Re: the game's afoot

> Since I last posted critiques of various "oil conspiracy theories" I ran
> into a story (www.rwor.org/a/v23/1120-29/1125/oil_afghanistan.htm)
> [snip]
> RH

Last week, in a mild Frontline program on Saudi Arabia, James Baker stated
in no uncertain terms that US policy is one of preparedness for
participation in war in the Middle East to protect "our" access (US gov and
corporate access) to oil, and that this includes ensuring the stability of
regimes in the region friendly to "our" interests.  Hardly a revelation,
hardly even news.  But there it is.

As for the story that RH refers us to, I think that article is worth
posting.  Here it is:

Afghanistan: The Oil Behind the War
Revolutionary Worker #1125, November 4, 2001, posted at rwor.org

"U.S. policy was to promote the rapid development of Caspian energy... We
did so specifically to promote the independence of these oil-rich countries,
to in essence break Russia's monopoly control over the transportation of oil
from the region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through
diversification of supply."

Sheila Heslin, energy expert, at the
White House National Security Council,
Senate Testimony 1997

"The U.S. strategy toward Russia is aimed at weakening its international
position and ousting it from strategically important regions of the world,
above all, the Caspian region: the Transcaucasus and Central Asia."

Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, 1999

"The circumstances in the world have shifted. In a year or two, or three,
we'll see considerably different arrangement in the globe than existed prior
to September 11 because the event is of that magnitude."

Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense,
Washington Times, Oct. 24

A decade ago, many republics of the former Soviet Union declared their
independence across a sweeping arc of the Eurasian landmass--tearing the
whole southern half of the Soviet Union from Russia. This region contains
many of the world's largest and most undeveloped sources of energy--vast oil
and gas fields starting at the oil city of Baku on the Caspian Sea and
stretching eastward through the five countries known as the Central Asian
Republics (CARs)--Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan.

Control of oil means control of those who need that oil. It is a lifeblood
of modern empire.

The United States ruling class considers these countries from Turkey to
China as key "prizes" to be snatched up after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. For Russia--struggling, bankrupt and weakened through the
1990s--control of these energy-rich countries is essential for any hopes of
re-emerging as a world-scale superpower.

Whoever controls the Caspian region has a counterweight to the Persian
Gulf--a way to strengthen control over all oil-producing states by hooking
up a new energy source to the world market.

The Caspian region's energy fields are landlocked--far from the oceans.
Exploiting the people and resources of the Caspian region takes huge
pipelines traveling hundreds of miles over mountains and deserts. Whoever
controls the pipelines controls the oil. And so there has been an intense
fight over who will build these new pipelines and where they will go.

If the pipelines go north through Russia to Europe, Russia will reestablish
control over the Caspian region and the European imperialists will have a
source of energy that the U.S. does not control.

If a major pipe goes west, from Baku in Azerbaijan, across Turkey to the
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan--then the U.S. expects to have control over
that oil and everyone who needs that oil.

If the pipes go south through Iran to its refineries and harbors, then the
U.S. containment of Iran is broken. And, in that case, the Caucasus region
becomes an inland extension of the Persian Gulf--not a separate competitive
region.

And, if a U.S.-built pipeline goes south through Afghanistan to Pakistan,
Russia loses control in the CARs, and the U.S. gains power over those who
use it--especially Pakistan and India.

Throughout the 19th century, the expanding Russian and British empires
fought over control of Afghanistan and Central Asia--in a colonial contest
for power that the British called the "Great Game." Today, oil has become
the focus of the "New Great Game" for the Caspian region.

Western capitalists have poured billions of dollars into exploration,
infrastructure, massive bribes, and military build-ups. And yet, after ten
years, almost no Caspian oil or gas is reaching the world market. Oil
pipelines are fragile, vulnerable and extremely expensive. No capitalist
wants to build a multi-billion-dollar pipeline unless they are sure that
local governments can protect it.

This brings us to Afghanistan--and to the intense new U.S. war on
Afghanistan.

Oil was not the trigger that started this war. The events of September 11
were. But the U.S. imperialists have also seized on these events to pursue
goals of dominating the oil wealth of this region.

