Interessant om USAs motiver i Afghanistan.
Trond Andresen
>America's pipe dream
>
>A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for
>Caspian oil
>
>George Monbiot
>Tuesday October 23, 2001
>The Guardian
>
>"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here,"
>Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that
>does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial
>and commercial rivalry?" In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded
>Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no.
>But the lessons of war never last for long.
>
>The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against
>terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British
>ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral
>equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral
>choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan
>is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in
>central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East. Afghanistan has some
>oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major
>strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain
>reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998,
>Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a
>major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when
>we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically
>significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless
>until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and
>economic sense is through Afghanistan.
>
>Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or
>Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic
>control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the
>west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran
>would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate.
>Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the
>strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But
>pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its
>aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most
>lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and
>competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming
>and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in
>Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than
>pumping it west and selling it in Europe.
>
>As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company
>Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from
>Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the
>Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in
>Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon
>after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph
>reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a
>pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close
>political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban,
>and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of
>Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to
>Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested
>paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas
>it pumped through the land they had conquered.
>
>For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime
>appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In
>1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop
>like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil
>consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and
>lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy began to change
>only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both
>Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.
>
>Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among
>war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February
>1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told
>representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and
>sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only
>other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan
>government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped
>to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a
>day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in
>east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.
>
>But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September,
>a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information
>administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an
>energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential
>transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to
>the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of
>oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that
>the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we
>would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its
>strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out,
>the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the
>possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the
>development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline
>carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied
>concern.
>
>American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum
>dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic
>and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking
>to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper
>Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental
>interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new
>regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four
>central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation".
>Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world
>multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum
>dominance.
>
>If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them
>with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then
>binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it
>will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions
>of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the
>western domination of Asia.
>
>We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be
>deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the
>plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by
>attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations
>describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote
>in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny,
>murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high
>mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims
>while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and
>senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their
>oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its
>attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan,
>however misguided that may be. But we would be naïve to believe that
>this is all it is doing.#
>
>www.monbiot.com
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