Re: oil

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From: LeoCasey@aol.com
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Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 4:02 PM
Subject: Better Format: What's In That "Pipe Dream" You're Smoking?
What's In That  "Pipe Dream" You're Smoking?
The Fallacy of Oil Interests As the Motivation for Military Action Against
the Taliban and Al Qaeda

Leo Casey

A commentary published by the British anti-war activist George Monbiot in
_The Guardian_, "America's Pipe Dream," is making the rounds of Internet
listservs as a demonstration of the claim that oil interests underlie the
current military action in Afghanistan [A copy of that piece is reproduced
below.] Monbiot's commentary is, to date, the most complete argument for
this claim, which has become a staple of the fundamentalist dogma that
passes for anti-war and anti-imperialist discourse in some circles these
days. As I show below, Monbiot's piece is filled with misstatements of fact,
groundless speculation and unsupported conclusions. It provides a clinic on
the refusal of "anti-war" and "anti-imperialist" fundamentalist leftists in
North America and Europe to verify the simplest claims, as well as their
willingness to suspend critical thinking faculties in discussions of the
current military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
What follows is an outline of why the Monbiot commentary does not sustain
the case that the U.S. government has a major geo-political strategic and
economic interest in Afghanistan as a result of Caspian Sea oil and gas.

Let us make clear, from the start, that Afghanistan itself has no meaningful
oil or natural gas resources, so it could not be of geo-political and
economic strategic importance in that regard. The entire argument hinges on
the centrality of Afghanistan in getting the Caspian oil and natural gas to
market, especially the East Asian and European markets.

Background Information
The Caspian Sea is in central Asia, surrounded by three former, Moslem
majority republics of the Soviet Union [Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and
Kazakhstan], the Russian Federation and Iran. Significant oil and gas
deposits have been located in the Caspian Sea, concentrated off-shore of the
three former Soviet republics in the southern Caspian. There are some legal
issues concerning the status of the Caspian Sea, with Iran and Russia making
claims that it should be able exploit deposits which are more than 12 miles
off-shore of the three former Soviet republics, but those disputes are not
central to the questions we are examining here. Estimates of the actual oil
resources in the region range from 90 to 200 billion barrels, and estimates
of the natural gas resources range from 8 to 16 trillion cubic meters. Some
analysts suggest that in combination, these resources may be on the order of
those in the Persian Gulf area [Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates].

That these oil and gas resources make the Caspian Sea region an area of
major geo-political and economic strategic importance is universally
recognized and acknowledged. What is at issue here is whether or not it
makes additional states outside of the region, such as Afghanistan, of
similar importance.

There is a wealth of information on the Internet, as well as print
publications, on this topic, and it is symptomatic of the level of discourse
that none of it is referenced in this Internet discussion. For those of you
who prefer one stop shopping, I recommend the collection published by the
German social democratic Ebert foundation, loosely aligned with the German
Social Democratic Party,  A Great Game No More: Oil, Gas and Stability in
the Caspian Sea Region The Role of Caspian Sea Oil in the Balkan Conflict,
which covers all of the essential facets of the issue. As this report
documents, the key issue is the location of oil and gas pipelines out of the
Caspian Sea, as the transit countries will clearly have a share of the
considerable profits, as well as a steady supply of oil and natural gas.

The Pipeline Routes
Monbiot's claim that the only route for a Caspian Sea pipeline which "makes
both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan" is entirely
unsupported by the available evidence. To the contrary, it is generally seen
as the option with the most economic and political shortcomings. In
contradistinction to the way in which Monbiot portrays the issue, most of
the emphasis in U.S. governmental circles has focused on preferred routes to
the West, through the Caucuses and concluding at a Black Sea or
Mediterranean port. One proposal is to upgrade an already existing pipeline
that begins in the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, and go through Georgia to its
port of Supsa on the Black Sea. The difficulties with that route is that it
would have to pass through the South Ossetia region of Georgia, with its
Abkhazi separatists who have done a great deal of damage to the existing,
small capacity pipeline, and that it would increase tanker traffic through
the already vastly overused and ecologically endangered Bosporus. An
alternative, most strongly backed by the U.S. and its regional allies Turkey
and Israel, would be to run another pipeline from Baku to the Turkish
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. [In both of the western routes, a
trans-Caspian pipeline would feed Kazakh and Turkmen gas and oil into this
pipeline's head at Baku, which would add environmental hazards to the sea.]
This pipeline would be shorter and less expensive if it ran through Armenia,
and Turkey originally proposed that route, but ongoing war between Armenia
and Azerbaijan over the Nogorno-Karabakh enclave make that option rather
unlikely at this point. The U.S. government contributed a small amount of
seed money to the companies planning this route in 1998, but the project has
not yet got off the ground at this point. The companies involved in this
project complain about the Turkish government's inability to follow through
on its commitments.

