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 Oct
31: Pipelineistan
is the golden future: a paradise of opportunity in the form of
US$5 trillion of oil and gas in the Caspian basin and the former
Soviet republics of Central Asia. In Washington's global
petrostrategy, this is supposed to be the end of America's oil
dependence on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC). This is of course the heart of the matter in the New
Great Game - compared to which the original 19th-century Great
Game between czarist Russia and the British Empire was- a
childish tin soldier's diversion.
Afghanistan itself has some natural gas in the north of the
country, near Turkmenistan. But above all it is ultra-strategic:
positioned between the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia,
between Turkmenistan on its northeast and the avid markets of the Indian
subcontinent, China and Japan on its east and southeast. Afghanistan is at the core of Pipelineistan.
The Caspian states hold at least 200 billion barrels of oil, and
Central Asia alone has 6.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas just
begging to be exploited. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are two
major producers: Turkmenistan is nothing less than a "gas
republic". Apart from oil and gas there's copper, coal,
tungsten, zinc, iron, uranium, gold.
In short, the
Caspian basin is thought to hold the world's third largest oil and
gas reserves - much of it still untapped.
The only export routes, for the moment, are through Russia. So
most of the game consists of building alternative pipelines to
Turkey and Western Europe, and to the east toward the Asian
markets. India, Iran, Russia and
Israel are all planning to supply oil and gas to South and
Southeast Asia through Afghanistan, Paksitan, India.
Construction begun on building a pipeline costing nearly £3bn with American help
through Georgia to Turkey in the West. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline starts a few kilometres south of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and will
run through the territory of neighbouring Georgia to the Turkish
Mediterranean coast.
The 1,750 kilometre (1,090 mile) pipeline to the Mediterranean was chosen
in preference to two other routes to the Gulf, or the Black Sea,
which would have taken the oil via Iran or Russia.
Both would have been shorter and cheaper, but were not
politically acceptable to Washington.
Iran urged Caspian oil producers to pipe their oil through Iran, despite US
sanctions.
"My message is - and I would like to emphasise - less
politics but more economics," said Mahmood Khagani, the Iranian
energy ministry's director for Caspian affairs.
"The 'golden gate' from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf
is now open," he said.
"Companies working
in the Caspian Sea can be sure their resources will be delivered
in the international markets," he promised.
Piping the oil south through Iran and out into gulf is the quickest and
simplest route. But US sanctions against Iran, together with Iran's own
internal politics and a dispute over borders of the Caspian sea,
are all deterrents.
Russia and Iran have already used a prolonged disagreement over the Caspian's legal status as
a means of preventing construction of American-backed pipelines
in the region.
Thus, on the eastern front, Afghanistan provides the most economical
transportation route for Central Asia's oil and gas resources to
the east, provided Pakistan and India fall in line by burying
their hatchets. Whether this happens or not is a subject of
intense international diplomatic posturing by the interested
quarters. Presently "Kashmir" is being "internationalized" in
order to make both India and Pakistan see the ground realities.
But it appears the rationale is based on more complex
undertakings than meets the eye.
 Oil transportation from the land-locked Caspian - which hold more reserves
than the North Sea - has been a major problem since western
firms started exploring there after the Soviet Union collapsed
in 1991.
Thus the more you think about the Caspian scenario, the more logical,
economical and politically viable appears the Afghan-Pakistan option.
It's enlightening to note that all countries or regions which
happen to be an impediment to Pipelineistan routes towards the
West have been subjected either to a direct interference or to
all-out war: Chechnya, Georgia, Kurdistan, Yugoslavia and
Macedonia. To the east, the key problems are the Uighurs of
China's far-western Xinjiang and, until recently, Afghanistan,
including Pakistan.
More, much more than Afghanistan is involved. What's at stake is
Eurasia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, stellar hawk and Jimmy Carter's
former national security adviser, used to wax lyrical on
Eurasia: "Seventy-five percent of the world population, most of
its material riches, 60 percent of the world's GNP, 75 percent
of sources of energy, and behind the US, the six most prosperous
economies and the six largest military budgets."
