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January 25, 2002
atimes.com
Central Asia/ Russia
THE ROVING EYE
Pipelineistan, Part 1: The rules of the game
By Pepe Escobar
War against terrorism? Not really. Reminder: it's all about oil.
A quick look at the map is all it takes. It's no coincidence that the
map of terror in the Middle East and Central Asia is practically
interchangeable with the map of oil. There's Infinite Justice,
Enduring Freedom - and Everlasting Profits to be made: not only by
the American industrial-military complex, but especially by American
and European oil giants.
Where is the realm these days of former US secretary of state James
Baker, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, former White
House chief of staff John Sununu and former defense secretary and
current Invisible Man Dick Cheney? They are all happily dreaming of,
and working for, the establishment of Pipelineistan.
Pipelineistan is the golden future: a paradise of opportunity in the
form of US$5 trillion of oil and gas in the Caspian basin and the
former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In Washington's global
petrostrategy, this is supposed to be the end of America's oil
dependence on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC). This is of course the heart of the matter in the New Great
Game - compared to which the original 19th-century Great Game between
czarist Russia and the British Empire was a childish tin soldier's
diversion.
Afghanistan itself has some natural gas in the north of the country,
near Turkmenistan. But above all it is ultra-strategic: positioned
between the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia, between
Turkmenistan and the avid markets of the Indian subcontinent, China
and Japan. Afghanistan is at the core of Pipelineistan.
The Caspian states hold at least 200 billion barrels of oil, and
Central Asia has 6.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas just
begging to be exploited. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are two major
producers: Turkmenistan is nothing less than a "gas republic". Apart
from oil and gas there's copper, coal, tungsten, zinc, iron, uranium,
gold.
The only export routes, for the moment, are through Russia. So most
of the game consists of building alternative pipelines to Turkey and
Western Europe, and to the east toward the Asian markets. India will
be a key player. India, Iran, Russia and Israel are all planning to
supply oil and gas to South and Southeast Asia through India.
It's enlightening to note that all countries or regions which happen
to be an impediment to Pipelineistan routes towards the West have
been subjected either to a direct interference or to all-out war:
Chechnya, Georgia, Kurdistan, Yugoslavia and Macedonia. To the east,
the key problems are the Uighurs of China's far-western Xinjiang and,
until recently, Afghanistan.
More, much more than Afghanistan is involved. What's at stake is
Eurasia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, stellar hawk and Jimmy Carter's former
national security adviser, used to wax lyrical on Eurasia: "Seventy-
five percent of the world population, most of its material riches, 60
percent of the world's GNP, 75 percent of sources of energy, and
behind the US, the six most prosperous economies and the six largest
military budgets." Brzezinski is on record stressing that the US
would have to make sure "no other power would take possession of this
geopolitical space".
The numbers are clear. According to the United States Energy
Information Administration, in 2001 America imported an average of
9.1 million barrels per day - over 60 percent of its crude oil needs.
In 2020, the country is projected to require almost 26 million
barrels per day in imports. So Pipelineistan, in the Caucasus and in
Central Asia - for the West and Japan but especially for America
itself - cannot but be the strategic-military No 1 goal.
In this geostrategic grand design, the Taliban were the proverbial
fly in the ointment. The Afghan War was decided long before September
11. September 11 merely precipitated events. Plans to destroy the
Taliban had been the subject of international diplomatic and not-so-
diplomatic discussions for months before September 11. There was a
crucial meeting in Geneva in May 2001 between US State Department,
Iranian, German and Italian officials, where the main topic was a
strategy to topple the Taliban and replace the theocracy with a
"broad-based government". The topic was raised again in full force at
the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001 when
India - an observer at the summit - also contributed its own plans.
Nor concidentally, Pipelineistan was the central topic in secret
negotiations in a Berlin hotel a few days after the G-8 summit,
between American, Russian, German and Pakistani officials. And
Pakistani high officials, on condition of anonymity, have extensively
described a plan set up by the end of July 2001 by American advisers,
consisting of military strikes against the Taliban from bases in
Tajikistan, to be launched before mid-October.
More recently, while most of the planet that has access to news was
distracted by New Year's Eve celebrations, and only nine days after
Hamid Karzai's interim government took power in Kabul, Bush II
appointed his special envoy to Afghanistan. It comes as no surprise
he is Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad - a former aide to the
Californian energy giant UNOCAL. Khalilzad wasted no time in boarding
the first flight to Central Asia. The Bush II team now does not even
try to disguise that the whole game is about oil. The so- called
brand-new American "Afghan policy" is being conducted by people
intimately connected to oil industry interests in Central Asia.
In 1997, UNOCAL led an international consortium - Centgas - that
reached a memorandum of understanding to build a $2 billion, 1,275-
kilometer-long, 1.5-meter-wide natural-gas pipeline from Dauletabad
in southern Turkmenistan to Karachi in Pakistan, via the Afghan
cities of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan near Quetta. A
$600 million extension to India was also being considered. The
dealings with the Taliban were facilitated by the Clinton
administration and the Pakistani Inter Services Agency (ISI). But the
civil war in Afghanistan would simply not go away. UNOCAL had to pull
out.
