About a year ago, I visited the United States airbase in Bagram, some fifty kilometres north of the Afghan capital Kabul. Soon after my arrival a US army public affairs officer, a friendly Texan, gave me a tour of the sprawling camp, set up after the overthrow of the Taliban in December 2001. As we walked past the endless rows of tents and troops in desert camouflage uniforms, I spotted a wooden pole carrying two makeshift street signs. They read Exxon Street and Petro Boulevard. Perplexed, the officer explained, This is the fuel handlers workplace. The signs are obviously a joke, a sort of irony.
As I am sure it was. However, it seemed an uncanny sight, as I was researching my book on the potential links between the war on terror and American oil interests in Central Asia. By that stage, I had already travelled thousands of kilometres from the eastern shores of the Black Sea, the Caucasus peaks across the Caspian Sea and the Central Asian plains all the way down to the Afghan Hindu Kush. On that epic journey, I met with countless warlords, diplomats, politicians, generals, refugees, and oil bosses. What I saw and heard during my research made for compelling evidence that the war on terror in the region is increasingly intertwined with another geo-strategic struggle: the new great game.
In this re-run of the first great game, the 19th century imperial rivalry between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia, powerful players once again position themselves to control the heart of the Eurasian landmass, left in a post-Soviet power vacuum. Today, the United States has taken over the leading role from the British. Along with the ever-present Russians, new regional powers such as China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan have entered the arena, and transnational oil corporations are also pursuing their own interests.
Dreaming of the Caspian
The main spoils in todays great game are the Caspian energy reserves, principally oil and gas. On its shores, and at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, lie the worlds biggest untapped fossil fuel resources. Estimates range from 110 to 243 billion barrels of crude, worth up to $4 trillion. According to the US Department of Energy, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 130 billion barrels, more than three times the United States reserves.
In industrialised countries energy ministries, what would be the last oil rush in world history has evoked a sense of euphoria. Democratic governments are courting corrupt, ex-communist Caspian potentates, while energy companies have signed lucrative contracts and invested more than thirty billion dollars in new production facilities.
I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian, declared Dick Cheney in a speech to oil industrialists in Washington D.C. in 1998. Now US vice-president, Cheney was then still CEO of the oil service giant Halliburton. In May 2001, he recommended in the National Energy Policy report that the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy, singling out the Caspian basin as a rapidly growing new area of supply.
With a potential oil production of up to six million barrels per day by 2015, the Caspian region has become crucial to the United States policy of diversifying energy supply. It is designed to wean America off its dependence on the Arab-dominated Opec cartel, which is using its near-monopoly position as pawn and leverage against industrialised countries.
As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, Opec is further expanding its share of the world market. At the same time, the United States will have to import more than two-thirds of its total energy demand by 2020, mostly from the unstable Middle East.
The politics of pipelines
Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable with the growing power of Saudi Arabia, which since the 9/11 terror attacks has become an embarrassing and dangerous ally. There is a fear that radical Islamist groups could topple the corrupt Saudi dynasty and stop the flow of oil to Western infidels. Even without an anti-western revolution, the Saudi petrol is already, as it were, ideologically contaminated. In its efforts to stave off political turmoil, the corrupt regime in Riyadh funds the powerful, radical Wahhabi sect that backed the Afghan Taliban and foments terror against Americans around the world.
In a desperate effort to decrease its dependence on the Saudi oil sheikhs, the United States seeks to secure and control the Caspian oil resources. However, bloody conflicts have broken out over disputed pipeline routes from the landlocked region to high-sea ports. Russia, still regarding itself as imperial overlord of its former colonies, is trying to hold the US at arms length and promotes pipeline routes through the north Caucasus.
By contrast, Washington champions pipelines that would circumvent both Russia and Iran. One of them, first planned by the US oil company Unocal in the mid-1990s, would run from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. Construction has already begun for another pipeline, running from Azerbaijans capital Baku via neighbouring Georgia to Turkeys Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
The Bush administration has used the war on terror for a massive military build-up in Central Asia, dramatically altering the geo-strategic power equations in the region. Washington seeks to seal the American cold war victory against Russia, to contain Chinese influence, and to tighten the noose around Iran.
At the same time, the war on terror has served the Bush administration as a pretext to further American oil interests in the Caspian. As early as 1997, President Clintons assistant secretary of state Strobe Talbott argued that, were the Caspian region to fall into the hands of religious or political extremists, it would matter profoundly to the US if that were to happen in an area that sits on as much as two hundred billion barrels of oil.
A fatal addiction
With the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the new great game has spilled over the Central Asian borders and entered its critical stage. However vehement the denials by the Bush administration, its true intention in Iraq clearly is to turn the country not only into Americas new ally in the Middle East but also into a strategic oil supplier for the US economy, as an alternative to Saudi Arabia.
What is at stake behind the rhetoric of disarmament and democratisation is nothing less than the control over the earths remaining fossil reserves. As in Central Asia, the victims in this new great game over power, oil, and pipelines are mostly innocent civilians. They know painfully well why oil has been called the devils tears.
As the planets remaining oil reserves are going to last for only a few more decades, the struggles over access and profits between countries and multinational corporations are fast becoming fiercer. With the industrialised worlds addiction to oil growing unabated, the stage for future energy wars has been set.
Meanwhile, Americas brazen energy imperialism itself jeopardises the few successes in the war on terror because the resentment it causes in Central Asia and the Middle East makes it ever easier for terrorist groups to recruit angry young men as new fighters. It is all very well to pursue oil interests but is it worth mortgaging the security of the worlds people to do so?
