Oil and gas are not the reason the US has attacked Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has long had a key place in US plans to secure control of the vast but landlocked oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. Though the primary US motivation is to destroy Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, another, rather more pecuniary objective is also on the agenda, particularly in the search for an alternative government in Kabul. With the Taliban out of Kabul and the search for a new Afghan government on center stage, one criterion on Washington’s mind will be how best to make Afghanistan safe for a couple of billion-dollar pipeline investments.
In the case of the great natural gas and oil fields of Turkmenistan, immediately north of Afghanistan, the US government has for a decade strongly supported plans by US-led business groups for both an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Arabian sea via Afghanistan and a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Such pipelines would serve important US interests in a number of ways:
- Drawing the Central Asian oil states away from the Russian sphere of influence and establishing the foundation for a strong US position
- Thwarting the development of Iranian regional influence by limiting Turkmenistan-Iranian gas links and thwarting a plan for a Turkmenistan-Iran oil pipeline to the Arabian Sea.
- Diversify US sources of oil and gas, and, by increasing production sources, help keep prices low
Benefiting US oil and construction companies with growing interests in the region
- Providing a basis for much-needed economic prosperity in the region, which might provide a basis for political stability.
For much of the 1990s the United States supported the Taliban’s rise to power, both by encouraging the involvement of US oil companies, and by implicitly tolerating Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two of its key regional allies, in their direct financial and military support for the Taliban. The Taliban, which is committed to a particularly primitive vision of Sunni Islam, had the added advantage for the US of being deeply hostile to Shia Muslims in neighboring Iran (as well as within Afghanistan).
A crucial condition for building the pipelines is political stability in Afghanistan, and for a time the US believed the Taliban could provide just that. Had it not been for the Taliban’s apparent tolerance of the former US-supported Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban’s highly visible extremely repressive attitude to women and other social issues, the US would most likely have continued its support for the Taliban, and the construction of the pipelines would have got underway in the late 90s. Certainly Iran believed that the US was behind Pakistani and Saudi support for the Taliban as part of a long-term plan to contain Iran. But as so often before, US foreign policy based on the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” helped generate the conditions that allowed the New York and Washington atrocities to be conceived.
The key to Central Asian politics is economic development in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, all of which are amongst the poorest parts of the former Soviet Union. Most are authoritarian dictatorships of the most dismal kind. For the past ten years the US has been wooing the governments of these countries, and opening the doors for profitable investment by US companies.
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan make up the eastern side of the Caspian Sea Basin, beneath which lie oil reserves to rival those of Saudi Arabia and the world’s richest reserves of natural gas. If you read the trade newspapers and websites of the world oil industry, words like “fabulous“, “huge“, “enormous” flow across the pages describing the Caspian Sea Basin gas and oil fields. But more importantly, these words go together with “undeveloped“, “isolated” and “politically unstable“. There are billions of dollars to be made there, but the possibility of realizing these fabulous profits hinges on one crucial issue: how is the gas and oil to get to its potential markets? While the countries of Central Asia may be floating on a sea of hydrocarbon, they are far from both actual seas and centres of industry. – and deep in the heart of Islam
In the past the Caspian republics exported most of their oil and gas to a pipeline grid integrated into the rest of the Soviet Union/Russia. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terms of trade became very sharp. In the 1990s the ex-Soviet buyers of Caspian hydrocarbons could no longer afford to pay world prices. And Gazprom, the old Soviet oil company that owned the pipelines, was selling its own oil in competition with that of the Caspian republics. In 1997, Gazprom denied Turkmenistan access to its pipelines over a payment dispute, resulting in a devastating 25% drop in the Turkmenistan GDP. The ex-Soviet Russian pipeline network itself is past its use-by date, having been sloppily built with out-of-date technology, and itself needs billions of dollars simply to renovate it.
A small number of new pipelines have been built, but many more are, as they say, in the pipeline. But all have costs in the billions, and each of the possible routes from the Caspian Sea Basin – west, south, southeast and east – has very serious political difficulties. If Afghan political turmoil could be ended, there are literally billions of dollars to be made by US and Japanese companies, by the Turkmenistan, Afghan and Pakistani governments, and one key element of US planning for Central Asian regional hegemony would be achieved.
