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The New Great Game: Oil Politics in Central Asia
Ted Rall,  <http://www.alternet.org/> AlterNet
October 11, 2001

Nursultan Nazarbayev has a terrible problem. He's the president and
former Communist Party boss of Kazakhstan, the second-largest republic
of the former Soviet Union. A few years ago, the giant country struck
oil in the eastern portion of the Caspian Sea. Geologists estimate that
sitting beneath the wind-blown steppes of Kazakhstan are 50 billion
barrels of oil -- by far the biggest untapped reserves in the world.
(Saudi Arabia, currently the world's largest oil producer, is believed
to have about 30 billion barrels remaining.)



Kazakhstan's Soviet-subsidized economy collapsed immediately after
independence in 1991. When I visited the then-capital, Almaty, in 1997,
I was struck by the utter absence of elderly people. One after another,
people confided that their parents had died of malnutrition during the
brutal winters of 1993 and 1994. Middle-class residents of a superpower
had been reduced to abject poverty virtually overnight; thirtysomething
women who appeared sixtysomething hocked their wedding silver in
underpasses next to reps for the Kazakh state art museum trying to move
enough socialist realist paintings for a dollar each to keep the lights
on. The average Kazakh earned $20 a month; those unwilling or unable to
steal died of gangrene adjacent to long-winded tales of woe written on
cardboard. 



Autocrats tend to die badly during periods of downward mobility.
Nazarbayev, therefore, has spent most of the last decade trying to get
his land-locked oil out to sea. Once the oil starts flowing, it won't
take long before Kazakhstan replaces Kuwait as the land of Benzes and
ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the more expensive and
vulnerable to sabotage it is. The shortest route runs through Iran, but
Kazakhstan is too closely aligned with the U.S. to offend it by cutting
a deal with Teheran. Russia has helpfully offered to build a line
connecting Kazakh oil rigs to the Black Sea, but neighboring
Turkmenistan has experienced trouble with the Russians: they tend to
divert the oil for their own uses without paying for it. There's even a
plan to run crude out through China, but the proposed 5,300-mile line
would be far too long to prove profitable.



The logical alternative, then, is Unocal's plan, which is to extend
Turkmenistan's existing system west to the Kazakh field on the Caspian
and southeast to the Pakistani port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. That
project runs through Afghanistan.



As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his 2000 book
"Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," the
U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in Afghanistan
around 1994 -- a regime that would end the country's civil war and thus
ensure the safety of the Unocal pipeline project. Impressed by the
ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a
pipeline deal, the U.S. State Department and Pakistan's ISI intelligence
service agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war
against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. It has been reported
that as recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary
of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of
returning to the days of dollar-a-gallon gas. Pakistan, naturally, would
pick up revenues from a Karachi oil port facility. Harkening to 19th
century power politics between Russia and British India, Rashid dubbed
the struggle for control of post-Soviet Central Asia "the new Great
Game." 



Predictably, the Taliban Frankenstein got out of control. The regime's
unholy alliance with Osama bin Laden's terror network, their penchant
for invading their neighbors and their production of 50 percent of the
world's opium made them unlikely partners for the desired oil deal.
Then-President Bill Clinton's 1998 cruise missile attack on Afghanistan
briefly brought the Taliban back into line; they even eradicated opium
poppy cultivation in less than a year, but they nonetheless continued
supporting countless militant Islamic groups. When an Egyptian group
whose members had trained in Afghanistan hijacked four airplanes and
used them to kill more than 6,000 Americans on September 11,
Washington's patience with its former client finally expired.



Finally the Bushies had the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had
wanted all along: invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in
Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 dead than it concerns
itself with oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony
president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without
interference from annoying local middlemen.



Central Asian politics, however, is a house of cards: every time you
remove one element, the whole thing comes crashing down. Muslim
extremists in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance, will support
additional terror attacks on the U.S. to avenge the elimination of the
Taliban. A U.S.-installed Northern Alliance can't hold Kabul without an
army of occupation because Afghan legitimacy hinges on capturing the
capital on your own. And even if we do this the right way by funding and
training the Northern Alliance so that they can seize power themselves,
Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun government will never tolerate the replacement
of their Pashtun brothers in the Taliban by Northern Alliance Tajiks.
Without Pakistani cooperation, there's no getting the oil out and
there's no chance for stability in Afghanistan.



As Bush would say, make no mistake: this is about oil. It's always about
oil. And to twist a late '90s cliché, it's only boring because it's
true. 



Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, has
traveled extensively throughout Central Asia. Most recently, in 2000, he
went to Turkmenistan as a guest of the U.S. State Department.  AlterNet
<http://www.alternet.org/images/a_tiny.gif>


 <http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=11692>

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