghanistan, we can be sure it will expect something in return. At the least, it will put Iran in a more powerful position regionally.

This is just the latest indication of the dangerous direction of the new U.S. administration’s foreign policy. For more on that foreign policy, read “America’s Future Foreign Policy Is Already Here” and “Obama’s Radical Foreign Policy.”