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Oil, Afghanistan, Bush and the Taliban--An Unfolding Story

1) America's pipe dream: A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil -- The Guardian [UK] (10/22/01)

2) San Francisco Chronicle (11/2/01)

3) U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil - Say Authors (11/01)

4) Bush-Taliban-Oil line scandal (1/8/02)
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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

America's pipe dream: A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil
George Monbiot, Monday October 22 2001: The Guardian [UK]

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here," Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naive to believe that this is all it is doing.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

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Ted Rall      
Friday, November 2, 2001         
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
 

New York -- NURSULTAN NAZARBAYEV has a terrible problem. He's the president and former Communist Party boss of Kazakstan, the second-largest republic of the former Soviet Union. A few years ago, the giant country struck oil in the eastern portion of the Caspian Sea. Geologists estimate that sitting beneath the wind-blown steppes of Kazakstan are 50 billion barrels of oil -- by far the biggest untapped reserves in the world. (Saudi Arabia, currently the world's largest oil producer, is believed to have about 30 billion barrels remaining.) Kazakstan's Soviet-subsidized economy collapsed immediately after independence in 1991. When I visited the then-capital, Almaty, in 1997, I was struck by the utter absence of elderly people. One after another, people confided that their parents had died of malnutrition during the brutal winters of 1993 and 1994.

Middle-class residents of a superpower had been reduced to abject poverty virtually overnight; thirtysomething women who appeared sixtysomething hocked their wedding silver in underpasses, next to reps for the Kazak state art museum trying to move enough socialist-realist paintings for a dollar each to keep the lights on. The average Kazak earned $20 a month; those unwilling or unable to steal died of gangrene while sitting on the sidewalk next to long- winded tales of woe written on cardboard.

Autocrats tend to die badly during periods of downward mobility. Nazarbayev, therefore, has spent most of the past decade trying to get his landlocked oil out to sea. Once the oil starts flowing, it won't take long before Kazakstan replaces Kuwait as the land of Mercedes-Benzs and ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the more expensive and vulnerable it is to sabotage. The shortest route runs through Iran, but Kazakstan is too closely aligned with the United States to offend it by cutting a deal with Tehran. Russia has helpfully offered to build a line connecting Kazak oil rigs with the Black Sea, but neighboring Turkmenistan has experienced trouble with the Russians -- they tend to divert the oil for their own use without paying for it. There's even a plan to run crude through China, but the proposed 5,300-mile-long pipeline would be far too long to prove profitable.

The logical alternative, then, is Unocal's plan, which is to extend Turkmenistan's existing system west to the Kazak field on the Caspian Sea and southeast to the Pakistani port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. That project runs through Afghanistan.

As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his book "Taliban," published last year, the United States and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in place in Afghanistan around 1994 -- a regime that would end the country's civil war and thus ensure the safety of the Unocal pipeline project. Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a- gallon gas. Pakistan, naturally, would pick up revenues from a Karachi oil port facility. Harkening back to 19th century power politics between Russia and British India, Rashid dubbed the struggle for control of post-Soviet Central Asia "the new Great Game."

Predictably, the Taliban Frankenstein got out of control. The regime's unholy alliance with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, their penchant for invading their neighbors and their production of 50 percent of the world's opium made them unlikely partners for the desired oil deal.

Then-President Bill Clinton's August 1998 cruise missile attack on Afghanistan briefly brought the Taliban back into line -- they even eradicated opium poppy cultivation in less than a year -- but they nonetheless continued supporting countless militant Islamic groups. When an Egyptian group whose members had trained in Afghanistan hijacked four airplanes and used them to kill thousands of Americans on September 11, Washington's patience with its former client finally expired.

Finally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what the United States has wanted to do all along -- invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul.

Realpolitik no more cares about the thousands of dead than it concerns itself with oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying local middlemen.

Central Asian politics, however, is a house of cards: every time you remove one element, the whole thing comes crashing down. Muslim extremists in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance, will support additional terrorist attacks on the United States to avenge the elimination of the Taliban. A U.S.- installed Northern Alliance can't hold Kabul without an army of occupation because Afghan legitimacy hinges on capturing the capital on your own. Even if we do this the right way by funding and training the Northern Alliance so that they can seize power themselves, Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun government will never stand the replacement of their Pashtun brothers in the Taliban by Northern Alliance Tajiks. Without Pakistani cooperation, there's no getting the oil out and there's no chance for stability in Afghanistan.

As Bush would say, "make no mistake": this is about oil. It's always about oil. And to twist a late '90s cliche, it's only boring because it's true.

Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist, has traveled extensively throughout Central Asia. In 2000, he went to Turkmenistan as a guest of the State Department. His latest book is "2024: A Graphic Novel" (NBM Books, May 2001).

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 25

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Yahoo News, Thursday November 2001
U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil - Say Authors
By Julio Godoy, Inter Press Service

PARIS, Nov 15 (IPS) - Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, thegovernment of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret serviceinvestigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban thedelivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition andeconomic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim.

