Check that map of Afghanistan newly fixed to your icebox door. Locate two sites featured in this series. Kunduz (Nov. 20) is a parvenu town riddled with ethnic treachery. Mazar-e-Sharif (Nov. 29) owes its metropolitan status to a fraud. Now move west to Herat. This ancient city is the real deal. And what is or isn’t happening there should occasion a U.S. reality check. Let Herat be the basis for a heart-to-heart talk about – perhaps even with – the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Herat’s venerability is traceable in its name. The Achaemenid Persians called it “Haraiva.” Ever narcissistic, Alexander of Macedon labeled it “Alexandria Areia” and in 330 BCE built a fort which still stands. “Eri” figures in the travel narrative of 15th century Portuguese merchant-spy Ludovico de Varthema. Babur, founder of India’s Muslim Moghul dynasty, listed it as “Heri.”

Settlements last – and survive devastation by such scourges as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane – because of deeply important location. Nancy Dupree, doyenne of ex-pat Afghanophiles, calls Herat the “pivot” around which Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia swing.

This centrality is not new. Kabul may be Afghanistan’s capital, and Kandahar was Taliban spiritual center and remains HQ for Pashtun expansionism. But Herat opens onto a wider world: north toward Central Asia, west toward Iran and (what we call) the Middle East. Here’s why 26-year-old Eldredge Pottinger became famous in September 1837. A lieutenant in British East India Company army, he had hit town a year earlier in what Peter Hopkirk terms “a routine Great Game reconnaissance.”

(Routine? Young Pottinger had come by foot and horse all the way from India disguised, successfully, as a Muslim holy man: walking the walk and talking the talk! Note the difference between this young subaltern’s excursion two centuries ago and that of our Green Berets last November who flew from America, then motored into Mazar [a brave but less arduous access] speaking Arabic and Russian … neither of which is native to Afghanistan.)

Pottinger found Herat threatened by Persia (now Iran) with help from Russia and led the city’s defense against a ten month siege. The critical moment came when young Eldredge rallied the defenders by physically hauling their timid chieftain into the hand-to-hand fray. Pottinger was lionized in London as “The Hero of Herat.” (Less heroic was the 1885 British destruction of Herat’s famed Musalla complex, arguably the finest achievement of 15th century Muslim architecture. Ten months ago I wandered the site, further blasted by recent warfare: a fragmented litter of medieval tiles and modern rocket shells. Nowhere in Afghanistan does one feel less faith in progress. And, at that time, the sullen, terrified, Taliban-occupied city looked west toward Iran for deliverance.)

Persia/Iran, past and present, regards Herat as its own. The whole region of northwestern Afghanistan is known, even to the Afghans, as Khorassan meaning “the sunrise East” – of course from Iran’s perspective. Heratis are the most Persianized of Afghans in accent, food, and art. Herat was actually part of Persia during much of pre-modern history. The last Persian occupation (to date) ended only in 1857, and sabers have rattled off and on ever since.

Iran’s attitude still amounts to possessive condescension. When I moved from our Kabul embassy in 1973 to a similar stint in Tehran, Iranians giggled at my Afghan accent – for them a sort of hillbilly twang. “Stay here,” one cabinet minister told me, “and learn to speak Persian properly. One day we’ll teach those barbarian back east to do the same.”

Names may change, but old ambitions, like old cities, persist across decades and centuries. Iran is like Pakistan before Musharraf’s recent renunciation of extra-territorial aims: It wants its say in – and, given the chance, its chunk of – Afghanistan. (How long will Pakistan’s secret service and officer corps be decent chaps and stick to their own cricket pitch?) More than the usual muscle flexing is at stake. Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province depends for water on the Helmand River which rises in Afghanistan. A 1977 Afghan-Iranian hydro agreement has survived no better than the two then-existing governments. With characteristic disregard for international conventions, the Taliban took all the water they wanted. Now Iran, whose own Islamists hated the ones next door, wants to make sure that the taps are properly turned back on.

Hence the newsworthiness of Herat’s popular, prickly and perplexing Ismail Khan. Popular because he led Herat’s resistance against the Soviets, governed the area justly afterward, and withdrew from the city in 1995 rather than subject it to destruction by the advancing Taliban. Prickly in his relations with the Interim Authority of Hamid Karzai whose Dec. 22 inauguration address he interrupted by an obtrusive, mid-ceremony arrival. Karzai kept his cool, welcomed the tardy warlord, but gave him nothing in the new government. Ismail’s son Mir Wais Sadeq was awarded the portfolio for “Labor and Social Affairs.” As Afghans reckon power, those are slim pickings.

Perplexing in two ways. First because, virtually alone among Afghan leaders, Ismail Khan obscures his own ethnic roots and thus, some say, can play to all crowds. Perplexing also because of his uncertain relationship with Iran.

Is this nice-guy warlord Iran’s first-string champion? If not, who is? Warming Iran’s substitute bench sits the least nice, most psychopathically vicious of all Afghan gangsters, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Meanwhile daily convoys of trucks roll across the border with “humanitarian aid ” … and deliver it to a well-guarded army camp outside Herat City.

Now let’s outline the need for that heart-to-heart talk. Iran, first of all, amounts to more than meddlesome, mostly feckless Pakistan. Unlike Pakistan – and most other Stans on the map this week – Iran is for real and here to stay. And Iran is where militantly anti-American Islamism first went prime time: in 1979, with the ascension of Ayatollah Khomeini and then the capture of the U.S. Embassy and subsequent 444-day detention of 53 diplomat-hostages. “Khomeini struggles, Carter trembles” read a banner hung from the embassy walls.

If not trembling, America has been more than nervous about Iran ever since. Here’s why we helped Saddam “Frankenstein” Hussein in the Iraq-Iran War during Reagan’s era … while at the same concluding the Iran-Contra arms deal. (Forget fall guy and hyper-patriot Ollie North. For full details on this unlawful commerce, ask our current president’s father.) When Khomeini died in 1989, a milder-mannered cleric named Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani emerged as president, and Iran seemed (seemed) to change.

It’s been seeming to change ever since. Rafsanjani was replaced by Mohammad Khatami as seemingly nice-guy president … while Rafsanjani morphed into a harder-liner. Ultimate authority still resides in the anti-Western hands of very hard-liner Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. My sense of Iran’s direction has recently been troubled further by a book and a phone call.

The book, “Bin Laden – The Man Who Declared War On America,” is written by Yossef Bodansky whom credits list as director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. Bodansky is clearly a hawk and may be an alarmist, but if his claims of Iranian leadership in worldwide Islamist terrorism are even fractionally true, then the situation in Herat has overtones going far beyond Afghanistan.

The phone call came from investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. This fellow, suffice it to say, is no administration patsy. For further information on the November airlift of enemy personnel from Kunduz, see his article “The Getaway” in The New Yorker of Jan. 28. On the phone we spoke of Pakistan’s rogue intelligence service, the ISI, which – with what must have been U.S. approval – would later engineer the great escape. Hersh then voiced his concern that Iran’s intelligence establishment is similarly autonomous and similarly supportive of Islamist terrorism.

Iran, clearly, is hard at work in Herat. What about elsewhere? Our War on Terror mentions lots of other venues from Sudan to Yemen to the southern Philippines. Note the lack of administration speculation – at least in public – about Iran. Why this silence?

Events in Herat should provoke real heart-to-heart talk on whether or not Iran – a far more formidable political and military entity than any of the usual suspects – is centrally involved and invested as an opponent in our worldwide war. If so, the essentially minor-league game in Afghanistan could get big-league real quick. Stay tuned for “Game Theory” in

the Bangor Daily News.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.