Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the discovery of large oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea and its littoral states, Afghanistan has been an important piece on the board of the energy industry's "great game."
US energy interests in Afghanistan during the 1990s were represented by Unocal. In 1997, the company formed a consortium called CentGas, to build a natural gas export pipeline between Turkmenistan's gas fields and Asian markets. Unocal was also interested in developing an oil export pipeline, which would have brought central Asian oil to the east. Both pipes would have crossed Afghanistan. The proposed $2 billion gas pipeline was planned to stretch 900 miles from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad field (one of the world's largest gas fields, with reserves of 25 trillion cubic feet), to central Pakistan, delivering 2 billion cubic feet of gas per day.
Unocal is now under scrutiny for its allegedly cosy relationship with the Taleban. The company says that it has always made clear that it would only proceed when the US and UN recognised the Afghan government. But it can't get off so easily and nor should the US's energy policy in the region. The state department's efforts to ensure that oil export pipelines from central Asia are not controlled by Iran, Iraq or Russia meant that exports through Afghanistan were promoted alongside the development of an export line from Azerbaijan to Turkey, (this Baku to Ceyhan pipeline is now set to go ahead).
The US's reasoning was clear. If Russia, which remains an enemy to many people in the CIA and state department, controlled the export routes from the Caspian basin, it could oversee the flow of 8m barrels of oil per day on top of its own production, making it as important as Saudi Arabia.
Iran, already one of the world's largest oil exporters, would also grow even more dominant in world oil markets if a main export pipeline from the Caspian were to cross its land. The US found that prospect alarming, as did Saudi Arabia. No doubt the state department and its friends in the kingdom were therefore happy to see Unocal's development plans for the trans-Afghan line move forward.
Helping to promote its proposal to the rulers in Afghanistan, Unocal is said to have entertained senior officials from the Taleban in the US. According to Michael Griffin, author of a book on the Taleban, Unocal also invested some $800,000 in the University of Nebraska, where 140 Afghans were to be sent to learn how to build pipelines.
Unocal executives are thankful that they withdrew from CentGas and Afghanistan when they did, in 1998-largely, it appears, under pressure from the then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who had succeeded in adding women's rights to US foreign policy, in spite of oil company lobbying.
"We never had a commercial agreement," a company official said in October, and once "the bin Laden link" had been made, "it became clear to us that we didn't want the pipeline to happen." Such corporate speak should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. Unocal's pipeline proposals were, after all, made after the Taleban's treatment of women had received worldwide publicity. The company established an office in Kandahar, seat of Taleban power, and remained longer in the country than the UN, leaving for home only after the US had published its ransom for bin Laden.
But Unocal was only ever operating in accordance with US policy in the region. One of the company's negotiators in the pipeline talks was Robert B Oakley, former ambassador to Pakistan and, according to Griffin, an organiser of the anti-Soviet jihad. The trans-Afghan line was fully supported by the state department, in accordance with its efforts to exclude Iran and Iraq from any role as a transit country.
This does not mean that the present war was caused by the oil industry or is being fought in support of it. None the less, now that Bush has decided the Taleban's time is up, the installation of a regime willing to deal with the west, will serve Big Oil's interests.
The oil companies will return to Afghanistan as soon as the opportunities present themselves. Most of the industry's executives pop in and out of war zones and "rogue" states with the kind of nonchalance usually practised by war reporters. Moreover, the energy industry is already trying to use the conflagration to sew up other concessions from the US government. The lobby group USA Engage, which represents oil companies, has stepped up its campaign to get sanctions on Iran lifted.
George W Bush and Dick Cheney, both former Texas oil executives, also seem certain to take advantage of the consensual climate in Washington to push through the opening for oil and gas drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In Afghanistan, Bush must be more circumspect. The 1953 CIA operation to depose Iran's nationalist leader Mossadeq may have suited western oil interests for a time. But the US should be wary of repeating in central Asia the kind of interference in the Persian Gulf that has been a source of unrest for two generations. n
