[robbinsj]

"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."

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!