- The world is watching anxiously as Afghan leaders begin
the difficult task of rebuilding Afghanistan after decades of war and famine.
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- The interim government in Afghanistan and interested
outside parties will need to grapple with issues that have confronted the
region since long before Sept. 11. Among these is the question of Central
Asia's considerable oil and gas reserves. According to the Institute for
Afghan Studies, these are worth an estimated US$3 trillion at last year's
prices.
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- Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, corporations-often
with government support-have competed for control of Central Asia's hydrocarbon
resources, in a battle that some analysts have called a new "Great
Game" for control over Eurasia.
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- The international press has turned to this topic with
new interest since the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan began on Oct. 7.
As the United States augmented its military presence around Afghanistan,
Ranjit Devraj, writing for Hong Kong's Asia Times, likened U.S. President
George W. Bush's aims in Afghanistan to his father's in Iraq. In both cases,
Devraj argues, the motive was oil. Devraj is not alone. George Monbiot-in
a column written for London's Guardian but syndicated in Lahore's centrist,
mass-circulation Dawn-called the U.S.-led campaign a "colonial adventure."
"American imperialism has begun its unilateral war against Afghanistan,"
echoed Sitaram Yechury for Chennai's mass-circulation The Hindu (Oct. 13).
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- Comparisons between this war and the Gulf War are tempting:
The Bush family is steeped in oil, as are U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney
and a host of other notables from the Bush administration. The United States
was slow to condemn the Taliban in the mid-1990s because the Taliban seemed
to favor U.S. oil company Unocal to build two pipelines across Afghanistan.
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- But to term the war in Afghanistan "a colonial adventure"
is to ignore the thousands of civilians who died in terrorist attacks on
Sept. 11 and to ignore an unprecedented attack on the nerve center of the
U.S. military. It would be surprising if strikes of such magnitude did
not draw a military response.
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- And while US$3 trillion is a considerable sum by anyone's
yardstick, U.S. government energy experts estimate that the region has
200 billion barrels of oil-less than what's already known to exist in Saudi
Arabia alone.
-
- Perhaps U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
had this in mind when, in an Oct. 15 interview with the liberal Moscow
newspaper lzvestia, she went to great lengths to reassure Russian readers
that the United States has no designs on Russia's traditional hegemony
over Central Asian oil reserves.
-
- Rice may not have had a choice. On Dec. 11, Moscow's
government-owned Prime Tass news agency reported that Russia had signed
a long-term cooperation accord with Turkmenistan covering natural gas exploration,
production, processing, transport, and marketing. The deal was announced
just 10 days after Gazprom announced that it had reached a similar agreement
with Kazakhstan over that country's oil resources.
-
- The deals did not come as a surprise to the national
security adviser, who is an authority on Central Asian oil. It was during
her tenure on U.S. oil company ChevronTexaco's board of directors that
the company partnered with a consortium including Russia, Kazakhstan, Oman,
and U.S. oil company ExxonMobil to complete most of the work on a pipeline
carrying oil from the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan to the Russian port
of Novorossiisk. ChevronTexaco was so grateful for Rice's service that
it named a tanker after her. On Oct. 15, the first tanker full of oil from
the pipeline set sail from Novorossiisk. On Nov. 28, U.S. President George
W. Bush extended his congratulations to the consortium.
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- Central Asian oil is important. It is potentially important
to the United States, which consumes more energy than any other country
in the world and must import roughly half its oil. But it is surely more
important to Central Asia. It is in this context that we consider the issue
of oil and gas in Central Asia.
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- The History:
-
- Oil seepages were first discovered on the Aspheron Peninsula,
a dry, rocky extension of the Caucasus mountains projecting into the landlocked
Caspian Sea, centuries ago. In the 13th century, Marco Polo recorded rumors
of a spring that produced oil, which, though not edible, was "good
to burn," and useful for cleaning the mange of camels. Baku was the
home of the "eternal pillars of fire" worshipped by the Zoroastrians.
Phrased more prosaically, these pillars were the result of flammable gas
escaping from cracks in limestone.
-
- By the early 19th century, there was a primitive oil
industry in Baku. Local residents extracted oil from hand-dug pits. Robert
Nobel, the son of a Swedish weapons engineer who had immigrated to Russia
in 1837, arrived in Baku in 1873. In a few short years, he and his brother
Ludwig modernized drilling procedures, revolutionized methods for transporting
oil "downstream" to markets, and supplied the world with half
its oil. Soon after, the Parisian branch of the Rothschild family, already
famous throughout Europe, began competing with the Nobels for control of
the region's oil wealth. Meanwhile, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil
company fought to maintain its competitive edge in supplying Europe and
Russia with oil. Over the following decades, some of the world's most powerful
families, backed by their home governments, vied for control of Central
Asia's oil.
-
- Central Asia has always played an important role in the
geopolitical balance of Eurasia. In World War II, during his campaign against
Russia, Adolf Hitler sought to capture Baku and the Caucasian oil fields
in a desperate bid to replenish his depleted fuel supplies before attacking
the Middle East simultaneously from the west in North Africa and from the
east in Central Asia. After the war, the Soviets retained Central Asian
oil and gas fields as reserves, exploiting oil and gas deposits in Tatarstan
and Siberia instead.
-
- Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ex-Soviet
republics of Central Asia, believing oil to be the fastest way for them
to secure their economic and political independence, have sought to exploit
their oil wealth. According to the estimates of geologists, the oil deposits
of the Caspian Sea may not be quantitatively comparable to the deposits
of the Persian Gulf, but they are still considered of excellent quality
and many look to them as a significant source of untapped energy for the
21st century. Some have estimated that the entire Caspian Sea is a basin
full of oil and natural gas, starting from Azerbaijan and continuing to
the opposite shore in the territory of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
-
- Modern Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan share
the majority of the region's hydrocarbon wealth. That these countries are
all landlocked means that they all depend on their neighbors for access
to Western markets, via pipelines. This adds another dimension to the struggle
for political and economic hegemony in the region: Players must vie for
control of oil and gas production and for the pipelines that deliver the
resources to markets.
-
- Although the stakes involved remain the same today-power,
influence, security, wealth-the playing field has changed over the past
century. Tribal warlords now contend with global powers and multinational
conglomerates. Afghanistan's career as an incubator and exporter of terrorists,
rebels, and opium has spread instability throughout the region, and, indeed,
the world. If anything, today's battle lines are more merciless and tangled
than those drawn a century ago.
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- http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/front.htm
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