Fw: Afghanistan and oil: Guardian Oct 23

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

The Guardian 23rd October 2001

America's Pipe Dream

The war against terrorism is also a struggle for oil and regional
control

      By George Monbiot

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here", Woodrow
Wilson asked a year after the First World War ended, "that does not know
that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial
rivalry?". In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its
own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never
last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but
it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs
that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in
some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of
1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to regional control and the transport
of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a
major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain
reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick
Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil
services company, remarked, "I cannot think of a time when we have had a
region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the
Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only
route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.


Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or
Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control
over the Central Asian Republics, which is precisely what the West has spent
ten years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime
which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round
through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be
prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the
US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate
the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is
slow and competition is intense. In South Asia, by contrast, demand is
booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in
Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it
west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, the US oil company Unocal has
been seeking since 1995 to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan,
through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. The
company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which
would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took
Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders
say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason
why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of
the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of
Afghanistan." Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston,
where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these
barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through
the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to
have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US
diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did.
There will be Aramco [a US oil consortium which worked in Saudi Arabia],
pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with
that." US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started
campaigning against both Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing
for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war
resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John
Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the
growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined
that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil.
The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats
and banks, still hoped to build a 1000-mile pipeline, which would carry a
million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy
bombings in East Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few
days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration
reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems
from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and
natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential
includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines
through Afghanistan." Given that the US government is dominated by former
oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that a
reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures in its strategic thinking.
As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic
outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of
the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic
zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to
Europe, is a critical allied concern.

This is not the only long-term US interest in Afghanistan. American foreign
policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means
that the United States should control military, economic and political
development all over the world. China has responded by seeking to expand its
interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last
year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment
and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia
pulled four Central Asian Republics into a "Shanghai Co-operation
Organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world
multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum
dominance.

If the United States succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing it
with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if it then binds the
economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed
not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China.
Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be
deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight
of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy
the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope
and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944, "The enemy aggressor
is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are
always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to
regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to
civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering
accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the United States
government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military
force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naïve
to believe that this is all it is doing.




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