Bush fuels oil conspiracy theory

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

So the Afghan War obviously isn't about fighting terrorism -- leading to
conclude that it must be about oil

Ted Rall, AlterNet
Conspiracy theories are funny things: the wackier they sound, the more
likely they are to be true. The fires of September were still burning when
I, among others, suggested that the Bush regime's Afghan war might have more
to do with old-fashioned oil politics than bringing the Evil Ones to
justice.

Little did I know how quickly I would be proven right.

The Taliban government and their Al Qaeda "guests", after all, both were at
best bit players in the terror biz. If the U.S. had really wanted to
dispatch a significant number of jihad boys to meet the black-eyed virgins,
it would have bombed Pakistan. Instead, the State Department inexplicably
cozied up to this snake pit of anti-American extremists, choosing a nation
led by a dictator who seized power in an illegal coup as our principal South
Asian ally.

Moreover, the American military strategy in Afghanistan -- dropping bombs
without inserting a significant number of ground troops -- all but
guaranteed that Osama would live to kill another day.

So the Third Afghan War obviously isn't about fighting terrorism -- leading
cynics to conclude that it must be about (yawwwwwwn!) oil. Bush and Cheney
were both former oil company execs, after all, and National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice was corporate counsel at Chevron. Unbeknownst to most
Americans, oil fields dot northern Afghanistan near its border with
Turkmenistan. But the real jackpot is under the Caspian Sea. Between
confirmed and estimated oil reserves, Kazakhstan is destined to become the
world's largest oil-producing nation, and will one day dwarf even Saudi
Arabia.

For the U.S., more production means cheaper oil, lower production and
transportation costs, and higher corporate profits. The Kazakhs would be
happy to work with us, but their oil is frustratingly landlocked. The
shortest and cheapest of all possible pipelines would run from the Caspian
to the Persian Gulf via Iran, but lingering American resentment from the
1980 hostage crisis has prevented U.S.-aligned Kazakhstan from getting its
crude out to sea. Plan B is a 1996 Unocal scheme for a trans-Afghanistan
pipeline that would debouche at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi.

As Zalmay Khalilzad co-wrote in The Washington Quarterly in its Winter 2000
issue, "Afghanistan could prove a valuable corridor for this [Caspian Sea]
energy as well as for access to markets in Central Asia." Khalilzad has an
unsavory past. As a State and Defense Department official during the Reagan
years, Khalilzad helped supply the anti-Soviet mujihadeen with weapons
they're now using to fight Americans. During the '90s he worked as Unocal's
chief consultant on its Afghan pipeline scheme.

According to the French daily Libération, Khalilzad's $200 million project
was originally conceived to run 830 miles from Dauletebad in southeastern
Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan. Multan already possesses a link to
Karachi. Partly on Khalilzad's advice, the Clinton Administration funded the
Taliban through Pakistani intelligence, going so far as to pay the salaries
of high-ranking Taliban officials. The goal: a strong, stable authoritarian
regime in Kabul to ensure the safety of Unocal's precious oil.

In 1998, after Taliban "guest" Osama bin Laden bombed two American embassies
in east Africa, Unocal shelved the plan. Chief consultant Khalilzad moved on
to the Rand Corporation think tank. Considering the Taliban irredeemably
unreliable, Clinton withdrew U.S. support. But as the newly-minted cliché
goes, everything changed after 9-11. Now the Taliban are gone, replaced with
a U.S.-installed interim government.

Rising energy prices helped push the economy into recession; perhaps 90-cent
gas will work where interest rate cuts failed. Once again, the pipeline plan
is hot.

Did Bush exploit the Sept. 11 attacks to justify a Central Asian oil grab?
The answer seems clear. On Dec. 31, Bush appointed his special envoy to
Afghanistan: Zalmay Khalilzad. "This is a moment of opportunity for
Afghanistan," the former Unocal employee commented upon arrival in Kabul
Jan. 5. You bet it is: Pakistan's Frontier Post reports that U.S. ambassador
Wendy Chamberlain met in October with Pakistan's oil minister to discuss
reviving the Unocal project.

And a front-page story in the Jan. 9 New York Times reveals that "the United
States is preparing a military presence in Central Asia that could last for
years," including a building permanent air base in the Kyrgyz Republic,
formerly part of the Soviet Union. (The Bushies say that they just want to
keep an eye on postwar Afghanistan, but few students of the region buy the
official story.)

Many industry experts consider Unocal's revived Afghan adventure fatally
flawed and expect the U.S. to ultimately wise up and pursue an Iran deal.
But thus far the Bushies have given the conspiracy theorists a lot to think
about.

Nello

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