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Pipedream: The Fallacy of Oil Interests As the Motivation for Military Action Against the Taliban and Al QaedaLeo Casey A commentary published by the British anti-war activist George Monbiot in "The Guardian", "America's Pipe Dream," is making the rounds of Internet listservs as a demonstration of the claim that oil interests underlie the current military action in Afghanistan. Monbiot's commentary is, to date, the most complete argument for this claim, which has become a staple of the fundamentalist dogma that passes for anti-war and anti-imperialist discourse in some circles these days. As I show below, Monbiot's piece is filled with misstatements of fact, groundless speculation and unsupported conclusions. It provides a clinic on the refusal of "anti-war" and "anti-imperialist" fundamentalist leftists in North America and Europe to verify the simplest claims, as well as their willingness to suspend critical thinking faculties in discussions of the current military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. What follows is an outline of why the Monbiot commentary does not sustain the case that the U.S. government has a major geo-political strategic and economic interest in Afghanistan as a result of Caspian Sea oil and gas. Let us make clear, from the start, that Afghanistan itself has no meaningful oil or natural gas resources, so it could not be of geo-political and economic strategic importance in that regard. The entire argument hinges on the centrality of Afghanistan in getting the Caspian oil and natural gas to market, especially the East Asian and European markets. Background InformationThe Caspian Sea is in central Asia, surrounded by three former, Moslem majority republics of the Soviet Union [Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan], the Russian Federation and Iran. Significant oil and gas deposits have been located in the Caspian Sea, concentrated off-shore of the three former Soviet republics in the southern Caspian. There are some legal issues concerning the status of the Caspian Sea, with Iran and Russia making claims that it should be able exploit deposits which are more than 12 miles off-shore of the three former Soviet republics, but those disputes are not central to the questions we are examining here. Estimates of the actual oil resources in the region range from 90 to 200 billion barrels, and estimates of the natural gas resources range from 8 to 16 trillion cubic meters. Some analysts suggest that in combination, these resources may be on the order of those in the Persian Gulf area [Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates]. That these oil and gas resources make the Caspian Sea region an area of major geo-political and economic strategic importance is universally recognized and acknowledged. What is at issue here is whether or not it makes additional states outside of the region, such as Afghanistan, of similar importance. There is a wealth of information on the Internet, as well as print publications, on this topic, and it is symptomatic of the level of discourse that none of it is referenced in this Internet discussion. For those of you who prefer one stop shopping, I recommend the collection published by the German social democratic Ebert foundation, loosely aligned with the German Social Democratic Party, A Great Game No More: Oil, Gas and Stability in the Caspian Sea Region The Role of Caspian Sea Oil in the Balkan Conflict, which covers all of the essential facets of the issue. As this report documents, the key issue is the location of oil and gas pipelines out of the Caspian Sea, as the transit countries will clearly have a share of the considerable profits, as well as a steady supply of oil and natural gas. The Pipeline RoutesMonbiot's claim that the only route for a Caspian Sea pipeline which "makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan" is entirely unsupported by the available evidence. To the contrary, it is generally seen as the option with the most economic and political shortcomings. In contradistinction to the way in which Monbiot portrays the issue, most of the emphasis in U.S. governmental circles has focused on preferred routes to the West, through the Caucuses and concluding at a Black Sea or Mediterranean port. One proposal is to upgrade an already existing pipeline that begins in the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, and go through Georgia to its port of Supsa on the Black Sea. The difficulties with that route is that it would have to pass through the South Ossetia region of Georgia, with its Abkhazi separatists who have done a great deal of damage to the existing, small capacity pipeline, and that it would increase tanker traffic through the already vastly overused and ecologically endangered Bosporus. An alternative, most strongly backed by the U.S. and its regional allies Turkey and Israel, would be to run another pipeline from Baku to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. [In both of the western routes, a trans-Caspian pipeline would feed Kazakh and Turkmen gas and oil into this pipeline's head at Baku, which would add environmental hazards to the sea.] This pipeline would be shorter and less expensive if it ran through Armenia, and Turkey originally proposed that route, but ongoing war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nogorno-Karabakh enclave make that option rather unlikely at this point. The