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It's about oil
By Ted Rall
Friday, November 2, 2001,
San Francisco Chronicle
New York -- NURSULTAN NAZARBAYEV has a terrible problem.
He's the president and former Communist Party boss of
Kazakstan, the second-largest republic of the former
Soviet Union. A few years ago, the giant country struck
oil in the eastern portion of the Caspian Sea.
Geologists estimate that sitting beneath the wind-blown
steppes of Kazakstan are 50 billion barrels of oil -- by
far the biggest untapped reserves in the world. (Saudi
Arabia, currently the world's largest oil producer, is
believed to have about 30 billion barrels remaining.)
Kazakstan's Soviet-subsidized economy collapsed
immediately after independence in 1991. When I visited
the then-capital, Almaty, in 1997, I was struck by the
utter absence of elderly people. One after another,
people confided that their parents had died of
malnutrition during the brutal winters of 1993 and 1994.
Middle-class residents of a superpower had been reduced
to abject poverty virtually overnight; thirtysomething
women who appeared sixtysomething hocked their wedding
silver in underpasses, next to reps for the Kazak state
art museum trying to move enough socialist-realist
paintings for a dollar each to keep the lights on. The
average Kazak earned $20 a month; those unwilling or
unable to steal died of gangrene while sitting on the
sidewalk next to long- winded tales of woe written on
cardboard.
Autocrats tend to die badly during periods of downward
mobility. Nazarbayev, therefore, has spent most of the
past decade trying to get his landlocked oil out to sea.
Once the oil starts flowing, it won't take long before
Kazakstan replaces Kuwait as the land of Mercedes-Benzs
and ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the
more expensive and vulnerable it is to sabotage. The
shortest route runs through Iran, but Kazakstan is too
closely aligned with the United States to offend it by
cutting a deal with Tehran. Russia has helpfully offered
to build a line connecting Kazak oil rigs with the Black
Sea, but neighboring Turkmenistan has experienced
trouble with the Russians -- they tend to divert the oil
for their own use without paying for it. There's even a
plan to run crude through China, but the proposed 5,300-
mile-long pipeline would be far too long to prove
profitable.
The logical alternative, then, is Unocal's plan, which
is to extend Turkmenistan's existing system west to the
Kazak field on the Caspian Sea and southeast to the
Pakistani port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. That
project runs through Afghanistan.
As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his
book "Taliban," published last year, the United States
and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in place
in Afghanistan around 1994 -- a regime that would end
the country's civil war and thus ensure the safety of
the Unocal pipeline project. Impressed by the
ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging
Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and
Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence agency agreed to
funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war
against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As
recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual
salary of every single Taliban government official, all
in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a-
gallon gas. Pakistan, naturally, would pick up revenues
from a Karachi oil port facility. Harkening back to 19th
century power politics between Russia and British India,
Rashid dubbed the struggle for control of post-Soviet
Central Asia "the new Great Game."
Predictably, the Taliban Frankenstein got out of
control. The regime's unholy alliance with Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, their penchant for
invading their neighbors and their production of 50
percent of the world's opium made them unlikely partners
for the desired oil deal.
Then-President Bill Clinton's August 1998 cruise missile
attack on Afghanistan briefly brought the Taliban back
into line -- they even eradicated opium poppy
cultivation in less than a year -- but they nonetheless
continued supporting countless militant Islamic groups.
When an Egyptian group whose members had trained in
Afghanistan hijacked four airplanes and used them to
kill thousands of Americans on September 11,
Washington's patience with its former client finally
expired.
Finally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what
the United States has wanted to do all along -- invade
and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul.
Realpolitik no more cares about the thousands of dead
than it concerns itself with oppressed women in
Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is
solely about getting the Unocal deal done without
interference from annoying local middlemen.
Central Asian politics, however, is a house of cards:
every time you remove one element, the whole thing comes
crashing down. Muslim extremists in both Pakistan and
Afghanistan, for instance, will support additional
terrorist attacks on the United States to avenge the
elimination of the Taliban. A U.S.- installed Northern
Alliance can't hold Kabul without an army of occupation
because Afghan legitimacy hinges on capturing the
capital on your own. Even if we do this the right way by
funding and training the Northern Alliance so that they
can seize power themselves, Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun
government will never stand the replacement of their
Pashtun brothers in the Taliban by Northern Alliance
Tajiks. Without Pakistani cooperation, there's no
getting the oil out and there's no chance for stability
in Afghanistan.
As Bush would say, "make no mistake": this is about oil.
It's always about oil. And to twist a late '90s cliche,
it's only boring because it's true.
Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist, has
traveled extensively throughout Central Asia. In 2000,
he went to Turkmenistan as a guest of the State
Department. His latest book is "2024: A Graphic Novel"
(NBM Books, May 2001).