The main Caspian oilfields are in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. And the main
U.S. plan for the region has been the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline. Afghanistan,
which has no oil of its own, lies far away below the southern rim of Central
Asia. But stability in Afghanistan is important to the U.S. pipeline plans,
and, now, after September 11, Afghanistan has been thrust center stage in
this struggle for Caspian oil.

In the "war infomercial" we all get on TV, the current U.S. attack on
Afghanistan is described as a war to stamp out terrorism and protect the
American people. Amidst the flag waving, there is no discussion of oil or of
rivalry with Russia and other imperialists. But, in fact, oil politics and
imperialist interests are woven into all the moves and alliances that the
U.S. is now making.

Central Asia: From Days of Revolution to Al Haig's Pipeline Dreams

"We have no idea now who will buy our gas and how they will pay for it."

Avde Kuliyev, foreign minister of
Turkmenistan, December 1991

The 1917 communist revolution, centered in the industrial cities of European
Russia, stirred radical new hopes in the internal Asian colonies of the
Tsar's empire. In June 1921, women delegates from Central Asia dramatically
threw off their veils at the 2nd Women's Conference of the new Communist
International. Then, on International Women's Day in 1927, 100,000 women
stood together in Bukhara in the newly founded Soviet Republic of
Uzbekistan. They tore off their veils, dipped them in wax, and burned them.
Intense confrontations with feudal patriarchs followed, and hundreds of
women were lynched for refusing to go back under cover. But by 1930, after
years of underground organizing and complex struggle led by the Communist
Party, there were no veiled women in Bukhara.

Thirty years later, in the mid-1950s, Nikita Khrushchev's capitalist
counter-revolution within the Soviet government and party overthrew the
socialist revolution. The Central Asian Republics were treated as internal
colonies. The rulers of these CARs remained officially "communists," but in
reality they served as the local representatives of the new Soviet state
capitalism--charged with carrying out the exploitation of labor and mineral
wealth.

The collapse of the Soviet Union by 1991 was not a big change in these
societies. Almost everywhere, the same Soviet-era state capitalists ruled
the newly independent CARs and Caucasus republics, using the same means, the
same state structures, the same police. The main difference was that they
were looking for new masters. They took Turkey as their new "model"--a
secular, repressive Third World state with close military ties to NATO and
an open door to Western exploitation.

Turkmenistan is a good example. This land of deserts and mountains, the size
of California, borders the Caspian Sea (to the west), with Iran and
Afghanistan to the south. It is very sparsely populated--by 4 million Turkic
peoples who historically lived as nomads. Its government was headed by
President Saparmurad Niyazov, who had been the General Secretary of the
Communist Party there before independence.

Turkmenistan is believed to have 159 trillion cubic feet of natural gas
under its soil (the fourth largest reserves in the world). It has 1.5
billion barrels of proven oil--but may have as much as 32 billion barrels.
All its old pipelines run north, to Russia and other former Soviet
countries. But after 1991 there was no profit to be made there. These
countries were all bankrupted after the Cold War and could not pay their gas
bills. Russia is itself one of the world's greatest natural gas producers,
and its gas corporation had no interest in shipping Turkmeni gas to the
world market.

The Turkmenistan President Niyazov hooked up with the U.S. and openly
proclaimed neocolonialist dreams of setting up the world's "new Kuwait." By
1993, Niyazov was being escorted to ruling class conferences in Washington,
DC by Gen. Alexander Haig, former head of Reagan's National Security
Council.

The plan that emerged involved oil and gas pipelines running south from
Turkmenistan to the sea. The U.S. vetoed any Iranian route and insisted the
pipes run over Afghanistan--to Pakistan.

But after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, no force had been able to form a
national government and Afghanistan remained gripped by civil war between
various reactionary forces.

In 1994, the fundamentalist Islamist movement called Taliban emerged among
the Pashtun people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With the backing of the
Pakistani secret police, ISI, Taliban made a bid to take over Afghanistan.

By November, as the Taliban was taking its first city, Kandahar, the
Argentinean oil company Bridas set up a "working group" with the Turkmeni
government to plan a gas pipeline--over 800 miles through the Afghan oasis
at Herat. Bridas opened secret negotiations with the Taliban and a wide
array of local feudal warlords. The Pakistani government officially joined
the project four months later.

