Prior to September 11 th many Americans did not know where the country of
Afghanistan was or the significance of the now demolished Taliban regime that
was ruling it. Ironically Afghanistan, a mountainous country located in the
heart of Central Asia, has been a main focus of the government
since the Soviet invasion. Ever since then, the United States has been funding
fundamentalism in the region, either through Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, in order
to keep it under control for future United States exploitation. Due to it”s
strategic positioning for transportation of oil, Afghanistan, mainly through the
use of the Taliban, has been one of the many victims of United State”s foreign
policy.
> The Soviet invasion was the United State”s first interference in
Afghanistan”s affairs. In order to stop the communist expansion through the
region, it developed the Afghan Mujaheddin (as resistance), funded and
administered by the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Government, in the name of Jihad, or holy-war.
(web) The United States also wanted
to keep Afghanistan from going under the control of the Soviets in order to have
access to the land for future purposes. After the war, however, the United
States left Afghanistan and the damages behind. Included in these damages were
the group of people we now know as the Taliban, a group of deracinated fanatics
bred in Pakistan. (web) The Taliban consisted of Pakistani and
Afghan children left over from the Soviet invasion that were trained in
religious schools, or ”madressas”, in Pakistan.
> Acclaimed Pakistani historian and novelist Tariq Ali explains the
United State”s role in the creation of the Taliban.
> It has to be said that the United States and Saudi Arabia were fully involved
in the funding and financing of these schools. I mean, the United States used
Saudi as a conduit to do it. (web)
> Contrary to popular belief, the Taliban are not true Afghans that
were born within the culture, they are merely a group of young boys that were
raised militaristic ally, with a strong emphasis on seventh century Islam that is
ten times more constrained than the Saudi version. (web) Another
Pakistani journalist captures the Taliban”s outlook vividly.
> These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know
during the 1980”s- men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages,
remember their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recounted legends
and stories from Afghan history. These boys were from a generation who had never
seen their country at peace.
They had no memories of their tribes, their elders,
their neighbours, nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples they could possibly
adapt to. Their simple belief in messianic, puritan Islam was the only prop they
could hold onto which gave their lives some meaning. (Rashid, 2000, p. 106)
> Afghanistan was recognized for it’s strategic positioning near the
Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan, the sources of ten percent of the worlds oil and
gas reserves, and the United States wanted to tap into
these. (web)
> The Caspian is the centre of the last great oil rush of this
century, laps across a huge mine, liquid gold. Some 200 billion bbl.
, or ten
percent of the earth”s potential oil reserves, which cost at today”s prices up
to US$4 trillion. Turkmenistan has ranked the fourth largest natural gas reserve
in the world. (web)
> For gas exporters, the prices rise as the pipeline is lengthened,
and the shortest way to get the gas and oil from the Caspian region is through
Afghanistan. (web) Afghanistan, however, was not stable enough
for the building of a pipeline, and that”s why the project was postponed until
the mid-nineties, when the Pakistani and United States governments decided to
throw in the Taliban in hopes for political stability in the region. (Personal
communication, February 8, 2002)
> In 1994, the United States State Department and Pakistan’s
Inter-services Intelligence agency sought to install a stable regime in
Afghanistan to enhance the prospects for Western oil pipelines. They financed,
armed and trained the Taliban in its civil war against the Northern Alliance.
(web)
>This following quote gives a more in- depth illustration of how the United
States gave support to the Taliban and some advantages of it.
> For much of the 1990”s the United States supported the Taliban”s rise to
power, both by encouraging the involvement of US oil companies, and by
implicitly tolerating Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two of it”s key regional
allies, in their direct financial and military support for the Taliban. The
Taliban, which is committed to a particularly primitive version of Islam, had
the added advantage for the US of being deeply hostile to Shia Muslims in
neighbouring Iran. (web)
> As early as 1995, California- based Unocal proposed the construction
of an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan, south through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to
the Arabian Sea. ( web)
> Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan agreed in 1997
to build a large Central Asian Gas pipeline through the less mountainous
southern parts of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and then possibly on to the growing
market of India. The Central Asian Gas Pipeline Consortium, or Centgas, was made
up of Unocal (US, 47% share), Delta Oil (Saudi Arabia, 15% share), Government of
Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan, 7% share), Ito chu Oil Exploration (Japan, 6.
