On the other hand... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.stm Friday, 27 December, 2002, 11:23 GMT Central Asia pipeline deal signed http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q7.html [ Home | 9/11 Webpage]
6). Afghanistan, Turkmenistan Oil and Gas, and the Projected Pipeline(10/21/01; updated 5/16/02)
UPDATE, 5/13/02: Karzai to hold talks with neighbors on proposed gas pipeline.
On May 13, the BBC announced that: `Afghanistan hopes to strike a deal later this month to build a $2bn pipeline through the country to take gas from energy-rich Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. Afghan interim ruler Hamid Karzai is to hold talks with his Pakistani and Turkmenistan counterparts later this month on Afghanistan's biggest foreign investment project, said Mohammad Alim Razim, minister for Mines and Industries told Reuters.'
`Mr Razim said US energy company Unocal was the "lead company" among those that would build the pipeline, which would bring 30bn cubic meters of Turkmen gas to market annually. Unocal - which led a consortium of companies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Japan and South Korea - has maintained the project is both economically and technically feasible once Afghan stability was secured. "Unocal is not involved in any projects (including pipelines) in Afghanistan, nor do we have any plans to become involved, nor are we discussing any such projects," a spokesman told BBC News Online.'
This announcement comes at a time when the US, according to Stratfor on 5/15/02, is debating whether or not to help quell the dispute between the Karzai central government and the dissenting warlord Padsha Khan in Paktia Province. Obviously the prospects for the viability of a pipeline are intimately linked to the prospects for peace and security in Afghanistan, which are poor unless the US becomes more engaged.
As Ahmed Rashid quotes in Taliban (169), "peace can bring a piepline, but a pipeline cannot bring peace."
For a somewhat expanded version of this update go to FLASH 33.
Click here for more info about the book I have finished for Rowman and Littlefield, entitled DRUGS, OIL, AND WAR: THE DEEP POLITICS OF U.S. INTERVENTIONS IN VIETNAM, COLOMBIA, AND AFGHANISTAN.
FLASH: US-Russian Tensions over Central Asian Oil(12/01/01)
Eric Margolis argues in the Los Angeles Times on 11/28/01 that "The Russians have regained influence over Afghanistan, avenged their defeat by the U.S. in the 1980s war and neatly checkmated the Bush administration, which, for all its high-tech military power, understands little about Afghanistan.
"The U.S. ouster of the Taliban regime also means Pakistan has lost its former influence over Afghanistan and is now cut off from Central Asia's resources. So long as the alliance holds power, the U.S. is equally denied access to the much-coveted Caspian Basin. Russia has regained control of the best potential pipeline routes. The new Silk Road is destined to become a Russian energy superhighway."
Since Margolis' warning last November, the power balance has shifted back in the US direction. The US now has troops positioned in Georgia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, effectively balancing the presence of Russian troops and pipelines in Central Asia. It would appear that, so far, cooler heads in both Moscow and Washington have moved to avoid a head-on conflict in either Afghanistan or the Caspian basin.
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Afghanistan has only limited oil or gas reserves. But it straddles the most direct route for exporting oil and natural gas out of Turkmenistan, where the gas reserves alone are estimated at over 100 trillion cubic feet, or the fourth largest proven natural gas reserves in the world.
Undoubtedly US strategic planning has to consider the importance of oil and gas in the region of the Caspian and Central Asia. As Frank Viviano pointed out on 9/26/01 in the San Francisco Chronicle
"The combined total of proven and estimated reserves in the region stands at more than 800 billion barrels of crude petroleum and its equivalent in natural gas. By contrast, the combined total of oil reserves in the Americas and Europe is less than 160 billion barrels, most of which, energy experts say, will have been exhausted in the next 25 years."
US interest in the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia is both economic and strategic. Part of the "Great Game" played for a century in the area between Britain and Russia was not just to gain control of these huge resources for oneself, but also to deny them to others. America's world dominance is based in large part on its hegemonic influence over the world oil economy. As noted below, an NSC official told Congress in 1997 that US policy in Central Asia was "to in essence break Russia's monopoly control over the transportation of oil [and gas] from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply" (quoted in Rashid, Taliban, 174).
The 1990 Gulf War with Iraq was motivated in part by Saddam Hussein's moves to challenge that influence. The US can be counted on to resist challenges to the status quo, in which oil sales the world over are denominated in US dollars (thus creating a demand for our currency which helps compensate for our recurring trade deficits). U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, and again in Colombia in the last decade, also have to be seen as part of a global strategy of dominating oil development.
Recent US moves in Afghanistan have had more immediate and pressing concerns, but oil has always been one of the things on Washington's mind. Powerful oil development interests in Texas have had their eyes on Central Asian oil reserves for over two decades, and this may have been a factor in the Reagan-Bush strategy (otherwise questionable from the point of view of world stability) of helping to break up the former Soviet Union.
The wake of that break-up has seen a frenzied oil boom in the Caspian and trans-Caspian republics -- the biggest such oil boom in forty years. American oil companies such as Chevron have played a dominant role in this development. The increased interest in the oil and gas has naturally led to increased planning on how to get the resources out.
For the West, two major alternatives have presented themselves: the so-called Western Pipeline (to the Black Sea or even across the Balkans), and the Eastern Pipeline, via either Iran (the easier route, geographically speaking) or Afghanistan.
The Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan can be linked to the same "single, golden theme" which Michael Griffin (Reaping the Whirlwind, 115) has discerned in the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Turkish Kurdistan and Chechnya: "each represented a distinct, tactical move, crucial at the time, in discerning which power would ultimately become master of the pipelines which, some time in this century, will transport the oil and gas from the Caspian basin to an energy-avid world." <SNIP>
Michael Pugliese