Posted on 10/04/2001 9:17:01 PM PDT by AM2000
It is ironical that Washington was courting the very force it is up against today for years in a bid to advance the commercial interests of US oil barons, writes Ishtiaq Ahmad
October 3
In the second week of December 1997, a Taliban delegation led by Mullah Muhammad Ghaus arrived at a five-star hotel in Houston, Texas. Their itinerary for the next few days included shopping at the city's best supermarkets; for which they did not show any particular interest, except that Mullah Ghaus bought a comb. However, the Taliban delegates were quite excited after visiting the zoo and the Nasa Space Centre. They also had dinner with Marty Miller, Vice-President if the US Oil Company UNOCAL, admiring his swimming pool and comfortable house.
Taliban's visit was reported by Reuters on 13 December, a day before the Sunday Telegraph carried a detailed story by Caroline Lees titled "Oil Barons Court Taliban in Texas".
UNOCAL was then competing with its Argentinean rival, Birdas, to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan. Taliban's sojourn to Texas as VIP guests was part of a series of attempts on the part of UNOCAL to woo Taliban towards its own pipeline project and forbid them from cutting a pipeline deal with Birdas. The same month, when the Taliban delegation visited Houston, another Taliban delegation was being hosted similarly by Birdas chiefs in Buenos Aires.
Before that, in February 1997, a delegation of Taliban leaders had flown to the UNOCAL headquarters at Sugarland, Texas, for a whirlwind of corporate hospitality and, two months later, the company opened a project office in Kandahar, the seat of Taliban power.
In this deceitful pipeline politics-inclusive of pleasure trips abroad by the turban-clad bearded leaders of Taliban, and much more-the competition was not restricted solely between commercial interests; the governments of regional states as well as the great powers were also dragged into what became known as the New Great Game.
As for the US government, it wanted UNOCAL to build the oil and gas pipelines from the Central Asian states to Pakistan through Afghanistan so that the vast untapped oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian and Caspian regions could be transported to markets in South Asia, South-East Asia, the Far East and the Pacific.
No surprise then that the very people who are being accused today by the United States as harbouring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network were courted by Washington for years in order to secure a commercial interest-the UNOCAL pipeline deal.
The Clinton administration ignored the rise of the Taliban from October 1994 onwards, with the active backing of its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. For political reasons as well, Washington did not object to the emergence of an inherently anti-Iran Sunni force in Afghanistan, which secured its first major victory against the then Afghan government of Burhanuddin Rabbani in September 1995, when the Herat province bordering Iran and Turkmenistan fell. For the next three years, between 1995 and 1998, especially after the fall of Kabul in September 1996, Clinton administration officials openly lobbied for the UNOCAL before Taliban authorities. That America ignored the rise of the Taliban and courted them on behalf of the US oil concerns led to a widespread perception in the regional media, also expressed officially by the anti-American Iranian regime, that the CIA was behind the Taliban movement.
It was only after the August 1998 bombing of the two US embassies in East Africa and the consequent cruise missile attack on the alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan of the Al-Qaida, the organization headed by Osama bin Laden-who allegedly master-minded the bombing of the embassies-that the US official contact with the Taliban was restricted, as per official US claims, to the provision of millions of dollars in humanitarian assistance and the visit of a number of US officials to Kabul until a couple of months before the September 11 terrorist strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As for UNOCAL, it took three months after the August 1998 terrorist act and US military response-that is, December 1998-to withdraw from the Cent-Gas consortium the US oil company itself had organized to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan's old Daulatabad gas field to Pakistan through Afghanistan.
In the Cent-Gas Consortium, UNOCAL held a 70 per cent stake, Saudi oil company Delta-Nimir 15 per cent, Russia's state-owned gas company Gazporm 10 per cent and the Turkmen state-owned company Turk-menrosgaz 5 per cent. In October 1997, after Gazporm left the Cent-Gas, the consortium was expanded, with UNOCAL's share reduced to 54.11 per cent, Delta 15 per cent, Turk-menrosgaz 7 per cent, Indonesia Petroleum (Japan) 7.22 per cent, CIECO Trans-Asia Gas Ltd (Japan) 7.22 per cent, Crescent Group (Pakistan) 3.89 per cent and Hyundai Ltd (South Korea) 5.56 per cent.
UNOCAL signed with the Turkmen authorities a second, even more ambitious agreement with wide appeal across the region. UNOCAL's Central Asian Oil Pipeline Project (CAOPP) envisaged a 1,050-mile oil pipeline from Chardzhou oil field in Turkmenistan to an oil terminal on Pakistan's coast.
