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October 23, 2001
Robert
Jensen
Crushing
Academic Dissent
October 22, 2001
Hamit
Dardagah
The
New Newspeak
Tom
Turnipseed
War
on the Poor
Patrick Cockburn
Killing
Mullah Omar's Child
David
Vest
The
War on Women
Shepherd
Bliss
Advice
from a Vietnam Vet
Hani
Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
October 21, 2001
Donald
Rumsfeld
The
al-Jazeera Interview
Mark
Scaramella
Nuclear
Anxiety
October 19, 2001
Mohammed
Sid-Ahmed
Bush's
Palestinian State
Michael
Colby
A
Mailroom Manifesto
October 18, 2001
Mahajan
and Jensen
Avoiding
a New Cold War
Patrick
Cockburn
US
Planes Pound Taliban
Jamey Hecht
Gerald Ford
and the CIA
Mokhiber
and Weisman
3
Arguments
Against This War
October 17, 2001
Ballinger
and Marsh
Music
and War Resistance
Steve
Perry
The
Anthrax Chronicles
Chris
Kromm
Operation
Infinite Disaster
Susan
Block
Sex
Not Bombs
David Vest
Osama Speaks
October 16, 2001
Steve
Perry
War
Without Frontiers
Douglas
Valentine
The
CIA and Anthrax
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Battle of Mazar-i-Sharif
John
Troyer
Return
to Normal?
Moji Agha
A
Jihad Against Ignorance
October
15, 2001
Tariq
Ali
Alternatives
to War
John
Pilger
War
American Style
Umberto
Eco
The
Roots of Conflict
Marwan
Bishara
Clash
of Civilizations? Hardly
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A Pocket Guide to
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October
23, 2001
War and Oil
America's Pipe Dream
By George Monbiot
"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 the regional
control and 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 10 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,
in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating 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 [the former US oil consortium 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 1,000-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 such plans no
longer figure 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.
American foreign policy is governed by
the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means
that the US should control military, economic and political
development worldwide. 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 cooperation organisation".
Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world
multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum
dominance.
If the US succeeds in overthrowing the
Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western
government and if the US 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 civilise
savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally
into their oil wells." I believe that the US government
is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military
force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we
would be naive to believe that this is all it is doing.
George Monbiot is a columnist for The Guardian. Visit his webpage
at http://www.monbiot.com
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