U.S. government contributed a small amount of seed money to the companies planning this route in 1998, but the project has not yet got off the ground at this point. The companies involved in this project complain about the Turkish government's inability to follow through on its commitments. Another possibility, but viewed negatively by the U.S. government, is a northern, all Russian route, hooking up with some pre-existing Russian pipelines. [Monbiot treats the western route as if it were part of the northern route, which is a complete misrepresentation of the options.] This would give the Russian federation considerable control not only over the oil and gas, but over the future of the Central Asia and Caucuses regions as well. This option has been opposed not only by the U.S. and its primary allies in the region, Turkey and Israel, but also by those states themselves, which do not want to be dependent upon a Russia which would be reasserting its hegemony in the area. As well, such a pipeline would have to pass through the Russian regions of Chechyna and Dagestan, Islamic majority republics within the Russian Federation which have been fighting a bloody and bitter war for their independence. The pipeline would be an obvious target for Chechynan and Dagestan rebels as long as the war continues, and if either republic won its independence, it would have to be part of whatever arrangement was reached regarding the pipeline. In many ways, the most sensible route would be to the south, through Iran. It would be the cheapest to build: although somewhat longer than the pipeline to Supsa, it would not have to pass through mountainous terrain, and it would not pose an environmental hazard. Significant pipe and port infrastructure already exist. The significant downside is that this would increase the world's reliance upon the oil and gas out of the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz, unless the pipeline was extended to the port of Jask on the Gulf of Oman. As well, there are constant tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan, as Iran has twice as many Azeris in its north as live in Azerbaijan proper, and it fears an Azeri separatist movement; the Azerbaijan government favors the western, as opposed to the southern, routes. While large oil companies generally favor the southern pipeline option on economic, cost-benefit grounds, the U.S. government has opposed it due to its historical antipathy to the Shi'ite Islamic regime in Iran. To the east, China has entered into a contract with Kazakhstan to build a 2000 mile long pipeline from Kazakh wells to China, but this is an extremely expensive venture which China is likely to complete only if it continues to view the Kazakh option as a strategic imperative. And China has its own ethnic problem with the large Muslim, Turkic minority which dominates in its western regions, astride the pipeline route. Finally to the southeast, there is the option of a pipeline through from Turkmenistan and possibly Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan to Pakistan. This would be the longest and most expensive of all pipelines, excepting the one to China which is not commercially viable, and it would have to pass through some difficult and mountainous terrain in Afghanistan. UNOCAL, a California based oil company, was promoting the possibility of this pipeline until the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance placed it politically out of bounds following the bombing of the American embassies in Africa. But even before the enmity between the Taliban and the U.S. broke out, the Taliban was fighting an internal civil war with an alliance based in minority ethnic groups, and was also in severe conflict with its neighbor Iran, in no small part because of its persecution of the Shi'ite Hazaras living in its western regions adjacent to Iran. While the southeastern route would be closest to the booming south and east Asian market for oil, it is not significantly closer than the southern route. The Strategic OptionsGiven the political instability which is endemic throughout these regions -- the most stable of all the governments discussed here are in Turkey and Iran, and neither of them is particularly strong in that regard -- geo-political and economic strategy has to involve a "hedging" of bets. It is simply too high a risk strategy to place "all of your eggs in one basket." That is why one sees an effort in public policy debates, reflected in the strategic literature, to force the U.S. government to broach an opening to Iran that would result in a southern as well as a western pipeline option. What is clear from a review of that literature is how minor a role calculations about a possible southeastern pipeline through Afghanistan play in the Caspian Sea thinking of key U.S. governmental and corporate figures. Consider, for example, the following two pieces, the first, US Policy Toward Central Asia and the South Caucuses, written by William Odom, director of National Security Studies at the Hudson Institute who serves as a general in the U.S. Army, during which time he was a director of the National Security Agency, and the second, Geopolitical Dynamics in the Caspian Region, written by Graham Fuller, a senior RAND Corporation figure who served as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council when he worked for the CIA. So far from being the only route which makes both political and economic sense, as Monbiot claims, the southeastern