Oil politics in Central Asia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The New Great Game: Oil Politics in Central Asia
Ted Rall, AlterNet October 11, 2001

Nursultan Nazarbayev has a terrible problem. He's the president and
former Communist Party boss of Kazakhstan, 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
Kazakhstan 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.)

Kazakhstan'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 Kazakh state art
museum trying to move enough socialist realist paintings for a dollar
each to keep the lights on. The average Kazakh earned $20 a month;
those unwilling or unable to steal died of gangrene adjacent 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 last decade trying to
get his land-locked oil out to sea. Once the oil starts flowing, it
won't take long before Kazakhstan replaces Kuwait as the land of
Benzes and ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the more
expensive and vulnerable to sabotage it is. The shortest route runs
through Iran, but Kazakhstan is too closely aligned with the U.S. to
offend it by cutting a deal with Teheran. Russia has helpfully
offered to build a line connecting Kazakh oil rigs to the Black Sea,
but neighboring Turkmenistan has experienced trouble with the
Russians: they tend to divert the oil for their own uses without
paying for it. There's even a plan to run crude out through China,
but the proposed 5,300-mile line 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 Kazakh field on the
Caspian 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 2000 book
"Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,"
the U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime 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 U.S. State Department and
Pakistan's ISI intelligence service agreed to funnel arms and funding
to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern
Alliance. It has been reported that 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 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 terror 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 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 more than
6,000 Americans on September 11, Washington's patience with its
former client finally expired.

Finally the Bushies had the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had
wanted all along: invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime
in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 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 terror attacks on the U.S. 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. And 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 tolerate 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 clichi, it's only boring because
it's true.

Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, has
traveled extensively throughout Central Asia. Most recently, in 2000,
he went to Turkmenistan as a guest of the U.S. State Department.


--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 10/13/2001

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org


=======
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message