5%
share), Indonesia Petroleum [INDEX] (Japan, 6. 5%), Hyundai Engineering and
Construction (5%), and the Crescent Group (Pakistan, 3. 5 %). (web)
Exactly how much the Centgas consortium agreed to pay the Taliban for transit
fees is unknown, but Unocal”s competitor, Argentinean- based Brid as, reportedly
offered them $1 billion in transit fees. (web) This following quote
explains how and why the deals were temporarily put on hold.
> In 1997, Centgas got the gas pipeline contract, but by the time it
was ready to commence work, the political situation in Afghanistan that had
looked promising in US eyes in the mid-1990’s had deteriorated.
Civil war
continued, the Taliban”s cultural extremism and hostility to women had exploded
in the world media, and Afghanistan had become a major terrorist base. In August
1998, the US attacked bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps, and four months later,
Unocal pulled out of Centgas. The combination of instability and pressure from
the US government and attacks from shareholders and women’s groups in the US was
too much. (web)
> The United States soon found that the Taliban were not as reliable
as they thought.
There were many more obstacles to overcome now that the Taliban
were in the media, shocking the world with the gruesome oppressions brought on
by their regime. United States Representative Dana Rohrabacher said regarding the
United State”s support of the Taliban:
> I am making the claim that there is and has been a covert policy by this
administration to support the Taliban movement”s control of Afghanistan… This
amoral or immoral policy is based on the assumption that the Taliban would bring
stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central
Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan… I believe the administration has
maintained this covert goal and kept the Congress in the dark about its policy
of supporting the Taliban, the most anti-Western, anti-female, and anti-human
rights regime in the world. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this
policy would outrage the American people, especially America”s
women. (web)
> From this quote we can see that the United States has been hiding
intelligence about their policy towards Afghanistan even from their own
Congress.
> Even though the Centgas proposal is said to have been dropped, the
series of meetings held between United States, Pakistani, and Taliban officials
after 1998, indicates the project was never off the table.
(web)
> After Bush’s accession to the presidency, various Taliban envoys
were received at the State Department, CIA, and National Security council. The
CIA, which appears, more than ever, to be a virtual extended family of the Bush
oil interests, facilitated a renewed approach to the
Taliban. (web)
>Ahmed Rashid states in Taliban the peculiar link between the American people
have with the Taliban regime that the likely do not even know about.
> As recently as 1999, U. S.
taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of
every single Taliban government official, all in hopes of returning to the days
of dollar-a-gallon gas. (Rashid, 2000, p. 175)
> September 11 th has caused a new turn in the United State’s approach
to the pipelines. The Bush administration took it’s opportunity to wage war
against the Taliban, and gain access to the land. (web)
> The groundwork for the current U.
S. military actions in Afghanistan
was being built up for several years. What comes into focus is that the
September 11 the terrorist attacks have provided a qualitatively new opportunity
for the U. S. acting particularly on behalf of giant oil companies, to
permanently entrench its military in the former Soviet Republics of Central
Asia, and the transcaucusus where there are vast oil reserves- the second
largest in the world.
(web) Conveniently enough, the now
interim Prime-Minister, Hamid Karzai, is a former Unocal executive,
Vice-President Dick Cheney was, until the end of last year, president of
Halliburton, a company that provides services for the oil industry. United
States National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was, for the past decade,
manager for Chevron, one of the largest refiners and marketers of petroleum
products in the United States. (web)
> The United States, has for the past two decades, manipulated
forces such as the Mujaheddin and the Taliban in order to gain control over oil
routes going through Afghanistan. Their primary goal has always been to gain
access to oil that will ensure their way of life for decades to come. This,
however, comes at the cost of an entire country, and the lives of many. Driven
from their homes, the people of Afghanistan have been victims of outside
interference mainly due to their countries strategic positioning in Central
Asia.
Although the future of Afghanistan is uncertain, one can only hope that
some regime will come into power to stabilize Afghanistan, not for the purposes
of building oil routes, but to return Afghanistan to what it once was, a country
with a government representative of the history and culture, that’s main focus
is not the transport of oil.