The Northern Route: from the Caspian through Russia
An existing Russian pipeline to the huge oil terminal on the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk could be linked to the new fields in Azerbaijan and later Kazakhstan. A plan for this “Northern Route” involving the Caspian Sea Pipeline Consortium of Russian and foreign corporations is pressing ahead, but faces several severe obstacles. The first is the war in Chechnya, through which the first phase of this pipeline passes. The second is that the US is opposed to it for precisely the reasons that Russia likes it: it would be good for Russia. The third is that Turkey is uneasy about increasing Russian oil and gas tanker traffic exiting the Black sea through the already over-crowded 17 mile-long Bosphorus/Turkish Straits which connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and which now carry 1.7 million barrels/day of oil alone.
The Western Route (2): via Georgia to Turkey
In late September of this year, Azerbaijan and Georgia agreed on terms for passage rights across Georgia of a gas pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey to start exports in 2004. In total, the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline will cost about $1 billion, but would open the way to Azerbaijani gas reaching either Turkish domestic markets or onward to Europe. This would fit with EU planning to create a gas grid stretching from the Caspian to the Atlantic. Georgia is still politically unstable, but more importantly, this route is not especially suitable for the states to the east of the Caspian Sea – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Anything involving the Caspian Sea itself is regarded as extremely sensitive by oil companies because in the mess left by the break-up of the Soviet Union, there is no accepted legal framework for governing the Caspian Sea itself. The US has been pressing hard for the project to come on line quickly, both because it would begin the flow of serious investment funds, and because it would strengthen its current favourite for regional strongman, Turkey, against its former favourite, Iran.
The Eastern Route: China
Another possibility of considerable importance for East Asia and Japan would be a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Xinjiang in China, and then into the Chinese gas grid to the industrialized east coast – and possibly on to Japan. The problem however is the huge distance involved – more than 7,000 km. – and very rugged terrain in places. According to a study prepared jointly by Mitsubishi, Exxon and China National Petroleum, such a pipeline would cost more than $10 billion. There is also a small problem of providing a tempting and vulnerable target to separatist movements in China’s western provinces. China National Petroleum recently abandoned an agreement with Kazakhstan to construct an oil pipeline east because of disagreements about cost. However, China is seriously interested in Caspian Sea hydrocarbon resources, and has even reported an interest in a pipeline to the Arabian sea, with a view to importing gas and oil by supertanker.
The Southern Route: Iran
Turkmenistan shares a long border with Iran, and there is already a gas pipeline linking it to the northern region of Iran, where most of Iran’s industry is located. Iran, of course, itself has very large gas and oil reserves, but these are located in the south of the country, close to the Persian Gulf. An expansion of the Turkmenistan-Iran relationship could be beneficial to both states. More importantly, it would provide another route to Turkey, and hence Europe, or to the Indian Ocean. However, the prosperity of Iran is not something viewed with great favour in Washington. Nonsense about rogue states apart, Washington’s core concern about Iran is its role as the natural dominant power in the Persian Gulf. When the Shah was in power, this was to be lauded; come the Iranian revolution, to be abhorred. As French, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Malaysian and Russian companies have moved back into a politically changing Iran, American oil and construction companies have long been nudging Washington to soften its stance toward Iran, and in particular to abandon the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996. But until Washington is sure it can control ensure the safety of its own oil interests in Saudi Arabia and other conservative Gulf states, there is little likelihood of Washington supporting a major Iranian pipeline for Caspian Sea Basin gas.
The Southeastern Route: Afghanistan to Pakistan
For gas exporters, cost rises with length of pipeline. The shortest and cheapest export route for Turkmenistan oil and for its vast gas reserves is through Afghanistan, and serious planning for both oil and gas pipeline construction by US companies has long been in place. Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed in 1997 to build a large Central Asian Gas pipeline through the less mountainous southern parts of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and then possibly on to the growing market of India. The Central Asian Gas Pipeline Consortium was made up of Unocal (US, 47% share), Delta Oil (Saudi Arabia, 15%), Government of Turkmenistan (7%), Itochu Oil Exploration (Japan, 6.5%), Indonesia Petroleum [INPEX] (Japan, 6.5%), Hyundai Engineering and Construction (5%), and the Crescent Group (Pakistan, 3.5%). Unocal was the lead developer, much encouraged by the US government. In December 1997, senior officials of the US Department of Energy meeting in Washington with Taliban ministers put their blessing on the enterprise.
