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RALL 1/6/04
An Update on the Real Reason We Invaded Afghanistan
NEW YORK--So where's the pipeline?
In 2001 common sense, expert opinion and extensive research convinced me and other Central Asia watchers that the United States didn't have much interest in saving Buddha statues or Afghan women when it went to war against the Taliban. After we turned down their offer to extradite Osama, it became obvious that we weren't interested in capturing the alleged mastermind of 9/11 either. Logic and evidence indicated that the Bush Administration's focused on Afghanistan to make it secure for a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas from the landlocked Caspian Sea.
Here's the story in a nutshell. The former Soviet republics surrounding the Caspian Sea--particularly Kazakhstan--have the potential to become the biggest oil-producing nations on earth. "By 2050," reports the Asia Times, "the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea will account for more than 80 percent of world oil and natural gas production. Together, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian may have something like 800 billion barrels of oil and an energy equivalent amount in natural gas. Compare this figure with oil reserves in the Americas and in Europe: less than 160 billion barrels. And they will be exhausted before 2030." Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan want to build a pipeline to carry their oil and gas out to deep-sea ports. The shortest possible route would go through Iran, which the U.S. has declared part of an Axis of Evil. Second shortest is via Afghanistan, a dangerous proposition that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have nonetheless encouraged during and after Taliban rule. Top Bushies last met with Taliban officials in July 2001, two months before 9/11. Negotiations broke down over transit fees, but top-level discussions between the U.S., Turkmenistan and Pakistan resumed in October, while American bombs were still raining on Kabul. That led people like me to speculate that the invasion--which made little effort to catch Osama--was a transparent excuse to gain control over newly emerging energy resources.
Yet here we are two years later, some war supporters point out, and still no pipeline.
Well, not exactly.
It's not the sort of thing the U.S. media cares to report, but there has in fact been movement on the proposed Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP). The Asian Development Bank, which hopes to finance a consortium of oil companies to finance the $3.5 billion (originally $2 billion) project, has already spent millions of dollars on feasibility studies and surveys along the proposed route from Herat, a city near Afghanistan's northwest border with Turkmenistan, to Kandahar, the former Taliban spiritual capital close to the southeastern frontier with Pakistan. The U.S.-led occupation coalition has promised to make paving the future TAP service highway the nation's top rebuilding priority. The ADB has hosted meetings between officials of Afghanistan and the two nations on each end of the thousand-mile-long conduit: Turkmenistan, which would ship Kazakh crude oil and its own natural gas from its Daultebad refineries, and Pakistan, which hopes to export the energy resources to deep-sea tankers via its Multan port on the Arabian Sea.
Turkmen prime minister Yolly Gurganmuradov, Afghan minister of mines and industry Mehfooz Nedai and Pakistani petroleum minister Nouraiz Shakoor held their seventh TAP meeting in Islamabad on December 10, 2003, where they decided on a 2010 target date for completion. Official groundbreaking for TAP, predicted to occur last year during a rash of post-Mullah Omar optimism, now awaits ADB verification that Pakistan can handle the anticipated volume of Turkmen gas. That study won't be completed until at least September 2004.
Far more worrisome is the Afghan government's dubious assurance that it "will provide complete security to the project," according to Pakistan's official news agency. The TAP route cuts through territory controlled by Herati warlord Ishmael Khan and several ex-Taliban commanders who would almost certainly threaten to blow it up unless they receive ad hoc "transit fees." The Karzai government in Kabul--headed by a former consultant to Unocal, the oil company that originally pitched TAP to the Taliban in 1995--can't possibly make good on its assurance.
The challenges are virtually insurmountable, yet the three nations see reasons to justify working to meet a March 2004 financing deadline. A recent diplomatic thaw with India has opened up the possibility of extending the pipeline across Pakistan. "If Pakistan can find within itself the strength and wisdom to change its current approach towards India, there are immense benefits that it can derive as a transit route for the movement of energy, goods and people," Indian foreign minister Yashwant Sinha said January 3. Even better, the star of TAP's biggest promoter--U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan--is rising. "Bush's pet Afghan" Zalmay Khalilzad, Karzai's ex-colleague at Unocal, is receiving kudos from grateful top Bushies. Last week the ubiquitous Khalilzad strong-armed delegates to the loya jirga into accepting a new constitution that ratifies Karzai's role as a U.S.-backed puppet dictator. TAP proponents hope Khalilzad's increased influence will convince Unocal and other U.S. companies to join the consortium.
I wrote about TAP as a motivation for the Afghan invasion in my book "Gas War." The Bushies invaded Afghanistan to build a pipeline that would never be feasible, I argued. "Afghanistan remains a disaster zone," writes the Kyrgyz-based Times of Central Asia after the latest Islamabad confab. "All transnational projects somehow involving this war-weary country seem to be doomed with troubles. [TAP] is no exception."
Delays and overruns are typical for big construction projects, but based on the news so far there's no reason to change my 2001 assessment. Until we inevitably withdraw our forces a few years from now, once again abandoning the Afghans to a cycle of death and horror we helped perpetuate, Bush and his Asian allies will keep trying to build their doomed pipeline.
(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America's best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)
