- New York - Nursultan
Nazarbayev
has a terrible problem. He's the president and former Communist Party boss
of Kazakstan, 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 Kazakstan 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.)
Kazakstan'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.
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- 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 Kazak state art museum trying to move enough socialist-realist
paintings for a dollar each to keep the lights on. The average Kazak earned
$20 a month; those unwilling or unable to steal died of gangrene while
sitting on the sidewalk next to long- winded tales of woe written on
cardboard.
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- Autocrats tend to die badly during periods of downward
mobility. Nazarbayev, therefore, has spent most of the past decade trying
to get his landlocked oil out to sea. Once the oil starts flowing, it won't
take long before Kazakstan replaces Kuwait as the land of Mercedes-Benzs
and ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the more expensive
and vulnerable it is to sabotage. The shortest route runs through Iran,
but Kazakstan is too closely aligned with the United States to offend it
by cutting a deal with Tehran. Russia has helpfully offered to build a
line connecting Kazak oil rigs with the Black Sea, but neighboring
Turkmenistan
has experienced trouble with the Russians -- they tend to divert the oil
for their own use without paying for it. There's even a plan to run crude
through China, but the proposed 5,300-mile-long pipeline would be far too
long to prove profitable.
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- The logical alternative, then, is Unocal's plan, which
is to extend Turkmenistan's existing system west to the Kazak field on
the Caspian Sea and southeast to the Pakistani port of Karachi on the
Arabian
Sea. That project runs through Afghanistan.
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- As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his
book "Taliban," published last year, the United States and
Pakistan
decided to install a stable regime in place 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 State
Department and Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence agency agreed to
funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically
Tajik Northern Alliance. 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 back
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."
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- Predictably, the Taliban Frankenstein got out of control.
The regime's unholy alliance with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist
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 August 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 thousands of Americans on September 11,
Washington's patience with its former client finally expired.
-
- Finally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what
the United States has wanted to do all along -- invade and/or install an
old-school puppet regime in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the
thousands of 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 terrorist attacks on the United States 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. 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 stand 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 cliche, it's
only boring because it's true.
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- ___
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- Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist, has
traveled extensively throughout Central Asia. In 2000, he went to
Turkmenistan
as a guest of the State Department. His latest book is "2024: A
Graphic
Novel" (NBM Books, May 2001).
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