>The most annoying thing about most post-9/11 "Great Oil Game"
>commentary is not that they have been "conspiratorial" or
>"structural determinist" (such things do exist on occasion), but
>that, at best, they merely argue, by coincidental inference, a
>causal relation between the Great Oil Game - which really does exist
>and is in play - and Uncle Sams' pathological post-9/11 behavior.
Ahmed Rashid argues in his book on the Taliban - which, by the way, is subtitled Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia - argues that the US supported the Taliban takeover in the mid-1990s because it was thought that the Taliban would be good for the Unocal pipeline. Clearly there's something to the oil angle after all.
Doug