25 January 2002 By Pepe Escobar - Asia Times Online
***************
Pipelineistan
Part 1 : The rules of the game
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 by the American industrial-military complex, especially by American
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 op****tunity in the form
of
US$5 trillion of oil and gas in the Caspian basin and the former Soviet
republics of Central Asia. In Wa****ngton's global petrostrategy, this is
supposed to be the end of America's oil dependence on the Organization of
Petroleum Ex****ting 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.
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 ex****t 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 im****ted 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 im****ts. 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 Ami****din 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 ex****ted 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 sup****ter. Four years ago, he wrote in the Wa****ngton 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
Wa****ngton 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 dias****a 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
re****ts 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 dictator****p, and
invested heavily in Nigeria.
Both Cheney and Bush II spent an im****tant part of their careers in
Arbusto,
a small company directed by Cheney. Arbusto never made money, but was
handsomely sup****ted 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 Wa****ngton's worldwide ..........
More :
Pipelineistan
Part 1 : The rules of the game
http://atimes.com/c-asia/DA25Ag01.html
Pipelineistan
Part 2 : The games nations play
http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DA26Ag01.html
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