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Soviet Remnants Remain in Kandahar January 27, 2002 THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: One American serviceman at - in Kandahar, Afghanistan is actually from Ukraine. His father was a veteran of the old Soviet army and now, he wears an American flag patch on one soldier. From Kandahar, CNN's Martin Savidge tells us about old wars and new soldiers. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There are ghosts at the Kandahar Airport. They dwell in the outer buildings and linger in the shadow of a still-growing U.S. military presence. At this former hub of another army, of another time, the shadowed remnants of the failed Soviet occupation bleach beneath the Afghan sun. Russian planes that once roared for the runway now rest beside it in a mass grave. Not far away, there's spare engines still stacked in the crates they came in. A former barracks reeks of dust, decay and defeat. The Soviets do not appear so much to have left but fled. (on camera): Signs of a hasty Russian departure can be found everywhere. In this room, it is piled two, three feet deep with old uniforms, a Russian gray coat, an old suitcase here, part of a harness for a uniform, bandages, lots of bandages, even an old boot. (voice-over): Next to where the American forces now burn their garbage lies a junk yard, stacked 50 feet high with Soviet vehicles as abandoned as the empire that built them. For the modern day occupiers, the past is just an oddity -- except for one. Meet Andriy Kononenko. As a boy growing up in Soviet Ukraine, he dreamed of joining the Army, but never in his wildest imagination did he envision it would be the U.S. Army. KONONENKO: Here we go. I'm ready to strike. SAVIDGE: Six years ago, he moved to New York. Three years later, he was wearing the uniform of the Army's 101st Airborne. Now he stands on the parameter of America's war on terrorism. Recalling a recent conversation he had with his father, a Soviet Army veteran, when Andriy said he was heading for Afghanistan. KONONENKO: He actually got -- I can't say scared, but he got very nervous about it. SAVIDGE: History is not lost on the 26-year old. From his post, Andriy can see the demise of Russian domination. He can also see the irony. KONONENKO: Who would think that in all the countries that I've ever been and will ever be would be Afghanistan. It's amazing. SAVIDGE: Andriy is prepared to lay down his life for America, saying he chose to be here. That freedom to choose, he says, makes all the difference between the soldiers here today and the ghosts of the past. Martin Savidge, CNN, Kandahar. #12 Forbes Global February 4, 2002 Kabuled together Oil companies have dreamed of a trans-Afghan pipeline. Are they crazy enough to pull it off now? By Daniel Fisher It has been called the pipeline from hell, to hell, through hell. It's a 1,270-kilometer conduit, 1.2 meters in diameter, that would snake across Afghanistan to carry natural gas from eastern Turkmenistan--with 700 billion cubic meters of proven reserves--to energy-hungry Pakistan and beyond. Unocal of the U.S. and Bridas Petroleum of Argentina vied for the $1.9 billion project in the 1990s. Now, with the collapse of the Taliban, oil executives are suddenly talking again about building it. "It is absolutely essential that the U.S. make the pipeline the centerpiece of rebuilding Afghanistan," says S. Rob Sobhani, a professor of foreign relations at Georgetown University and the head of Caspian Energy Consulting. The State Department thinks it's a great idea, too. Routing the gas through Iran would be avoided, and Central Asian republics wouldn't have to ship through Russian pipelines. But like everything else in Afghanistan, the unbuilt pipeline is already scorched by history. Bridas made a stab at construction in the 1990s, says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani financial journalist who recalls bumping into Carlos Bulgheroni, Bridas' chairman, leaving a meeting with Taliban leaders in Kandahar in early 1997. Later that year Unocal formed a consortium to build the pipeline. (Bridas sued the California oil giant for stealing its idea but lost.) Unocal mixed it up with tyrants, too, flying a delegation of Taliban officials to its engineering headquarters in Houston, Texas, and taking them on a side trip to the NASA Space Center. It gets uglier. The Taliban lusted after the $25 million a year in would-be pipeline royalties. Such a prize leads William O. Beeman, a professor at Brown University who's an authority on Central Asia, to conclude that Osama bin Laden's bombings in 1998 of U.S. embassies in Africa were designed to nip the budding relationship between the Taliban and Western interests. "Bin Laden didn't want the Taliban to be in bed with the U.S.," he says. "It would have made his position untenable." A spokeswoman for Unocal insists that the company never considered building the pipeline under an illegitimate regime and is no longer interested in the region. Still, the potential bounty of delivering $700 million or so of gas each year is bound to tempt someone, even if Afghanistan's new interim government and old warlords don't bury the scimitar. At least whoever picks up the challenge needn't worry about the Afghans' blowing the thing up. Unocal studied the problem extensively and concluded that, with the exception of Colombia, rebels in war-torn countries don't destroy key elements of the economic infrastructure. That's true even in Afghanistan, where a series of dams and hydroelectric plants built with American support in the 1950s and 1960s have survived two decades of almost constant warfare. Demolishing giant sculptures of the Buddha is one thing, sabotaging royalties quite another. --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ |
