http://www.counterpunch.org/monbiot2.html
War and Oil
America's Pipe Dream
By George Monbiot,
Counter Punch,
October 23, 2001
"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.
George Monbiot is a columnist for The Guardian. Visit his
webpage at http://www.monbiot.com
