http://www.counterpunch.org/pilger3.html
and an excerpt:
'The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.
With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.
A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.'
Nothing new here, I've posted it all before, but it's nice to know John Pilger's joined the fray.
Hakki Alacakaptan
---------------------------------------
|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
||
||
|| Brad Mayer wrote:
||
|| >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