Another possibility, but viewed negatively by the U.S. government, is a
northern, all Russian route, hooking up with some pre-existing Russian
pipelines. [Monbiot treats the western route as if it were part of the
northern route, which is a complete misrepresentation of the options.] This
would give the Russian federation considerable control not only over the oil
and gas, but over the future of the Central Asia and Caucuses regions as
well. This option has been opposed not only by the U.S. and its primary
allies in the region, Turkey and Israel, but also by those states
themselves, which do not want to be dependent upon a Russia which would be
reasserting its hegemony in the area. As well, such a pipeline would have to
pass through the Russian regions of Chechyna and Dagestan, Islamic majority
republics within the Russian Federation which have been fighting a bloody
and bitter war for their independence. The pipeline would be an obvious
target for Chechynan and Dagestan rebels as long as the war continues, and
if either republic won its independence, it would have to be part of
whatever arrangement was reached regarding the pipeline.

In many ways, the most sensible route would be to the south, through Iran.
It would be the cheapest to build: although somewhat longer than the
pipeline to Supsa, it would not have to pass through mountainous terrain,
and it would not pose an environmental hazard. Significant pipe and port
infrastructure already exist. The significant downside is that this would
increase the world's reliance upon the oil and gas out of the Persian Gulf
and through the Strait of Hormuz, unless the pipeline was extended to the
port of Jask on the Gulf of Oman. As well, there are constant tensions
between Iran and Azerbaijan, as Iran has twice as many Azeris in its north
as live in Azerbaijan proper, and it fears an Azeri separatist movement; the
Azerbaijan government favors the western, as opposed to the southern,
routes. While large oil companies generally favor the southern pipeline
option on economic, cost-benefit grounds, the U.S. government has opposed it
due to its historical antipathy to the Shi'ite Islamic regime in Iran.

To the east, China has entered into a contract with Kazakhstan to build a
2000 mile long pipeline from Kazakh wells to China, but this is an extremely
expensive venture which China is likely to complete only if it continues to
view the Kazakh option as a strategic imperative. And China has its own
ethnic problem with the large Muslim, Turkic minority which dominates in its
western regions, astride the pipeline route.

Finally to the southeast, there is the option of a pipeline through from
Turkmenistan and possibly Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan to Pakistan. This
would be the longest and most expensive of all pipelines, excepting the one
to China which is not commercially viable, and it would have to pass through
some difficult and mountainous terrain in Afghanistan. UNOCAL, a California
based oil company, was promoting the possibility of this pipeline until the
Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance placed it politically out of bounds following the
bombing of the American embassies in Africa. But even before the enmity
between the Taliban and the U.S. broke out, the Taliban was fighting an
internal civil war with an alliance based in minority ethnic groups, and was
also in severe conflict with its neighbor Iran, in no small part because of
its persecution of the Shi'ite Hazaras living in its western regions
adjacent to Iran. While the southeastern route would be closest to the
booming south and east Asian market for oil, it is not significantly closer
than the southern route.

The Strategic Options
Given the political instability which is endemic throughout these regions --
the most stable of all the governments discussed here are in Turkey and
Iran, and neither of them is particularly strong in that regard --
geo-political and economic strategy has to involve a "hedging" of bets. It
is simply too high a risk strategy to place "all of your eggs in one
basket." That is why one sees an effort in public policy debates, reflected
in the strategic literature, to force the U.S. government to broach an
opening to Iran that would result in a southern as well as a western
pipeline option. What is clear from a review of that literature is how minor
a role calculations about a possible southeastern pipeline through
Afghanistan play in the Caspian Sea thinking of key U.S. governmental and
corporate figures. Consider, for example, the following two pieces, the
first, US Policy Toward Central Asia and the South Caucuses, written by
William Odom, director of National Security Studies at the Hudson Institute
who serves as a general in the U.S. Army, during which time he was a
director of the National Security Agency, and the second, Geopolitical
Dynamics in the Caspian Region, written by Graham Fuller, a senior RAND
Corporation figure who served as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence
Council when he worked for the CIA.