A year later, a major U.S. oil company Unocal came onboard to provide
capital and expertise. Unocal quickly shoved Bridas out of the way and made
their own deal directly with Turkmenistan and Pakistan. Unocal met with
Turkmeni officials in Houston in April 1995. The Clinton administration gave
its support.

Asif Zardari, the husband of Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto, told the
journalist Ahmed Rashid at the time, "This pipeline will be Pakistan's
gateway to Central Asia." Pakistan's ruling class hoped to be the
point-of-entry for large amounts of gas and oil--including for Japan and
South Korea, who are eager to diversify their source of oil. The gas pipe
was expected to pass through to India. This would give Pakistan major
leverage over India, its longtime South Asian enemy, and draw both of those
countries much farther into U.S.-dominated economic networks.

It is often said these days that "the problem in Afghanistan is that the
U.S. just left after 1989." But the U.S. never left Afghanistan alone. The
U.S. remained officially neutral in the Afghan civil war of the 1990s--but
it continued to operate (as it had all during the 1980s) through its allies,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and through U.S. oil companies. And they, in
turn, were supporting the Taliban.

In October 1995, Niyazov signed an agreement with Unocal and its partner,
the Saudi-owned Delta Oil Company, to build the gas pipeline though
Afghanistan. Henry Kissinger, the guru of imperialist geo-politics, attended
the signing. He was officially working as a "consultant" for Unocal--but
everyone saw his presence as the blessing of the U.S. ruling class.
Kissinger quipped that this Afghan pipeline deal was a "triumph of hope over
experience."

The Tactic of "Permanent Smoldering"

"Certainly the Taliban appear to serve the U.S. policy of isolating Iran by
creating a firmly Sunni buffer on Iran's border and potentially providing
security for trade routes and pipelines that would break Iran's monopoly on
Central Asia's southern trade routes."

Reuters new agency, Oct. 1, 1996

"The outside interference in Afghanistan is now all related to the battle
for oil and gas pipelines. The fear is that these companies and regional
powers are just renting the Taliban for their own purposes."

Yasushi Akashi,
UN Under Secretary General,
Jan. 22, 1997

"It's uncertain when this project will start. It depends on peace in
Afghanistan and a government we can work with. That may be the end of this
year, next year, or three years from now, or this may be a dry hole if the
fighting continues."

Unocal Vice President Marty Miller,
June 5, 1997

It is now 2001, and there is no pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.

There are several reasons, including a drop in world oil prices. But the
Unocal plan fell apart mainly because the Taliban did not win the Afghan
civil war. The World Bank, for example, pulled out, saying it would not
finance the Unocal pipeline until there was a unified government in
Afghanistan.

The Taliban is rooted in Afghanistan's southern nationality, the Pashtuns,
and promoted a brutal, intolerant fusion of Islam and Pashtun feudal
traditions. Many people in southern Afghanistan hoped the Taliban would end
the murder, rape and theft by competing warlords. But meanwhile, the Taliban
faced armed opposition among the non-Pashtun peoples, led by the Northern
Alliance. This Northern Alliance had support outside Afghanistan--from
Russia and Iran. And this support was no accident: both Iran and Russia
would gain if continuing war sabotaged plans for the southern pipeline.

In the struggle over Caspian oil, various powers disrupt rival pipelines by
supporting what the Russian defense minister called "the permanent
smoldering of manageable armed conflict." No monopoly capitalist is about to
spend billions building a vulnerable overland pipeline through an area that
is "permanently smoldering"--where it would be a constant target of
sabotage.

There are several of these "permanent smolderings" in the Caspian region. At
the far northwest edge of this region, the rebellion in Chechnya has
prevented the Russian imperialists from building the pipeline they want
connecting Baku with Russia through Groznyy. The Russian ruling class
responded with a brutal war of counterinsurgency, killing thousands--while
accusing the U.S., Pakistan and the Saudis of secretly supporting the
rebellion.

The Search for "Strategic Anchors"

Both the U.S. and the Russians have made major, direct strategic and
military moves in the Caspian region, including the CARs, to influence what
pipelines get built.

When a pro-Russian government in energy-poor Tajikistan faced an Islamic
fundamentalist uprising, the Russian government moved 25,000 Russian troops
in and re-annexed the country. In 1993, Boris Yeltsin, then President of
Russia announced that the Tajik-Afghan border was now "in effect Russia's
border."

