Posted on 10/23/2001 7:54:47 AM PDT by jern
Monday October 22 05:18 PM EDT THE NEW GREAT GAME:
Oil Politics in Central Asia
NEW YORK
Nursultan Nazarbayev has a terrible problem. He's the president and former Communist Party boss of Kazakhstan, 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 Kazakhstan 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.) Kazakhstan'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. 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 Kazakh state art museum trying to move enough socialist realist paintings for a dollar each to keep the lights on. The average Kazakh 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.
Autocrats tend to die badly during periods of downward mobility. Nazarbayev, therefore, has spent most of the last decade trying to get his land-locked oil out to sea. Once the oil starts flowing, it won't take long before Kazakhstan replaces Kuwait as the land of Benzes and ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the more expensive and vulnerable to sabotage it is. The shortest route runs through Iran but Kazakhstan is too closely aligned with the U.S. to offend it by cutting a deal with Teheran. Russia has helpfully offered to build a line connecting Kazakh oil rigs to the Black Sea, but neighboring Turkmenistan has experienced trouble with the Russians-they tend to divert the oil for their own uses without paying for it. There's even a plan to run crude out through China, but the proposed 5,300-mile line would be far too long to prove profitable.
The logical alternative, then, is Unocal's plan, which is to extend Turkmenistan's existing system west to the Kazakh field on the Caspian and southeast to the Pakistani port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. That project runs through Afghanistan (news - web sites).
As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his book Taliban, published last year, the U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime into 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 U.S. State Department and Pakistan's ISI intelligence service 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."
Predictably, the Taliban Frankenstein got out of control. The regime's unholy alliance with Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s terror 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 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 more than 6,000 Americans on September 11th, Washington's patience with its former client finally expired.
Finally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. has wanted all along-invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 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 terror attacks on the U.S. 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. And 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 cliché, it's only boring because it's true.
Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, has traveled extensively throughout Central Asia. Most recently, in 2000, he went to Turkmenistan as a guest of the U.S. State Department.
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They just need a group with the capital and experience to start a new oil company.
Let it be an international joint venture with a Russian company.
Put up the pipeline to the Black Sea.
This will create lots of jobs.
Hire lots of people to guard the pipeline -
useful employment for the locals and for the Russians.
Shoot oil thieves dead. (Anyone got a problem with that?)
Put up refineries near the Black Sea.
Call it "New Houston City."
Like what's the problem here? Just do it.
It has been said numerous times on FreeRepublic, but I'll say it again: The military campaign in Afghanistan has nothing to do with 9-11; it was in the works as early as March of this year. The U.S. press ain't reporting it, but the U.S. and the Russians had already come to an arrangement in June as to how the military effort in Afghanistan would be coordinated.
This is a police action to lay pipe.
Osama is a convenient PR tool to get folks to rally behind the invasion and occupation of a soverign nation.
(Indeed, Osama is probably the safest person in Afghanistan right now -- sort of like Saddam Hussein. Neither will ever be killed or captured by the US because the US needs them to justify the deployment of troops to the American sheeple.)
This is a police action to lay pipe.
That might have been true in Kosovo. But there are three key differences now. First, the atrocity that started this conflict is not bogus like Racak was - the 5,000 dead in the rubble of the WTC are quite real. Second, the need for crazy pipeline plans to get to Caspian oil were a function of distrust of Russia and the desire to cut them out of the delivery formula. But Russia instead has been quite cooperative in oil matters, even recently saying that they would make good to Europe any shortfalls if the Persian Gulf crude is cut off - so that factor is fading away. And third, quite frankly, the Caspian hasn't been the huge pool of oil folks had hoped it would be - and there isn't enough oil to fill pipelines already under construction, let alone ones on the drawing board.
So this theory, like so many others like it, falls apart upon exposure to the facts.
Leftist agit-prop types usually screw up somewhere in revealig their true issues.
I would love to see Rall provide a source for this. And not just some whackjob conspiracy tripe from The Consortium.
To find all articles tagged or indexed using
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Go here:
and then click the Taliban_List topic to initiate the search! !
THIS year, the US gave (prior to 9-11) about $210 million to the Taliban. (Note: this was cold hard cash -- not foods and huminatarian stuff.)
I assume the "annual salary" of a Taliban official isn't more than $5,000 in that part of the world.
Are there 42,000 Taliban officials?
I doubt it.
THIS year, the US gave (prior to 9-11) about $210 million to the Taliban
That doesn't have anything to do with Rall's claim:
As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official
The author of the article mentioned oil.
I, on the other hand, mentioned CENTGAS.
CENTGAS is a consortium planning on building a natural gas pipeline from the region north of Afghanistan, through Pakistan, to India. The gas won't be for US markets -- instead, it is for the Paki/India market; the largest natural gas marekt on the planet.
The deal is worth hundreds of billions.