Brzezinski is
on record stressing that the US would have to make sure "no
other power would take possession of this geopolitical space".
Meaning the "Caspian oil and gas Basin".
The numbers are clear. According to the United States Energy
Information Administration, in 2001 America imported an average
of 9.1 million barrels per day - over 60 percent of its crude
oil needs. In 2020, the country is projected to require almost
26 million barrels per day in imports. So Pipelineistan, in the
Caucasus and in Central Asia - for the West and Japan but
especially for America itself - cannot but be the
strategic-military No 1 goal.
In this geostrategic grand design, the Taliban were the
proverbial fly in the ointment. The Afghan War was decided long
before September 11. September 11 merely precipitated events.
Plans to destroy the Taliban had been the subject of
international diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic discussions for
months before September 11. There was a crucial meeting in
Geneva in May 2001 between US State Department, Iranian, German, Italian
and Paksitani officials, where the main topic was a strategy to
topple the Taliban and replace the theocracy with a "broad-based
government". The topic was raised again in full force at the
Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001 when
India - an observer at the summit - also contributed its own
plans. There is also
a memo by al-Qaeda military chief Mohammed Atef which raises new
questions about whether failed U.S. efforts to reform
Afghanistan's radical regime -- and build the pipeline -- set
the stage for Sept. 11.
The e-mail memo was found in 1998 on a computer seized by the
FBI during its investigation into the 1998 African embassy
bombings, which were sponsored by al-Qaida. Atef's memo was
discovered by FBI counter-terrorism expert John O'Neill, who
left the bureau in 2001, complaining that U.S. oil interests
were hindering his investigation into al-Qaida. O'Neill, who
became security chief at the World Trade Center, died in the
Sept. 11 attack.
The seven-page memo was signed "Abu Hafs," which is the military
name of Atef, who was the military chief of al-Qaida and is
believed to have been killed in November 2001 during U.S.
operations in Afghanistan. It shows al-Qaida's keen interest in
the U.S.-Taliban negotiations and raises new questions as to
whether the U.S. military threat to the Taliban in July 2001
could have prompted al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attack.
Pakistani high officials, on condition of anonymity, have
extensively described a plan set up by the end of July 2001 by
American advisers, consisting of military strikes against the
Taliban from bases in Tajikistan, to be launched before
mid-October.
In 1997, UNOCAL led an international consortium - Centgas - that
reached a memorandum of understanding to build a $2 billion,
1,275-kilometer-long, 1.5-meter-wide natural-gas pipeline from
Dauletabad in southern Turkmenistan to Karachi in Pakistan, via
the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan
near Quetta. A $600 million extension to India was also being
considered. The dealings with the Taliban were facilitated by
the Clinton administration and the Pakistani Inter Services
Agency (ISI). But the civil war in Afghanistan would simply not
go away. UNOCAL had to pull out.
A secure and stable Afghanistan offers the US
a new opportunity to fulfill its expanding energy needs. Now
that the Taliban are no longer an obstacle and the interim
government is shaping Afghanistan's economic and political
future, the Bush administration plans to accelerate the project
referred to by some savvy Texas oil men as the new "Silk Road".
With almost $30 billion already invested by US oil companies in
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, the
suggested Afghan route would cost only one-half the amount of
the other alternative which would run through Georgia to
Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
There is ample evidence to support Washington's desire to fuel
its petro-politics agenda in Central Asia. Cemented with
diplomatic detente with Russia, and strongly reinforced with US
troops positioned in Georgia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and
Kyrgyzstan, the revisited Silk Road winding through Afghanistan
may yet prove to be an American-led commercial corridor. But as
author and journalist Ahmed Rashid writes purposely in his book
Taliban, "peace can bring a pipeline, but a pipeline
cannot bring peace".
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