But Russia has been in economic crisis, with little capital or market to
offer the newly independent Central Asian ruling classes. While Russia has
the historic ties there, it is the U.S. which has the initiative.

The U.S. has operated in Central Asia by developing allied states as
"strategic anchors." Its main anchor has been Turkey, the Muslim NATO member
at the far western edge of the region. The people of oil-rich Azerbaijan and
much of Central Asia are Turkic people--who share language and culture with
Turkey. Since 1991, Turkey has gone on a puffed-up "pan-Turkic"
campaign--dreaming of its own new empire, but really serving an expanding
U.S. empire. Turkish culture and businessmen have flooded the region. In
Azerbaijan, schools have officially switched away from the Russian alphabet
to the one used in Turkey--so a whole generation is emerging that can't read
any of the books published over five years ago.

In the final analysis it takes guns to pry the Caspian oil from rivals.

The U.S. and Turkey developed an anti-Russian military alliance in the
Caspian--drawing Azerbaijan and Georgia into close cooperation with NATO.
Azeri military officers are now trained in Turkey and Azeri soldiers served
within a Turkish battalion during the Balkan war.

Then on October 12, the whole world learned that the U.S. had taken over the
major Uzbekistan military base at Khanabad--100 miles from the Afghan
border, and moved in at least a thousand U.S. mountain troops. The U.S. and
Uzbek governments announced their alliance included U.S. guarantees of
protecting the government of President Islam Karimov.

The arrival of U.S. troops directly in the heart of Central Asia is a
quantum leap in its global moves. It is presented as a sudden result of the
new "U.S. war on terrorism." What remains largely unknown is that the U.S.
had been developing this Uzbek military alliance long before September
11--not to "fight terrorism" but to take over Central Asian oil and gas.

Green Beret Treks to the Uzbeks

"There were the makings of two coalitions emerging in the region. The U.S.
lining up alongside Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan and encouraging
its allies--Israel, Turkey and Pakistan--to invest there, while Russia
retained its grip on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan."

Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam,
Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia

Uzbekistan is at the very center of Central Asia. It has some oil and
natural gas reserves, but to the U.S. power structure its main importance
comes from its size and location. With 22 million people, fully half of the
region's population, and the area's richest agricultural region in the
Ferghana valley, Uzbekistan sits strategically on the northern Afghan border
between energy-rich Turkmenistan and the Soviet troops of Tajikistan.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. imperialists picked Uzbekistan to be their
eastern "anchor." In the words of Foreign Affairs magazine (Jan/Feb 1996),
Uzbekistan was supposed to be the "Central Asian stabilizer" to "create a
healthy balance [against Russian moves] that would best serve the interests
of regional security, Europe and NATO."

Recently, the New York Times revealed (Oct. 25): "In 1999, teams of Green
Berets arrived at former Soviet garrisons outside the capital here. The
mission was straightforward: to train the army of a former foe, in part to
prepare its inexperienced conscripts for skirmishes with the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan... The long-term goal was more ambitious. The Green
Berets were one element of an accelerating security arrangement in which the
two nations were laying the groundwork for more extensive military
cooperation.... As Green Berets were familiarizing themselves with their new
Central Asian partners, officials from the United States Central Command in
Florida and the American Embassy in Tashkent were meeting with Uzbek defense
officials, coordinating military programs. Soon, under a military education
program that began here in 1995, more Uzbek officers were admitted to
military schools in the United States.... Some American troops were involved
in exercises in Uzbekistan as long ago as August 1996, according to the
Department of Defense, although Uzbek officials say those exercises did not
involve Special Forces. Rather, military officials said that under Gen.
Anthony C. Zinni of the Marine Corps, the regional commander who supervised
the military presence in the region until retiring last year, engagement
efforts and Special Forces missions took much of their current shape in
1999. They have continued under the current commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks
of the Army. Several Green Beret teams have passed through the nation this
year, for instance, and during the summer a Navy SEAL team also trained
here."

During the 50th anniversary conference of NATO, in April 1999, an
anti-Russian alliance, GUUAM, was formed out of former southern Soviet
republics--Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova.

Ahmed Rashid describes an angry Russian diplomat saying in 1997, "We don't
accept NATO in our backyard. The U.S. must recognize that Central Asia will
remain within the 'near abroad'--Russia's sphere of influence."

