Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

A third big U.S. project in Central Asia has been proposed: dual oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan south through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan. Support for this enterprise appears to have been a major consideration in the Bush administration’s decision to attack Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. The Taliban government in Afghanistan had so blocked development of the pipelines under American auspices that removal of the Taliban became the secret casus belli of the “war on terrorism” following the attacks of September 11, 2001. As the journalist Patrick Martin has commented, “If history had skipped over September 11 and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.” 37

The original idea of tapping the vast gas reserves of Turkmenistan belongs to Carlos Bulgheroni, the hard-driving, ambitious chairman of the Argentine company Bridas, the third-largest oil and gas company in Latin America. In 1993, he negotiated an agreement with President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan and Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister of Pakistan, to build separate oil and gas pipelines across Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar. Bridas was, however, not big enough to cover all the costs, estimated at $2 billion for the 918-mile natural gas line and $4 billion for the 1,005-mile oil line, and so sought to create a consortium with the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal). Notorious and often in legal trouble for its flouting of environmental regulations in California, its collaboration in an oil deal with the murderous generals of Burma, and its indifference to the human rights of its employees in its many oil concessions, Unocal was so attracted to the idea that it went directly to Turkmenistan and Pakistan and negotiated a new agreement that froze Bridas out. Bulgheroni promptly sued Unocal in a Texas court for the theft of his idea, but the case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. Having learned that bigness matters, Bridas, in 1997, merged with the giant American company Amoco and the following year Amoco merged with British Petroleum, producing Britain’s largest company. But by then BP-Amoco was no longer interested in what was becoming one of the riskiest oil ventures of modern times.

The problem, of course, was the endless civil war in fragmented Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s, Unocal needed a government in Kabul it could deal with in obtaining transit rights. Moreover, the international financing necessary to build such pipelines would not be forthcoming until the United Nations, the United States, and many other nations had a government in the Afghan capital to recognize. In this context, the United States and Pakistan decided that an unusual offshoot of the anti-Soviet mujahideen (“freedom fighters”) of the 1980s was their best bet to end the war and obtain international legitimacy. They sponsored and supported a new organization calling itself the Taliban (Students of Islam). It would be hard to overstate the disasters that have befallen Afghanistan as a result of the “help” it has received from Americans, including the creation and subsequent destruction of the Taliban. During the almost decade-long Soviet military occupation of that country and our recruitment and arming of Islamic militants from around the world to fight the Russians, one-third of the population fled the country. (At one point, Pakistan and Iran sheltered more than six million Afghan refugees, and even in 1999, some 1.2 million Afghan refugees remained in Pakistan and about 1.4 million in Iran.) After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 and until Unocal came along, Afghanistan spiraled downward into one of the most brutal civil wars of modern times, becoming in the process by far the world’s largest producer of opium poppies. Narcotics trafficking became its major source of revenue.

The Taliban, composed mostly of ethnic Pushtuns from around Kandahar, launched a war against the hopelessly corrupt Tajik and Uzbek warlords of the “Northern Alliance.” War-weary Afghans often supported Taliban victories because its fundamentalist leaders did at least stamp out corruption, restore law and order (even if the law was an extreme version of medieval Islamic practice), and allow some semblance of normality to return to parts of the country. On September 27, 1996, the Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, and continued to drive the warlords north toward the borders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Both Unocal and the U.S. government were convinced that they could work with the Taliban and that its harsh treatment of women and criminals was no worse than that of America’s Afghan allies during the 1980s.

The United States began to help in every way it could. Deployments of American troop trainers to various Central Asian republics from 1997 on was a signal that Unocal, the American entry in the race for pipeline rights, was the company to back. Even after the Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996 as a “guest” of the Taliban and after al-Qaeda’s attacks of August 7, 1998, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, neither the Clinton nor the Bush State Departments ever designated Afghanistan a terrorist-sponsoring nation, since that would have ended any possibility of international funding for the pipelines. Both administrations were willing to accept the Taliban regime, despite its sponsorship of terrorism, so long as it cooperated with plans to develop the oil and gas resources of Central Asia.

A remarkable group of Washington insiders came together to promote the Unocal project. Unocal itself hired former national security adviser Henry Kissinger as a consultant in its negotiations with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Kissinger then worked with Turkmenistan’s chief consultant, General Alexander Haig, his former assistant in the White House and later Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. (Amoco, meanwhile, hired another former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had helped instigate the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s.) Unocal also paid for the services of Robert Oakley, a former U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a former ambassador to Pakistan, Zaire, and Somalia. 38

Most creatively, Unocal employed two well-connected Afghans to help influence the Taliban in its favor—a naturalized U.S. citizen, Zalmay Khalilzad, a Pushtun with a 1979 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and Hamid Karzai, a Pushtun from Kandahar with links to the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah, then living in Quetta, Pakistan. In 1991 and 1992, George Bush Senior had appointed Khalilzad deputy undersecretary of defense for policy planning, working under Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he became closely associated. While at the Pentagon Khalilzad was also noticed by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who in 2001 named him to head the Bush Junior transition team for defense. On May 23, 2001, President Bush appointed Khalilzad to the National Security Council staff working under Condoleezza Rice, and on December 31, 2001, Khalilzad became the United States’s “special envoy” (that is, unofficial ambassador) to Afghanistan only nine days after the U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul. In 1996, Khalilzad and Karzai were both pro-Taliban, thinking of the new government as Unocal’s best hope for “stability.” In November of the following year, Khalilzad participated in a major Unocal effort to entertain and impress a delegation of Taliban officials whom the company had invited to its engineering headquarters in Houston (with a side trip to the NASA Space Center thrown in). The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains as interested in oil as in terrorism in that region. 39