Eventually in the battle for pipelines, both Birdas and UNOCAL eventually emerged as losers, but it happened in each case due to completely different factors.
Birdas was ditched not just by the government of Turkmenistan but also by UNOCAL, which was brought to the region in the first place by the Argentinean firm itself. For that, Birdas filed a $15 billion suit against UNOCAL, which it eventually lost. It also got a ruling passed against the Turkmen government from the International Chamber of Commerce against the Turkmen decision of freezing the company's assets and stopping its gas and oil exploration and extraction work in the country spanning year, but Turkmenistan's President Niyazov simply ignored the internationally binding ruling. Turkmenistan and Pakistan had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the pipeline with Birdas in March 1995 and a formal deal in July 1995.
The Argentinean oil firm also lost the battle because there was no official backing for it from the government of Argentina, at least not to the extent that UNOCAL enjoyed (which otherwise was not possible because Argentina is no match to the US). In addition, the cunning Taliban themselves played a "double game" while dealing with the two rival oil concerns.
Still, the Argentinean firm could have succeeded, since its officials, unlike the UNOCAL management, had apparently succeeded in convincing the Taliban by establishing a close rapport with their leaders and offering them attractive proposals. However, even though Birdas managed to conclude an agreement in November 1996 with the Taliban on the pipeline project, it faced difficulty in arranging the finances for the project due to the lack of political clout over the governmental authorities in Islamabad and Ashgabad, the Turkmen capital, and the financial losses it suffered after the Turkmen authorities reneged on their previous agreements with the company to extract oil and gas from the new Turkmen gas reserves such as at Yashlar as well as its failure to secure capital financing from an influential Saudi Prince having enormous influence over Taliban, Turki bin Faisal, the chief of Saudi intelligence.
As far as UNOCAL's failure is concerned, even though it had also secured a $2.5 billion pipeline deal with Taliban, Turkmenistan and Pakistan in May 1997, it failed to meet the two demands made by the Taliban with regard to the pipeline deal-that UNOCAL should simultaneously re-construct the country's infrastructure; and that the pipeline should be open for local consumption at some points within Afghanistan-the pre-conditions which Birdas promised to meet. The Taliban were not just interested in receiving rent for the pipeline route, which could be $100 million a year, but also to involve the oil companies in building roads, water supplies, telephone lines, and electricity power lines. Birdas had proposed to build an "open" line, which could also meet the local needs for natural gas. On the other hand, UNOCAL had proposed to build a "closed" pipeline pumping gas for export only.
More importantly, despite the fact that UNOCAL enjoyed the formal US backing for the said deal, the growing feminist pressure against the US oil company as a result of Taliban's treatment of women eventually seriously constrained the lobbying bids of Clinton administration officials before the Taliban. Lastly, the August 1998 terrorist attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the US cruise missile attack against Afghanistan sealed the fate of the UNOCAL pipeline deal.
After the blaze of UNOCAL's gas ambitions in Afghanistan in August 1998, the US, in principle, had no further interest in the fate of Afghanistan, beyond a burning desire to get bin Laden "dead or alive." The US bombing of bin Laden camps forced UNOCAL to pull out its staff from Pakistan and Kandahar and, finally in December 1998, it formally withdrew from the Cent-Gas Consortium.
Even though the project was all but over, Pakistan persisted in trying to keep it alive. In April 1999, at a meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Taliban-all guided by the need to earn finances through oil and gas exports or the royalty over oil and gas transportation- tried to revive the project and said they would look for a new sponsor for Cent-Gas, but by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding the peculiar factors resulting in the failure of both UNOCAL and Birdas, despite so much of time, energy and money spent by the two rivals on the pipeline politics, the fundamental reason for their failure was the absence of peace in Afghanistan. The United States was led to believe by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that a Taliban regime would be able to herald an era of stable peace in Afghanistan, which did not occur as the Northern Alliance never allowed Taliban to rule the country without any military challenge. Washington also misjudged the Taliban resolve on the human rights front, hoping they might soften their stand on women rights in the wake of the progress in the UNOCAL deal, and the millions of dollars of financial benefits for them it entailed. So did the UNOCAL, which had donated $900,000 to the Centre of Afghanistan Studies at the University of Omaha, Nebraska-and much more. The said Centre set up a training and humanitarian aid programme for the Afghans, opening a school in Kandahar, which began to train some 400 Afghan teachers, electricians, carpenters and pipe-fitters to help UNOCAL to lay the pipeline. This was in addition to millions of dollars of US official assistance to Taliban authorities as humanitarian assistance. The Bush administration contributed significantly to the humanitarian relief effort in Afghanistan in helping the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) prior to the September 11 tragedy.
