Ted Rall: The New Great Game: Oil Politics in Central Asia

[Doug Millison]

I haven't seen this in the mainstream press yet. Rail seems to have
reasonable credentials:  "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. " For Pynchon relevance, you might consider re-reading the GR
passages re oil, especially the scenes set in Baku.  This one's personally
interesting to me, too; I have relatives in the oil exploration business in
Kazakhstan.
-Doug


The New Great Game: Oil Politics in Central Asia
Ted Rall, AlterNet
October 11, 2001

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 adjacent 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 2000 book "Taliban:
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," the U.S. and
Pakistan decided to install a stable regime 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 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 11, Washington's patience with its former
client finally expired.


Finally the Bushies had the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had 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 tolerate 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.