Who cares whether Unocal wants to pipe oil from Iran to Pakistan via Afghanistan?
The people who dredge up this old history make it sound nefarious, like we (the U.S.) went to war in Afghanistan because we the American people or George W. Bush wants to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. It's idiotic. We could care less.
The successful completion of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) route from the Kazakh Tengiz field near the Caspian Sea to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossisk and the subsequent shipping of oil from there since March of 2001 has made all the Afghanistan oil pipeline talk merely the mullings of conspiracy advocates.
The current position of the U.S. government in regard to a second pipeline from the Caspian oil fields is that "we" want it to tranverse Turkey and not Iran.
The maneuvering going on now has to do with interested parties bordering the Caspian who want in on the immense riches of this new oil field in Kazahkstan to try to have the Caspian Sea declared to be a "lake" so they can invoke rules governing lakes instead of laws governing seas.
Actually the CPC pipeline started shipping oil in late September, 2001.
As for the BTC pipeline, it is only a pipe dream unless the U.S. subsidizes the oil companies to use the route. Possible, considering the U.S. military security indirect subsidy of Gulf oil.
Another factor is that Russia is currently "intercepting" Azerbajani oil in exchange for natural gas. Thus, any oil to fill the 1.5 million barrel/day BTC pipeline must come from Kazakhstan which has not agreed to the BTC deal. Furthermore, the oil consortium that controls most of the Kazakhstan oil is managed by EIN (Italy) and TOTAL (France-Belgium-Lux). We shall see if this oil comes to America or is used to fill European gas tanks.
The U.S. focus will be to first complete the AMBO pipeline to the Albanian deep water port to ship Chevron oil to the U.S. The KLA support by the Klinton and Bush administrations may partially be tied to the oil potential in offshore Albania (1-3 billion barrels) which could be shipped from the same terminal.
As for Afghanistan, I suspect the Unical is out of the picture and BP will direct the pipeline construction projects. Interesting that Brandas of Argentina is now a subsidary of BP and the ISAF forces are mainly British!