American energy conglomerates, through the American Overseas Private
Investment Corp (OPIC), are now resuscitating this and other
projects. Already last October, the UNOCAL-led project was discussed
in Islamabad between Pakistani Petroleum Minister Usman Aminuddin and
American Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain. The exuberant official
statement reads: "The pipeline opens up new avenues of multi-
dimensional regional cooperation, particularly in view of the recent
geopolitical developments in the region."
But there are practical problems with these "new avenues".
Specialists at the James Baker (who else?) Institute in Texas stress
that the main beneficiaries would be Turkmenistan and Afghanistan -
which in itself is not a bad idea: Afghanistan would make a little
money and perhaps be a little more stable. As far as the gas is
concerned - liquefied and exported from Karachi - it would be too
expensive compared with gas from the Middle East.
UNOCAL also has a project to build the so-called Central Asian Oil
Pipeline, almost 1,700km long, linking Chardzhou in Turkmenistan to
Russian's existing Siberian oil pipelines and also to the Pakistani
Arabian Sea coast. This pipeline will carry 1 million barrels of oil
a day from different areas of former Soviet republics, and it will
run parallel to the gas pipeline route through Afghanistan.
Khalilzad is a very interesting character indeed. He was always a
huge Taliban supporter. Four years ago, he wrote in the Washington
Post that "the Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of
fundamentalism practiced by Iran". Khalilzad only abandoned the
Taliban after Bill Clinton fired 58 cruise missiles into Afghanistan
in August 1998, in retaliation for the alleged involvement of Osama
bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania. Only one day after the attack, UNOCAL put Centgas on
hold - and two months later abandoned plans for the trans-Afghan
pipeline.
A little more than a year ago, Khalilzad was reincarnated in print in
The Washington Quarterly, now stressing his four mains reason to ged
rid of the Taliban regime as soon as possible: Osama bin Laden, opium
trafficking, oppression of the Afghan people and, last but not least,
oil.
Afghan diaspora sources in Paris acidly comment that Khalilzad will
be regarded as nothing less than a traitor by fiercely proud and
independent Afghans. Born in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1951, he is part of
the Afghan ruling elite. His father was an aide to King Zahir Shah.
Khalilzad was studying at the notoriously conservative University of
Chicago when Afghanistan was invaded by the Red Army in December
1979. Later he became an American citizen and a special adviser to
the State Department during the Reagan years. He was a strident
lobbyist for more US military aid to the mujahedeen during the anti-
USSR jihad - campaigning for widespread distribution of Stinger
missiles.
Khalilzad was undersecretary of defense for Bush I, during the war
against Iraq. After a stint at the Rand Corp think tank, he headed
the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department and
advised Donald Rumsfeld. But he was not rewarded with any promotions.
The required Senate confirmation would raise extremely uncomfortable
questions about his role as UNOCAL adviser and staunch Taliban
defender. He was assigned instead to the National Security Council -
no Senate confirmation required - where he reports to National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Rice herself is a former oil-company consultant. During Bush I, from
1989-92, she was on the board of directors of Chevron, and was its
main expert on Kazakhstan. Chevron has invested more than $20 billion
in Kazakhstan alone. As for The Invisible Man, Vice President Dick
Cheney, he was for five years a director of Halliburton, one of the
top companies rendering service to the oil industry: present in 130
countries, 100,000 employees, turnover of almost $20 billion, a
member of the Fortune 400. Cheney did a lot of business with the
murderous Myanmar dictatorship, and invested heavily in Nigeria.
Both Cheney and Bush II spent an important part of their careers in
Arbusto, a small company directed by Cheney. Arbusto never made
money, but was handsomely supported by very wealthy Saudis. Among the
shareholders there was one James Bath, very cozy with Bush I and
chief money launderer for shady Gulf superstars, including one Salem
bin Laden, one of the 17 brothers of Osama bin Laden.
All American secretaries of state since World War II have been
connected with the oil industry - except two: one of them is Colin
Powell, but in his case the president, vice president and national
security adviser are all part of the oil industry anyway.
So everybody in the ruling plutocracy knows the rules of the ruthless
game: Central Asia is crucial to Washington's worldwide petro-
strategy. So is a "friendly" government in Afghanistan - now led by
the always impeccably dressed and fluent English speaker Hamid
Karzai. It does not matter that independent minds from Central Asia
in exile in Europe unanimously ridicule Karzai as nothing else than a
Taliban himself, and his Northern Alliance ministers as a bunch of
crooks.
As for US corporate-controlled media - from TV networks to daily
newspapers - they just exercise self-censorship and remain mute about
all of these connections.
Tomorrow, Part 2: Games nations play
Related Articles
Turkmenbashi reaches out
Reconstructing Afghanistan - on oil and gas
The oil behind Bush and Son's campaigns
((c)2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] for information on our sales and syndication
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