pipeline through Afghanistan was a distant, barely mentioned third -- well behind a western pipeline, which had the support of key foreign policy figures in the U.S. government, and a southern pipeline, which had the support of key corporate figures in the oil industry. This estimation is also present in the news media reports of these matters in the last few years, as evinced in the following 1997 and 1998 reports on the PBS Newhour and in Time Magazine. [Online NewsHour: Pumping Oil Out of the Central Asia -- September 18, 1997; TIME: The Rush for Caspian Oil.] Oil Interests and The Fundamentalist LeftThe military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda is not the first time the "anti-war" and "anti-imperialist" fundamentalist left in North America and Europe has trotted out the argument that oil interests lay behind U.S. military action. During 1999 NATO intervention in Kosova, opponents of that effort to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars and to being to a halt all of the genocidal campaigns of the Milosevic regime made the argument then that the real motivation was oil. Kosova, and for that matter, all of the Balkans, are like Afghanistan in that they possess no significant oil and gas deposits of their own. But that did not prevent figures such as Noam Chomsky's frequent co-author, Ed Herman, and former In These Times European correspondent Diana Johnstone from making arguments that U.S. oil interests -- and not an attempt to stop ethnic cleansing -- were at the root of the NATO intervention. How do you get from the Caspian Sea to Kosova? Well, Diana Johnstone writes [The Role of Caspian Sea Oil in the Balkan Conflict ], even though U.S. officials "'have been exerting just about every form of persuasion at their disposal to persuade the oil companies to choose a route that would run from Azerbaijan, down through Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan,' it appears that the companies will rely on a much shorter pipeline already being built from Azerbaijan to the port of Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast." This, she says, raises the environmental dangers of shipping through the Bosporus, so the solution would be to ship to Bulgaria on the western end of the Black Sea, and then run another pipeline down through the Balkans to Greece ports. In this convoluted scenario, which is never entertained as even a remote possibility in the discussions of government and corporate figures, the Balkans suddenly became of great strategic importance for the marketing of Caspian Sea oil and gas thousands of miles away. In a review of the text, Oil and Geopolitics in the Caspian Sea Region, Andre Gunder Frank [JWSR v7n1 Review Essay - Frank - Caspian Sea Oil - Still The Great Game For Central Eurasia] made similar claims regarding the intervention in Kosova. Those arguments bordered on the absurd then, and there are no more plausible when they are flipped thousands of miles in the other direction into Afghanistan. The U.S. and Europe do have real oil interests in the Middle East and in Central Asia, and at least one major war of recent memory, the Persian Gulf War, was fought in no small part over those interests. But the attempt to translate every military intervention by the U.S. and NATO into the pursuit of oil interests, no matter how outlandish the purported connection, just undermines the credibility of arguments that point to such interests when they are present. At the end of day, Ockham's razor still holds, and the best explanation for most actions is the simplest and most straightforward: the Persian Gulf War was fought to stop Iraq from gaining control over the vital Persian Gulf oil, the intervention in Kosova was a long overdue action to put a halt to genocidal ethnic cleansing in the nations of the former Yugoslavia, and military action in Afghanistan is an effort to put to an end the serial mass murders conducted by Al Qaeda, with Taliban support. ****************************************************************************** The war against terrorism is also a struggle for oil and regional control By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd October 2001 "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 regional control and the 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 ten 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, the US oil company Unocal has been seeking since 1995 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 [a US oil consortium which worked 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 1000-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 a reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures 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. This is not the only long-term US interest in Afghanistan. American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the United States should control military, economic and political development all over the world. 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 Co-operation Organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.
If the United States succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing it with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if it 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 civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the United States 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 |
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