As recently as July this year, Christina Rocca, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, met the Taliban officials in Islamabad and announced $43 million in food and shelter aid, brining to $124 the US contribution to the IDPs this year alone. Since the humanitarian assistance is spent by the Taliban, without any accountability, the renewed US contacts with the Taliban, including a visit by seven US officials to Kabul in late April preceded by another visit by three US officials earlier in that month, before the terror struck America on September 11 led to media speculations about a shift in the US policy away from a single-focus on the Osama issue towards an approach based on a cautious engagement with Taliban even as they were under stringent sanctions by Washington and the UN Security Council.
The US dealings with the Taliban, from their emergence in October 1994 to the August 1998 bombing of US embassies, leave little doubt as to why such speculations should not arise in response to renewed US contacts with the radical Islamic militia even if the official US explanation about such contacts is that they are guided by nothing but humanitarian concerns in Afghanistan.
When Kabul fell to Taliban in September 1996, the US State Department announced it would establish diplomatic relations with Taliban by sending a diplomat to Kabul. State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said the US found "nothing objectionable" in the steps taken by the Taliban to impose Islamic law. Senator Hank Brown, a supporter of the UNOCAL project, said, "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at least seems capable of developing a government in Kabul." As for the UNOCAL, its Vice -President Miller called the Taliban's success a "positive development."
After capturing Kabul, as Taliban started their northward military push, top US officials continued to pay regular visits to Kabul. They included former US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphel, her successor Karl Inderfurth, Deputy Secretary for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering, and the US ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. The US policy towards Afghanistan between the fall of Kabul until the November 1997 visit to Pakistan by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright seemed to by primarily motivated by commercial concerns involving the realization of the UNOCAL pipeline project. Tightening the noose around Iran could be a political goal, but it was also appeared to be motivated by the economic factor, as Tehran had also concluded a couple of gas supply deals with the Turkmen government involving European oil companies. Albright was the first US diplomat who came out categorically against the "despicable" attitude of Taliban on women rights; otherwise, all top US leaders visiting the region, particularly Kabul, since it came under Taliban's occupation, had spoken altogether different words about Taliban.
"We have an American company which is interested in building a pipeline from Turkmenistan through to Pakistan. This pipeline project will be very good for Pakistan and Afghanistan as it will not only offer job opportunities but also energy in Afghanistan," said Robin Raphel in Islamabad on 21 April 1996 soon after visiting Kabul. Later in the year, in October, she was in Kabul once again for a week, and after returning from there, she told presspersons in Islamabad that the international community should "engage the Taliban" instead of "isolating them."
Inderfurth, who succeeded Raphel in July 1997, was quoted by the Washington Post on 12 January 1998, even after Medeleine Albright's remarks about the Taliban, as saying: "We do believe they (Taliban) can modify their behaviour and take into account certain international standards with respect to women's rights to education and employment."
Bill Richardson was the highest-ranking US diplomat to visit Afghanistan since Henry Kissinger. During his visit in April 1998-six months before the US embassies were attacked and two months after Al-Qaida issued a declaration of jihad to "kill the Americans and their allies-civilian and military"-the US ambassador to the UN was reported to have offered US recognition of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in exchange for the handing over of Osama bin Laden to the United States. Since then, even after the US embassies bombing in August 1998, Taliban maintained their official contacts with the State Department through their representatives based in Washington, urging the US administration that it should recognize their government since they were now in control of over 90 percent of Afghanistan-meaning they were in a position to provide a safe and secure environment to the American oil concerns. It was only after the passing of the stringent UN Security Council resolutions in December last year that they were asked to leave the United States, as the sanctions imposed a ban on international travel of Taliban officials.
Now, as the United States prepares for military action against Taliban, in reaction to the September 11 acts of terrorism in the US and the alleged involvement of Taliban's "guest Osama bin Laden in them, it looks ironical that the very force Washington is up against today was being courted by it for years in a bid to advance the commercial interests of US oil barons. Whether the US military action occurs or not, President Bush, who himself has had huge stakes in the US oil business, might like to have a broad-based government in Afghanistan that is prepared to work with his administration in realizing an oil and gas pipeline project from Central Asia through with South Asia viable to toe its official line, then it might not face the same difficulty in advancing the commercial interests of oil companies such as UNOCAL in the pipeline politics of Central Asia.
(The author is a Pakistani journalist-turned academic, currently lecturing in International Relations at the Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus)
I see that the author threw in the adjective 'deceitful' in describing the early meetings between the Taliban and Unocal, as if it had some sort of relevance to the subject at hand, which it doesn't.
Isn't UNOCAL giving them a big enough cut?
They don't believe in paying interest (usury) - is that the problem?
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