So far from being the only route which makes both political and economic
sense, as Monbiot claims, the southeastern pipeline through Afghanistan was
a distant, barely mentioned  third -- well behind a western pipeline, which
had the support of key foreign policy figures in the U.S. government, and a
southern pipeline, which had the support of key corporate figures in the oil
industry. This estimation is also present in the news media reports of these
matters in the last few years, as evinced in the following 1997 and 1998
reports on the PBS Newhour and in Time Magazine. [Online NewsHour: Pumping
Oil Out of the Central Asia -- September 18, 1997; TIME: The Rush for
Caspian Oil.]

Oil Interests and The Fundamentalist Left
The military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda is not the first time
the "anti-war" and "anti-imperialist" fundamentalist left in North America
and Europe has trotted out the argument that oil interests lay behind U.S.
military action. During 1999 NATO intervention in Kosova, opponents of that
effort to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars and to being to a
halt all of the genocidal campaigns of the Milosevic regime made the
argument then that the real motivation was oil. Kosova, and for that matter,
all of the Balkans, are like Afghanistan in that they possess no significant
oil and gas deposits of their own. But that did not prevent figures such as
Noam Chomsky's frequent co-author, Ed Herman, and former _In These Times_
European correspondent Diana Johnstone from making arguments that U.S. oil
interests -- and not an attempt to stop ethnic cleansing -- were at the root
of the NATO intervention. How do you get from the Caspian Sea to Kosova?
Well, Diana Johnstone writes [The Role of Caspian Sea Oil in the Balkan
Conflict ], even though U.S. officials "'have been exerting just about every
form of persuasion at their disposal to persuade the oil companies to choose
a route that would run from Azerbaijan, down through Turkey to the
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan,' it appears that the companies will rely on a
much shorter pipeline already being built from Azerbaijan to the port of
Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast." This, she says, raises the
environmental dangers of shipping through the Bosporus, so the solution
would be to ship to Bulgaria on the western end of the Black Sea, and then
run another pipeline down through the Balkans to Greece ports. In this
convoluted scenario, which is never entertained as even a remote possibility
in the discussions of government and corporate figures, the Balkans suddenly
became of great strategic importance for the marketing of Caspian Sea oil
and gas thousands of miles away. In a review of the text, Oil and
Geopolitics in the Caspian Sea Region, Andre Gunder Frank [JWSR v7n1 Review
Essay - Frank - Caspian Sea Oil - Still The Great Game For Central Eurasia]
made similar claims regarding the intervention in Kosova.

Those arguments bordered on the absurd then, and there are no more plausible
when they are flipped thousands of miles in the other direction into
Afghanistan. The U.S. and Europe do have real oil interests in the Middle
East and in Central Asia, and at least one major war of recent memory, the
Persian Gulf War, was fought in no small part over those interests. But the
attempt to translate every military intervention by the U.S. and NATO into
the pursuit of oil interests, no matter how outlandish the purported
connection, just undermines the credibility of arguments that point to such
interests when they are present.

At the end of day, Ockham's razor still holds, and the best explanation for
most actions is the simplest and most straightforward: the Persian Gulf War
was fought to stop Iraq from gaining control over the vital Persian Gulf
oil, the intervention in Kosova was a long overdue action to put a halt to
genocidal ethnic cleansing in the nations of the former Yugoslavia, and
military action in Afghanistan is an effort to put to an end the serial mass
murders conducted by Al Qaeda, with Taliban support.

****************************************************************************
***
America's Pipe Dream

The war against terrorism is also a struggle for oil and regional control

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd October 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 regional
control and the 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
ten 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, the US oil company Unocal has
been seeking since 1995 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 [a US oil consortium which worked 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 1000-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 a reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures 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.

This is not the only long-term US interest in Afghanistan. American foreign
policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means
that the United States should control military, economic and political
development all over the world. 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 Co-operation
Organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world
multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum
dominance.

If the United States succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing it
with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if it 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
civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering
accidentally into their oil wells."
I believe that the United States government is genuine in its attempt to
stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that
may be. But we would be naïve to believe that this is all it is doing.

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