The $1.9 billion Centgas pipeline is to be 120 cm. in diameter, and to run 1271 kilometers from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, due south and then east, generally following the Herat – Kandahar road, then cross the Pakistan border at Quetta, terminating at Mulat. The Turkmenistan government has agreed to build a short pipeline to the huge Dauletabad gas field. 20 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year will flow down the pipeline, and the Turkmenistan government has guaranteed to deliver 708 billion cubic meters of gas to the consortium – equivalent to the entire reserves of the Dauletabad field.
Just how much the consortium stands to make depends on many factors, especially fluctuations in the price and demand for natural gas in the markets of East and Southeast Asia. But there are clearly huge profits to be made. And for Pakistan and Turkmenistan, as well as Afghanistan, the project would be immensely beneficial. For Afghanistan it would be the first major foreign investment since the Soviet invasion in 1979. For Pakistan it could be a key to the next stage of industrialization. Just how much the Centgas consortium agreed to pay the Taliban for transit rights is unknown. But Unocal’s competitor in the race to build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan — the Argentinian company, Bridas — was reported to have offered the Taliban $1 billion in transit fees, plus a considerable amount of railroad track, road construction, and a police post building every 20 km. along the pipeline to by garrisoned by Taliban troops.
The US government pressured Turkmenistan to give preference to the Unocal-led Centgas consortium over Bridas. In 1997 Centgas got the gas pipeline contract, but by the time it was ready to commence work, the political situation in Afghanistan that had looked promising to US eyes in the mid-1990s had deteriorated. Civil war continued, the Taliban’s cultural extremism and hostility to women had exploded in the world media, and Afghanistan had become a major terrorist base. In August 1998, the US attacked bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps, and four months later, Unocal pulled out of Centgas. The combination of instability, pressure from the US government and attacks from shareholders and women’s groups in the US was too much.
With Afghanistan at war with itself and the United States, the alluring Centgas project was on hold, despite repeated efforts to re-start the consortium by the governments of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. With the profits to be made so enormous, Unocal was reported to be trying to edge back into the project last year. But in addition to its obvious problems in Afghanistan, Unocal is being sued in a US court for use of Burmese forced labour over its Thailand-Burma project. (If this case succeeds, it will be the first occasion in which a US court has held a US corporation legally responsible for foreign human rights violations related to its profit-making activities; Unocal could face many millions in damage awards.) And the United States government imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar, banning new investment, largely because of the domestic reaction to Unocal’s exploitation of Burmese forced labour organized by the Myanmar dictatorship.
Meanwhile Unocal remains the lead developer on the consortium to build a 105-cm diameter 1700 kilometer-long oil pipeline from northern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea. A Unocal spokesman boasted to Congress that it would compare with the giant (and environmentally risky) Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Unocal – and Japanese – executives regard this $2.5 billion plan as by far the cheapest and least difficult way of bringing Turkmenistan’s oil to the sea, where it can be loaded onto supertankers bound for Japan and Korea, and possibly China..
Oil and gas are not the direct causes of the war in Afghanistan, but understanding the motives of long-term US policy towards that country is important. The pursuit of hydrocarbon interests has been a constant of US policy in the region for more than half a century. Having created the mujahadin resistance to fight the Soviets during the Cold War, the US then lost interest in the country, and allowed its former clients to destroy it. In order to gain the stability necessary for oil and gas operations, it flirted with the Taliban, until finally the whirlwind its earlier support for the mujahadin had created came blowing back home as a terrorist horror.
