“Never reading the words ‘Afghanistan” and ‘oil’ in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement,” says the Asia Times’ Pepe Escobar.
Escobar, who has coined the term “Pipelineistan” to describe the vast network of oil and gas pipelines that “crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet,” sees Afghanistan “at the core of Pipelineistan,” strategically placed between the Middle East, Central and South Asia.”
As Escobar points out, “It’s no coincidence that the map of terror in the Middle East and Central Asia is practically interchangeable with the map of oil.” Escobar was quoted last summer by Conn Hallinan, who is a Foreign Policy in Focus columnist.
Despite the Corporate Fawning Media that most of America watches on TV or hears on the radio and its focus on President Barack Obama’s adding troops to the “real war” against terrorism and al-Quaida and taking them from Iraq, and the war casualties and the rights of women in Afghanistan, it’s all the same focus-oil and America’s control versus that of China or Russia.
If you read the Daily News, the Post, or the Times, Obama has reached an “LBJ moment.” This refers to around 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson made his fatal decision to increase the troops in Vietnam. It cost him his presidency, although fighting went on until 1975. Most media now focus on Obama having only one term or “Obama’s Quagmire,” just as Vietnam became a 10-year quagmire for LBJ and Nixon.
After Saint Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down that wall, many republics of the former Soviet Union declared their independence across a sweeping arc of the Eurasian landmass–tearing the whole southern half of the Soviet Union from Russia. This region contains many of the world’s largest and most undeveloped sources of energy–vast oil and gas fields starting at the oil city of Baku on the Caspian Sea and stretching eastward through the five countries known as the Central Asian Republics (CARs)–Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Control of oil means control of those who need that oil. It is a lifeblood of modern empire.
The United States ruling class considers these countries from Turkey to China as key “prizes” to be snatched up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Russia–struggling, bankrupt and weakened through the 1990s–control of these energy-rich countries is essential for any hopes of re-emerging as a world-scale superpower.
Whoever controls the Caspian region has a counterweight to the Persian Gulf–a way to strengthen control over all oil-producing states by hooking up a new energy source to the world market.
The Caspian region’s energy fields are landlocked–far from the oceans. Exploiting the people and resources of the Caspian region takes huge pipelines traveling hundreds of miles over mountains and deserts. Whoever controls the pipelines controls the oil. And so there has been an intense fight over who will build these new pipelines and where they will go.
If the pipelines go north through Russia to Europe, Russia will reestablish control over the Caspian region and the European imperialists will have a source of energy that the U.S. does not control.
If a major pipe goes west, from Baku in Azerbaijan, across Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan–then the U.S. expects to have control over that oil and everyone who needs that oil.
If the pipes go south through Iran to its refineries and harbors, then the U.S. containment of Iran is broken. And, in that case, the Caucasus region becomes an inland extension of the Persian Gulf–not a separate competitive region.
And, if a U.S.-built pipeline goes south through Afghanistan to Pakistan, Russia loses control in the CARs, and the U.S. gains power over those who use it–especially Pakistan and India.
For most Americans and Europeans, Afghanistan appeared on their radar screens shortly after the 9/11 assaults on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. But according to Escobar, three months before the 2001 attack US, Iranian, German, and Italian officials met in Geneva to discuss toppling the Taliban because it was “the proverbial fly in the ointment” in a scheme to run a $ 2 bn, 800-mile natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via southern Afghanistan.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO moved aggressively to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the Warsaw Pact, quickly recruiting former Soviet allies and provinces.
According to Escobar, one of NATO’s first forays in the energy war was the Balkans, which NATO represented as a fight to liberate the Albanians in Kosovo. Moscow and Beijing, however, viewed it as an opportunity for the Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation (AMBO) to build a $ 1.1 bn pipeline to bring Caspian Basin oil to the West, thus bypassing Iran and Russia. The AMBO pipeline — due to open in 2011 — will transport Caspian Basin oil via Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania.
“How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), and finally Georgia (that critical energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan?” Escobar asks.
For every action, however, there is an opposite and equal reaction.
In 2001, Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which now has observer status from Iran, Pakistan, and India. Unlike NATO, the SCO is a regional organization, not a military alliance. Counting observers, it embraces the bulk of humanity, much of the world’s energy resources, and a growing section of its GNP.
However, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), made up of all of the SCO members, plus Belarus and Armenia, is a military alliance. Last February, CSTO created a collective rapid reaction force which, according to Russian expert Ilya Kramnik, “will give CSTO a quick tool, leaving no time for third parties to intervene.”
The only “third party” capable of intervening in Central Asia is NATO.
In many ways, Beijing is the linchpin in this 21st-century “great game,” because China is weathering the current worldwide depression better than most countries. While its exports have taken a beating, the Chinese have successfully fallen back on their enormous internal market to take up some of the slack. As a result, China recently opened the aid spigots to nations in the region.
In June, China loaned Turkmenistan $ 3 bn, which will give it a stake in the Turkmen’s enormous Yolotan Osman gas field, rumoured to be the world’s largest. The Turkmenistan loan also benefits Moscow by underwriting the Russian oil company Rosneft, and the pipeline builder, Transneft. Kazakhstan got a $ 15 bn loan, giving China a 22 % share in Kazakh oil production.
According to former Indian diplomat and current Asia Times commentator M.K. Bhadrakumar, after years of tension between Moscow and Beijing, the two countries are burying that past and “steering their relationship” in the direction of a “strategic partnership in the overall international situation,” rather than competing over energy resources. This past April, Russia and China signed a $ 25 bn oil agreement that will supply Beijing with 4 % of its needs through 2034. The two countries are currently negotiating a natural gas deal.
Beijing is planning an almost 4,000 mile, $ 26 bn Turkmen-Kazakh-China pipeline to run from the Caspian Basin to Guangdong Province in China. Included in the deal is a proviso to keep “third parties” — NATO bases — out of Turkmenistan.
In the meantime, Russia is paying premium prices to lock up Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas. It’s also negotiating to buy more Azerbaijani oil which, if successful, could end up bankrupting the western-controlled BTC pipeline that runs through Georgia.
Washington is hardly throwing in the towel. The Manas coup is a case in point, and the Obama administration is increasing aid to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
In short, the Central Asian chessboard is enormous, the pieces are numerous, and the stakes are high. Pipelineistan isn’t limited to the Middle East and Central Asia. It exists wherever gas and oil flow, from the steamy depths of Venezuela’s Oronoco Basin to the depths of the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil.
“Oil and gas by themselves are not the US’s ultimate aim,” argues Escobar, “It’s all about control.” And if “the US controls the sources of energy of its rivals — Europe, Japan, China, and other nations aspiring to be more independent — they win.”
The US has enormous military power. But as Iraq, and now Afghanistan, makes clear, the old days of cornering a market by engineering a coup or sending in the Marines are fast receding. The old imperial nations are fading, and the up-and-comers are more likely to be speaking Portuguese, Chinese, and Hindi than English.
The trick over the next several decades will be how to keep the competition for energy from sparking off brush fire wars or a catastrophic clash of the great powers.