In the book ''Bin Laden, la verite interdite'' (''Bin Laden, the forbiddentruth''), that appeared in Paris on Wednesday, the authors, Jean-CharlesBrisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July in protestover the obstruction.

Brisard claim O'Neill told them that ''the main obstacles to investigateIslamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played bySaudi Arabia in it''.

The two claim the U.S. government's main objective in Afghanistan was toconsolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oiland gas reserves in Central Asia.

They affirm that until August, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime''as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable theconstruction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia'', from the richoilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistanand Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean.

Until now, says the book, ''the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia havebeen controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that''.

But, confronted with Taliban's refusal to accept U.S. conditions, ''thisrationale of energy security changed into a military one'', the authorsclaim.

''At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told theTaliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury youunder a carpet of bombs','' Brisard said in an interview in Paris.

According to the book, the government of Bush began to negotiate with theTaliban immediately after coming into power in February. U.S. and Talibandiplomatic representatives met several times in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad.

To polish their image in the United States, the Taliban even employed aU.S. expert on public relations, Laila Helms. The authors claim that Helmsis also an expert in the works of U.S. secret services, for her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA).

The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place inAugust, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, theanalysts maintain.

On that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs forthe U.S. government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad.

Brisard and Dasquie have long experience in intelligence analysis. Brisardwas until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy forVivendi, a French company. He also worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al Qaeda network, headedby bin Laden.

Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of IntelligenceOnline, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy,available through the Internet.

Brisard and Dasquie draw a portrait of closest aides to President Bush,linking them to oil business.

Bush's family has a strong oil background. So are some of his top aides.

>From the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, through the director of

theNational Security Council Condoleeza Rice, to the Ministers of Commerce andEnergy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, all have for long worked for U.S.oil companies.

Cheney was until the end of last year president of Halliburton, a companythat provides services for oil industry; Rice was between 1991 and 2000manager for Chevron; Evans and Abraham worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant.

Besides the secret negotiations held between Washington and Kabul and theimportance of the oil industry, the book takes issue with the role played bySaudi Arabia in fostering Islamic fundamentalism, in the personality of bin Laden, and with the networks that the Saudi dissident built to finance hisactivities.

Brisard and Dasquie contend the U.S. government's claim that it had beenprosecuting bin Laden since 1998. ''Actually,'' Dasquie says, ''the firststate to officially prosecute bin Laden was Libya, on the charges of terrorism.''

''Bin Laden wanted settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but was hindered bythe government of Muammar Qaddafi,'' Dasquie claims. ''Enraged by Libya'srefusal, bin Laden organised attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qaddafi.''

Dasquie singles out one group, the Islamic Fighting Group (IFG), reputedly the most powerful Libyan dissident organisation, based in London, anddirectly linked with bin Laden.

''Qaddafi even demanded Western police institutions, such as Interpol, topursue the IFG and bin Laden, but never obtained co- operation,'' Dasquiesays. ''Until today, members of IFG openly live in London.''

The book confirms earlier reports that the U.S. government worked closelywith the United Nations during the negotiations with the Taliban.

''Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of FrancescVendrell, personal representative of UN secretary general Kofi Annan, todiscuss the situation in Afghanistan,'' says the book.

''Representatives of the U.S. government and Russia, and the six countriesthat border with Afghanistan were present at these meetings,'' it says.''Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table.''

These meetings, also called ''6+2'' because of the number of states (sixneighbours plus U.S. and Russia) involved, have been confirmed by Naif Naik,former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs.

In a French television news programme two weeks ago, Naik said during a''6+2'' meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions turned around ''theformation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had acceptedthis coalition, they would have immediately received international economicaid.''

''And the pipe lines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come,'' headded.

Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the U.S. representative at thesemeetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan.

''Simons said, 'either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistanconvinces them to do so, or we will use another option'. The words Simonsused were 'a military operation','' Naik claimed.

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Subject: Bush-Taliban-Oil line scandal
In case you missed the initial CNN coverage - AMERICAN MORNING WITH PAULA ZAHN

Explosive New Book Published in France Alleges that U.S. Was in Negotiations to Do a Deal with Taliban Aired January 8, 2002 - 07:34 ET    
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Time to check in with ambassador-in-residence, Richard Butler, this morning. An explosive new book published in France alleges that the United States was in negotiations to do a deal with the Taliban for an oil pipeline in Afghanistan.

Joining us right now is Richard Butler to shed some light on this new book. He is the former chief U.N. weapons inspector. He is now on the Council on Foreign Relations and our own ambassador-in- residence -- good morning .

RICHARD BUTLER, FMR. U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Good morning, Paula.

ZAHN: Boy, if any of these charges are true...

BUTLER: If...

ZAHN: ... this...

BUTLER: Yes.

ZAHN: ... is really big news.

BUTLER: I agree.

ZAHN: Start off with what your understanding is of what is in this book -- the most explosive charge.

BUTLER: The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration

-- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrterr