- War against terrorism? Not really. Reminder: it's all
about oil.
-
- A quick look at the map is all it takes. It's no
coincidence
that the map of terror in the Middle East and Central Asia is practically
interchangeable with the map of oil. There's Infinite Justice, Enduring
Freedom - and Everlasting Profits to be made: not only by the American
industrial-military complex, but especially by American and European oil
giants.
-
- Where is the realm these days of former US secretary
of state James Baker, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft,
former White House chief of staff John Sununu and former defense secretary
and current Invisible Man Dick Cheney? They are all happily dreaming of,
and working for, the establishment of Pipelineistan.
-
- 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 and the avid markets of the Indian subcontinent, China and
Japan. Afghanistan is at the core of Pipelineistan.
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- The Caspian states hold at least 200 billion barrels
of oil, and Central Asia 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.
-
- 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 will
be a key player. India, Iran, Russia and Israel are all planning to supply
oil and gas to South and Southeast Asia through India.
-
- 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.
-
- 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".
-
- 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 and
Italian 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.
-
- Nor concidentally, Pipelineistan was the central topic
in secret negotiations in a Berlin hotel a few days after the G-8 summit,
between American, Russian, German and Pakistani officials. And 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.
-
- More recently, while most of the planet that has access
to news was distracted by New Year's Eve celebrations, and only nine days
after Hamid Karzai's interim government took power in Kabul, Bush II
appointed
his special envoy to Afghanistan. It comes as no surprise he is
Afghan-American
Zalmay Khalilzad - a former aide to the Californian energy giant UNOCAL.
Khalilzad wasted no time in boarding the first flight to Central Asia.
The Bush II team now does not even try to disguise that the whole game
is about oil. The so-called brand-new American "Afghan policy"
is being conducted by people intimately connected to oil industry interests
in Central Asia.
-
- 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.
-
- American energy conglomerates, through the American
Overseas
Private Investment Corp (OPIC), are now resuscitating this and other
projects.
Already last October, the UNOCAL-led project was discussed in Islamabad
between Pakistani Petroleum Minister Usman Aminuddin and American
Ambassador
Wendy Chamberlain. The exuberant official statement reads: "The
pipeline
opens up new avenues of multi-dimensional regional cooperation,
particularly
in view of the recent geopolitical developments in the region."
-
- But there are practical problems with these "new
avenues". Specialists at the James Baker (who else?) Institute in
Texas stress that the main beneficiaries would be Turkmenistan and
Afghanistan
- which in itself is not a bad idea: Afghanistan would make a little money
and perhaps be a little more stable. As far as the gas is concerned -
liquefied
and exported from Karachi - it would be too expensive compared with gas
from the Middle East.
-
- UNOCAL also has a project to build the so-called Central
Asian Oil Pipeline, almost 1,700km long, linking Chardzhou in Turkmenistan
to Russian's existing Siberian oil pipelines and also to the Pakistani
Arabian Sea coast. This pipeline will carry 1 million barrels of oil a
day from different areas of former Soviet republics, and it will run
parallel
to the gas pipeline route through Afghanistan.
-
- Khalilzad is a very interesting character indeed. He
was always a huge Taliban supporter. Four years ago, he wrote in the
Washington
Post that "the Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of
fundamentalism
practiced by Iran". Khalilzad only abandoned the Taliban after Bill
Clinton fired 58 cruise missiles into Afghanistan in August 1998, in
retaliation
for the alleged involvement of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the bombing
of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Only one day after the attack,
UNOCAL put Centgas on hold - and two months later abandoned plans for the
trans-Afghan pipeline.
-
- A little more than a year ago, Khalilzad was reincarnated
in print in The Washington Quarterly, now stressing his four mains reason
to ged rid of the Taliban regime as soon as possible: Osama bin Laden,
opium trafficking, oppression of the Afghan people and, last but not least,
oil.
-
- Afghan diaspora sources in Paris acidly comment that
Khalilzad will be regarded as nothing less than a traitor by fiercely proud
and independent Afghans. Born in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1951, he is part of
the Afghan ruling elite. His father was an aide to King Zahir Shah.
Khalilzad
was studying at the notoriously conservative University of Chicago when
Afghanistan was invaded by the Red Army in December 1979.
-
- Later he became an American citizen and a special adviser
to the State Department during the Reagan years. He was a strident lobbyist
for more US military aid to the mujahedeen during the anti-USSR jihad -
campaigning for widespread distribution of Stinger missiles.
-
- Khalilzad was undersecretary of defense for Bush I,
during
the war against Iraq. After a stint at the Rand Corp think tank, he headed
the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department and advised
Donald Rumsfeld. But he was not rewarded with any promotions. The required
Senate confirmation would raise extremely uncomfortable questions about
his role as UNOCAL adviser and staunch Taliban defender. He was assigned
instead to the National Security Council - no Senate confirmation required
- where he reports to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
-
- Rice herself is a former oil-company consultant. During
Bush I, from 1989-92, she was on the board of directors of Chevron, and
was its main expert on Kazakhstan. Chevron has invested more than $20
billion
in Kazakhstan alone. As for The Invisible Man, Vice President Dick Cheney,
he was for five years a director of Halliburton, one of the top companies
rendering service to the oil industry: present in 130 countries, 100,000
employees, turnover of almost $20 billion, a member of the Fortune 400.
Cheney did a lot of business with the murderous Myanmar dictatorship, and
invested heavily in Nigeria.
-
- Both Cheney and Bush II spent an important part of their
careers in Arbusto, a small company directed by Cheney. Arbusto never made
money, but was handsomely supported by very wealthy Saudis. Among the
shareholders
there was one James Bath, very cozy with Bush I and chief money launderer
for shady Gulf superstars, including one Salem bin Laden, one of the 17
brothers of Osama bin Laden.
-
- All American secretaries of state since World War II
have been connected with the oil industry - except two: one of them is
Colin Powell, but in his case the president, vice president and national
security adviser are all part of the oil industry anyway.
-
- So everybody in the ruling plutocracy knows the rules
of the ruthless game: Central Asia is crucial to Washington's worldwide
petro-strategy. So is a "friendly" government in Afghanistan
- now led by the always impeccably dressed and fluent English speaker Hamid
Karzai. It does not matter that independent minds from Central Asia in
exile in Europe unanimously ridicule Karzai as nothing else than a Taliban
himself, and his Northern Alliance ministers as a bunch of crooks.
-
- As for US corporate-controlled media - from TV networks
to daily newspapers - they just exercise self-censorship and remain mute
about all of these connections.
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- http://www.atimes.com
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