There is a great map of all the Central Asian pipelines at the end of the following file:
Operation Cyclone (Afghanistan)
In the West, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was considered a threat to global security and the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf.[10] Moreover, the failure to accurately predict Soviet intentions caused American officials to reappraise the Soviet threat to both Iran and Pakistan, although it is now known that those fears were overblown. For example, U.S. intelligence closely followed Soviet exercises for an invasion of Iran throughout 1980, while an earlier warning from Brzezinski that “if the Soviets came to dominate Afghanistan, they could promote a separate Baluchistan … [thus] dismembering Pakistan and Iran” took on new urgency.[11][5]
.. Of the seven mujahideen groups supported by Zia’s government, four espoused Islamic fundamentalist beliefs—and these fundamentalists received most of the funding.[10] Despite this, Carter has expressed no regrets over his decision to support what he still considers the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan.[5]
.. Key proponents of the initial program were Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson; Michael G. Vickers, a young CIA paramilitary officer; and Gust Avrakotos, the CIA’s regional head, who developed a close relationship with Wilson. Their strategy was to provide a broad mix of weapons, tactics, and logistics, along with training programs, to enhance the rebels’ ability to fight a guerilla war against the Soviets. Initially, to avoid detection of U.S. involvement, the program supplied the rebels only with Soviet-made weaponry. This plan was enabled by the tacit support of Israel, which had captured large stockpiles of Soviet-made weaponry during the Yom Kippur War and agreed to sell them to the CIA clandestinely, as well as Egypt, which had recently modernized its army with weapons purchased from Western nations, funneling the older Soviet-made arms to the mujahideen.[30][31] After 1985, as the Reagan administration announced that it would support anti-Soviet resistance movements globally (in what is now known as the Reagan Doctrine), there was no longer a need to obfuscate the origin of the weaponry; Pentagon senior official, Michael Pillsbury, successfully advocated providing U.S.-made weaponry, including large numbers of Stinger missiles, to the Afghan resistance.[32]
.. Reports show civilian personnel from the U.S. Department of State and the CIA frequently visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area during this time, and the US contributed generously to aiding Afghan refugees. CIA director William Casey secretly visited Pakistan numerous times to meet with the ISI officers managing the mujahideen,[39] and personally observed the guerrillas training on at least one occasion.[40] Coll reports that
Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory — into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union’s predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.[40]
.. The U.S.-built Stinger antiaircraft missile, supplied to the mujahideen in very large numbers beginning in 1986, struck a decisive blow to the Soviet war effort as it allowed the lightly armed Afghans to effectively defend against Soviet helicopter landings in strategic areas. The Stingers were so renowned and deadly that, in the 1990s, the U.S. conducted a “buy-back” program to keep unused missiles from falling into the hands of anti-American terrorists. This program may have been covertly renewed following the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in late 2001, out of fear that remaining Stingers could be used against U.S. forces in the country.[49]
.. The Stinger missiles supplied by the United States gave Afghan guerrillas, generally known as the Mujahideen, the ability to destroy the dreaded Mi-24D helicopter gunships deployed by the Soviets to enforce their control over Afghanistan. Three of the first four Stingers fired each took down a gunship. The guerrillas were now able to challenge Soviet control of the airspace above the battlefield.[50]
— CIA – Central Intelligence AgencyReagan’s program assisted in ending the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan,[51][52] with the Soviets unable to quell the insurgency. On 20 July 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced pursuant to the negotiations that led to the Geneva Accords of 1988,[53] with the last Soviets leaving on 15 February 1989. Soviet forces suffered over 14,000 killed and missing, and over 50,000 wounded.[citation needed] The withdrawal helped precipitate the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.[5]
.. The U.S. offered two packages of economic assistance and military sales to support Pakistan’s role in the war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The first six-year assistance package (1981–87) amounted to US$3.2 billion, equally divided between economic assistance and military sales. The U.S. also sold 40 F-16 aircraft to Pakistan during 1983–87 at a cost of $1.2 billion outside the assistance package. The second six-year assistance package (1987–93) amounted to $4.2 billion. Out of this, $2.28 billion were allocated for economic assistance in the form of grants or loan that carried the interest rate of 2–3 per cent. The rest of the allocation ($1.74 billion) was in the form of credit for military purchases. More than $20 billion in U.S. funds were funneled into the country to train and arm the Afghan resistance groups.[54]