There is much speculation now about why Russian President Putin seems to
have agreed to U.S. occupation of southern Uzbekistan. Gleb Pavlovsky, an
advisor to President Vladimir Putin, said that Russia's government decided
it "would rather have the U.S. in Uzbekistan than the Taliban in Tatarstan."
(Tatarstan is a Russian region a few hundred miles from Moscow.) It is
widely reported that the U.S. secretly agreed to allow the Russian army to
stomp out the "permanent smoldering" in Chechnya--while the U.S. stomps out
the "smoldering" Islamist forces operating from Afghanistan.

In any case, this U.S.-Uzbek military alliance was in the works for years
before September 11--and there has been little the Russian government could
do about it.

Tipping the Balance Against the Taliban

The U.S. ties to Uzbekistan are a direct sign of their deepening hostility
to the Taliban--and to the forces of fundamentalist Islamism generally in
central Asia.

Starting with President Carter in the late '70s, and expanding greatly under
President Reagan in the 1980s, the CIA sought out, funded, trained and armed
fundamentalist Islamic forces in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Their goal was to unleash an anti-Russian "jihad" and spread it from
Afghanistan to Central Asia.

But when the Soviet Union fell apart, the governments that emerged in the
Caspian region were not Islamic fundamentalists. They were basically the
same governments which had been in power when they were part of the Soviet
Union. The revisionists of several key former-Soviet republics went from
pro-Russian state capitalists to pro-Western state capitalists. And the U.S.
oil companies and military operatives were deepening ties to these existing
governments.

Meanwhile, the Taliban sponsored Islamist movements in Central Asia, helping
armed forces that were threatening new U.S. allies like Uzbekistan's secular
President Islam Karimov. Karimov's army has been fighting his internal
Islamist opposition, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)--whose forces
reportedly find refuge under the protection of the Taliban and training from
al-Qaida.

In many ways, 1996 marked a turning point for the U.S. imperialists. It
became clear that the Taliban might not win the war and stabilize
Afghanistan for larger U.S. imperialist plans. By 1996, the U.S. was
developing stable new military and political ties with several formerly
revisionist states in Central Asia--who were often facing internal Islamist
challenges. And the U.S. was coming to see the fundamentalist Taliban and
the permanent civil war in Afghanistan as destabilizing to its interests
throughout much of Central and Southern Asia. And at the same time, the
Taliban took its stand by welcoming the increasingly anti-American Saudi
fundamentalist Osama bin Laden back into Afghanistan--and protecting him
after he declared "jihad" on the U.S.

Also, after 1996, it became increasingly clear that Caspian oil was being
bottled up by continuing instability of the post-Soviet governments. In 1996
only 140,000 barrels-a-day of Caspian oil were being exported outside the
former Soviet republics, and Caspian oil was still less than 4 percent of
total world oil production. The only pipeline that was successfully
completed in the 1990s was the one over Russian soil, from the Tenghiz
oilfields in Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

Only a small part of the U.S.-backed Baku-Ceyhan pipe has been
built--opening a stretch from Baku to the Georgian Black Sea port of Supsa
in 1998. An ongoing civil war in Georgia has put even those operations in
danger. With no outlet to the world market, Turkmenistan's natural gas
production dropped from 2,000 billion cubic feet in 1992 to 466 billion in
1998.

The U.S. decided that the Taliban (and its al-Qaida allies) were inflaming
"permanent smolderings" in parts of the world that the U.S. wants to
pacify--and that made them U.S. targets, even before the events of September
11.

Maoists have a saying, "It's not easy being a running dog." And that applies
well to the experience of the reactionary, backward-looking Islamist
movement. It was nurtured as "freedom fighters" by the U.S. all through the
1980s, and now finds its most prominent leaders on the empire's "Most
Wanted" lists.

Meanwhile, the former Soviet governments headed by Karimov and Niyazov are
welcomed into the U.S. imperialist networks--with military aid and promises
of investment capital.

Ten years ago, the U.S. started planning to run oil and gas pipelines
through the Afghan town of Herat. This month, the U.S. bombers attacked that
same desert town from the air--reportedly killing a hundred people in a
hospital there.

There is a connection between these two events.