An integral part of the plan was:
(a) having the world recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government in order to calm the fears of investors; or
(b) if that didn't work [and it didn't] then to have the US take over the country.
Look it up on Google. "CENTGAS"
(Or better yet, subscribe to a paper published outside of America where such facts are common-knowledge...)
We gave roughly the same amount in 1999.
I believe the amounts of our foreign aid to various countries can be found on the State Departments' website.
This isn't a big secret or anything.
Indeed, in May 2001 Colin Powell announced the U.S. was going to kick in an extra $45million this year to the Taliban.
Ostensibly, we were paying them for their opium eradication efforts.
I am well aware of the facts of this, and have studied pipeline politics for some time - I was the first person to break the connection of the Kosovo campaign to the AMBO pipeline in a major U.S. newspaper, thanks in large part to the efforts of other freepers who helped put the story together. However, I still contend there are key differences between that action and the current one, which I detailed, and I will stand by my assertion that the action in Afghanistan is not based on the desire to build the pipeline. Instead, my concern is that the actions to destroy bin Laden's organization will be corrupted by other interests who want to build their pipeline, and therefore the anti-terrorist action will not be fully effective - a subtle but very important difference.
I'd have to see how the foreign aid was delivered and allocated - the way Rall phrases it, the computers in Foggy Bottom were cutting paycheques every month to the Taliban leadership, with FICA withheld.
What is the basis for your connection between WTC and bombing the cities in Afghanistan?
The linkage is totally bogus.
None of the hijackers were Afghans. None of the suspects are afghans. None of the big-wigs in Binladin's outfit are Afghans. (In fact, nearly all the players are Saudis). And, certainly none of the funding for terrorism is coming from Afghan sources; the Taliban has no money save what the US gives them in aid; it doesn't even have an opium crop any more!
So why are we bombing Afghanistan?!
Is it because Osama is hiding out in a cave in Northern Afghanistan? Well, then, why not bomb his base and kill him? Or send in troops and get him?
Why are we bombing the entire country?
The military actions to date are in preparation for an occupation for the entire region. Osama is a red-herring. Indeed, the US hasn't even bothered explaining why it thinks he is connected with 9-11.
The final punchline is that given the political instability of the region only an idiot would try to run oil through central Asia any way. You've got no garauntees the oil line would last out the month. One guy with a mortar borrowed from the Palestinian Authority could screw everything up. Run the oil north and east through Russia, much more stable. And if we REALLY want to get a big oil deposit why screw around on the other side of the planet. Let's take over Mexico and get to the deposits they can't afford to tap in their Gulf.
My big sniff test on any potential conspiracy is one I call: "the idiot-savant rule". Basically I ask two questions: 1 - would you have to be amazingly brilliant to pull this off? 2 - would you have to be an idiot to think it was a good idea? If the answer to both those questions is Yes I don't believe the conspiracy. Given the death toll of 9-11 and all the other stuff needed to set the ground work for this "conspiracy" the answer to question one is Yes. 2 minutes looking at a map of the region with another 5 checking out other untapped oil deposits and the history of the various regions shows the answer to question two is also Yes. Therefore, this "conspiracy" is false.
Only because you wish it to be. First of all, this conflict is about far more than the WTC. We have absorbed several terrorist attacks over the last few years, and our lack of hard response only emboldened the other side. Bin laden is part of the terrorist web. He is deeply integrated into the Taliban power structure, and was even named as its commander-in-chief.
Terrorism at the level practiced by bin Laden is impossible without state sponsorship and protection. The Taliban refused to give bin Laden up. Therefore, we are taking them out.
None of the hijackers were Afghans. None of the suspects are afghans. None of the big-wigs in Binladin's outfit are Afghans. (In fact, nearly all the players are Saudis). And, certainly none of the funding for terrorism is coming from Afghan sources; the Taliban has no money save what the US gives them in aid; it doesn't even have an opium crop any more!
The Taliban offers a safe haven to Al Queda. Money is not needed, bin Laden has plenty of that. There isn't much money in the Bekaa Valley also, but it is a terrorist haven because the Syrians wink at its existence.
Is it because Osama is hiding out in a cave in Northern Afghanistan? Well, then, why not bomb his base and kill him? Or send in troops and get him?
ARE YOU THIS STUPID ON PURPOSE? We don't know where he is. The best way to get at him is to weaken his sponsors and create a very strong incentive for another Afghani faction to find out where he is.
Why are we bombing the entire country?
Because it weakens the Taliban.
The military actions to date are in preparation for an occupation for the entire region. Osama is a red-herring. Indeed, the US hasn't even bothered explaining why it thinks he is connected with 9-11.
Once again, this is about far more than the WTC. Try the previous bombing. The embassy bombings. The Cole. The bombings in Saudi Arabia. We let bin Laden off the hook for those. He just came back bigger and badder. Time to take him out, and those who make him possible.
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