The program funding was increased yearly due to lobbying by prominent U.S. politicians and government officials, such as Charles Wilson, Gordon Humphrey, Fred Ikle, and William Casey. Under the Reagan administration, U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen evolved into a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy, called the Reagan Doctrine, in which the U.S. provided military and other support to anti-communist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.[citation needed]
The mujahideen benefited from expanded foreign military support from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, United Kingdom and other Muslim nations. Saudi Arabia in particular agreed to match dollar for dollar the money the CIA was sending to the Mujahideen. When Saudi payments were late, Wilson and Avrakotos would fly to Saudi Arabia to persuade the monarchy to fulfil its commitments.[55]
Levels of support to the various Afghan factions varied. The ISI tended to favor vigorous Islamists like Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami and Haqqani. Some Americans agreed.[55][56] However others favored the relative moderates like Ahmed Shah Massoud. These included two Heritage Foundation foreign policy analysts, Michael Johns and James A. Phillips, both of whom championed Massoud as the Afghan resistance leader most worthy of US support under the Reagan Doctrine.[57][58][59]
After the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the U.S. shifted its interest from Afghanistan. American funding of Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami party was cut off immediately.[60] The U.S. also reduced its assistance for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.[citation needed]
In October 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush refused to certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device, triggering the imposition of sanctions against Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment (1985) to the Foreign Assistance Act (1961). This disrupted the second assistance package offered in 1987 and discontinued economic assistance and military sales to Pakistan with the exception of the economic assistance already on its way to Pakistan. Military sales and training programs were abandoned as well and some of the Pakistani military officers under training in the U.S. were asked to return home.[33]
As late as 1991 Charlie Wilson persuaded the House Intelligence Committee to continue the funding of the Mujahideen, providing them with $200 million for fiscal year 1992. With the matching funds from Saudi Arabia, this amounted to $400 million for that year. Afghan tribes were also delivered weapons which the United States captured from Iraq during the Gulf War.[61]
The U.S. government has been criticized for allowing Pakistan to channel a disproportionate amount of its funding to the controversial Hekmatyar,[62] whom Pakistani officials believed was “their man”.[63] Hekmatyar has been criticized for killing other mujahideen and attacking civilian populations, including shelling Kabul with American-supplied weapons, causing 2,000 casualties. Hekmatyar was said to be friendly with Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, who was running an operation for assisting “Afghan Arab” volunteers fighting in Afghanistan, called Maktab al-Khadamat. Alarmed by his behavior, Pakistan leader General Zia warned Hekmatyar, “It was Pakistan that made him an Afghan leader and it is Pakistan who can equally destroy him if he continues to misbehave.”[64] The CIA and State Department have been criticized for publishing textbooks intended to indoctrinate children with racism and hatred towards foreigners and towards non-muslim Afghans.[62] The CIA and State Department have been criticized for their direct relationship with Hekmatyar, beyond ISI contact,[41][42] in spite of his being one of the leading heroin smugglers in the region.[65]
In the late 1980s, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, concerned about the growing strength of the Islamist movement, told President George H. W. Bush, “You are creating a Frankenstein.”[66]
Others have asserted funding the mujahideen may have played a role in causing the September 11 attacks. A number of political commentators have described Al-Qaeda attacks as “blowback” or an unintended consequence of American aid to the mujahideen.[67]
Alleged connections of CIA assistance to Bin Laden[edit]
Some have alleged that bin Laden and al Qaeda were beneficiaries of CIA assistance. This is challenged by experts such as Coll—who notes that declassified CIA records and interviews with CIA officers do not support such claims—and Peter Bergen, who argues: “The theory that bin Laden was created by the CIA is invariably advanced as an axiom with no supporting evidence.”[68][69] Bergen insists that U.S. funding went to the Afghan mujahideen, not the Arab volunteers who arrived to assist them.[69]
However, Sir Martin Ewans noted that the Afghan Arabs “benefited indirectly from the CIA’s funding, through the ISI and resistance organizations,”[70] and that “it has been reckoned that as many as 35,000 ‘Arab-Afghans’ may have received military training in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $800 million in the years up to and including 1988.”[71] Some of the CIA’s greatest Afghan beneficiaries were Arabist commanders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar who were key allies of bin Laden over many years.[72][73] Haqqani—one of bin Laden’s closest associates in the 1980s—received direct cash payments from CIA agents, without the mediation of the ISI. This independent source of funding gave Haqqani disproportionate influence over the mujahideen.[48] Haqqani and his network played an important role in the formation and growth of al Qaeda, with Jalalhuddin Haqqani allowing bin Laden to train mujahideen volunteers in Haqqani territory and build extensive infrastructure there.[74]