Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 in the Guardian of London
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/>
America's Pipe Dream
A Pro-Western Regime in Kabul Should Give the US an Afghan Route for
Caspian Oil
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 the regional
control and 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 neighbors, 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 10 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, in 1995 the US oil company
Unocal started negotiating 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 [the former US oil consortium 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 recognized by
foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-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 such plans no longer figure 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.
American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum
dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic
and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to
expand its interests in central Asia. The defense 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 cooperation organization". Its purpose, according to Jiang
Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarization", by which he means
contesting US full-spectrum dominance.
If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a
stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US 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
paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I
believe that the US 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.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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