The New Great Game

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 while sitting on the sidewalk next 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 book Taliban, published last year, the U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime into place 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. 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 back 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 11th, Washington's patience with its former client finally expired.

Finally the Bushies have the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. has 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 stand 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 cliché, 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.

Rall, GFY -- or better yet, eat strychnine. If you think you deserve a more thoughtful response, think again.

Not directed at you, GFlash.

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.

Hey man, gas is $0.99 at a lot of places, maybe less in some.

Why Rall gets the play he does -- cartoons in magazines like Foreign Policy and the major weeklies -- is beyond me as he's not much different than a tin-foiler.

I wonder if he's got some sense knocked in to him with his recent trip to Afghanistan when the Tailban reporter killers were pounding on his door in the middle of the night. He reported for KFI radio in LA (and other stations) and he sounded very scared in his reports.

As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his book Taliban, published last year, the U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime into place 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. 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.

It's a great big whopping lie that Ted is telling. I've read Rashid's Taliban, and it's an excellent book. It also does not say what Rall says it does.

Firstly, the US State Department did not agree "to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban." Rather, the ISI did, for its own reasons; the US knew about it, but didn't then care one way or the other. Rall interprets inaction as active support -- probably because it fits in with his basely cynical worldview.

Secondly, the statement that "as recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official" is just plain sloppy. Rall is conflating two separate issues: ISI payments to the Taliban per se, and American humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The two had nothing to do with one another. The humanitarian aid was provided for two reasons: food subsidies, and alternative-crop subsidies for poppy farmers. It's true that the Taliban diverted a great deal of the money from this ill-conceived program -- but that's hardly the same thing as buying them off for the sake of a pipeline.

Rall is taking a legitimate authority (Rashid) and, hoping that the rest of us won't read him, twisting him to his own ends. But this Freeper knows the named source, and so I am happy to report that Ted Rall is once again showing himself a cynical liar.

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.

Not only what you said, but if you look at the map, the shortest route to the sea is through Russia, not Iran. It's only a few hundered miles accross the Volga and down the Don river valley to the Black Sea, not a 1000 miles over the Hindu-Kush. Rhal is either full of crap or doesn't know his geography. As to Russian 'skiming', does he think the other 'stans' a pipeline would need to run through to reach the Arabian Sea wouldn't do the same or worse?

Map of Central Asia

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