THE CENTRAL ASIAN GAS PIPELINE

Oil also came to drive the politics of Central Asia when, in the late 1970s, the Soviet Union discovered further untapped oil in the southern republic of Chechnya. This discover y, along with the oil deposits throughout the Caspian Sea region, upped the ante for the lands north of Persian Gulf nations. The region was ripe for exploitation but control over Afghanistan was needed to ensure the safety of a pipeline to bring the oil to world markets.

With the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989, international bankers and oilmen gained a foothold in cash-strapped Russia and the estimated $3 trillion in Caspian Sea oil was once again attracting serious attention. In 1997, six international companies and the government of Turkmenistan formed Central Asian Gas Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas) to build a 790-mile-long pipeline to link Turkmenistan's natural gas reserves with Pakistan and perhaps on to the New Delhi area of India.

Leading this consortium was America's Unocal Corporation, whose president, John F. Imle, Jr., said the project would be “the foundation for a new commerce corridor for the region often referred to as the Silk Road for the 21st Century.”

Also involved were these companies: Delta Oil Company Limited of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia Petroleum Ltd. of Japan, ITOCHU Oil Exploration Co. Ltd. of Japan, Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd. of Korea, and the Crescent Group of Pakistan. RAO Gazprom of Russia also was interested in joining the consortium.

But problems developed with the fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, not the least of which was the Taliban government's treatment of women, which prompted feminist-led demonstrations in America against firms seeking to do business there. Additionally, the Taliban regime was creating chaotic conditions by pitting the various Islamic sects against each other in order to maintain control. In early December 1998, Unocal withdrew from the pipeline consortium, citing the hazardous political situation, and the project languished.

Some event, some provocation, was required to propel the normally disinterested American public into supporting some sort of action in Afghanistan.

Many people have noticed that in President Bush's declaration of war on terrorism, he never mentioned terrorists in Northern Ireland or the Palestinian suicide bombers. Attention was only focused on Afghanistan, the one nation necessary to complete the lucrative pipeline and the leading supplier of opium. It should also be noted that Vice President Dick Cheney had been heavily involved in the oil industry. He headed the giant oil industry service company Halliburton and is generally thought to wield more power than the president. Halliburton had a major stake in the central Asian pipeline project as it would gain lucrative service contracts.

Despite Unocal's public announcement that it was withdrawing from the CentGas project, industry insiders said the firm never completely abandoned hopes for the project. The Texas-based Unocal never actually dropped plans for a trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline, which it considered a separate venture, and even held discussions on worker safety with the Taliban regime in March 2000.

With the shooting all but ended in Afghanistan by mid-2002, the gas pipeline project was back on a front burner. BBC News reported on May 13 of that year that interim leader Hamid Karzai was to hold talks with Pakistan and Turkmenistan officials to revive the $2 billion pipeline. Karzai, according to European news reports, formerly worked for Unocal, as did US envoy John J. Maresca. “The work on the project will start after an agreement is expected to be struck at the coming summit,” said Mohammad Alim Razim, minister for Mines and Industries.

Mr. Razim stated Unocal was the “lead company” among those that would build the pipeline. He added that the pipeline is expected to be built with funds from donor countries earmarked for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

A mere nine days after the new interim government of Hamid Karzai took power in Afghanistan, President Bush appointed National Security Council official Zalmay Khalilzad his special envoy. Unsurprisingly, Khalilzad, an American born in Afghanistan, had been employed by the oil giant Unocal. He also had taught political science at Columbia where he worked with former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a co-founder of the Trilateral Commission. Khalilzad had been a longtime supporter of the Taliban.

Khalilzad was also a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neo-con think tank which in a 2000 paper declared that it would require a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” to gain the support of the American public for their Middle East agenda.

When George W. Bush was appointed president, Khalilzad was selected by Cheney to head the Bush transition team in the area of defense. In the spring of 2002, he was named by Bush as the chief National Security Council official working under National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, dealing with issues pertaining to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. According to BBC reporter Mike Fox, Khalilzad “played an important part in developing the defense strategy of the Bush administration, both before and after the September the eleventh attacks.”

The need for more and more petroleum even impacted on America's security in other odd ways. Former FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill said in an interview with French authors Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, “(T)he main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.” Early in 2002, the former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani, put it bluntly when he stated, “[The] US has a strategic objective, which is to control the oil of the Caspian Sea and [thereby] to end dependence on the oil of the [Persian] Gulf.”

Of course, to challenge the oil and gas monopoly is to challenge the inner core leadership of Wall Street, the Council on Foreign Relations and other powerful interests, who have owned or controlled the federal government since before World War II. Until the American people gather the will to wean politicians off the oil spigot, this nation will continue to pursue a petroleum-based energy policy.