Drabikstan
02-08-2004, 06:10
The new 'Great Game' in Central Asia 29.07.2004
Geostrategic considerations, the struggle against terrorism, and concrete economic interests are among the intertwining strands of a new 'Great Game' in Central Asia, with the US inheriting Britain's imperial role and trying to consolidate its post-Cold War sphere of influence.
By Lutz Kleveman for ISN Security Watch
About two years ago, I visited the US airbase in Bagram, some thirty miles north of the Afghan capital Kabul. A US Army public affairs officer, a friendly Texan, gave me a tour of the sprawling camp, set up after the ouster of the Taliban in December 2001. It was a clear day, and one Chinook helicopter after the other took off to transport combat troops into the nearby mountains. As we walked past the endless rows of tents and men in desert camouflage uniforms, I spotted a wooden pole carrying two makeshift street signs. They read "Exxon Street" and "Petro Boulevard”. Slightly embarrassed, the PA officer explained, "This is the fuel handlers' workplace. The signs are obviously a joke, a sort of irony." As I am sure it was. It just seemed an uncanny sight as I was researching the potential links between the "war on terror" and US oil interests in Central Asia.
Strategic struggle for Wild East
I had already traveled thousands of miles from the Caucasus peaks across the Caspian Sea and the Central Asian plains all the way down to the Afghan Hindu Kush. On that journey I met with and interviewed warlords, diplomats, politicians, generals, and oil bosses. They are all players in a geo-strategic struggle that has become increasingly intertwined with the war on terror: the "New Great Game". In this re-run of the first "Great Game," the nineteenth-century imperial rivalry between the British Empire and czarist Russia, powerful players once again position themselves to control the heart of the Eurasian landmass, left in a post-Soviet power vacuum. Today the US 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 in a brash, Wild East style. Since 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration has undertaken a massive military buildup in Central Asia, deploying thousands of US troops, not only in Afghanistan but also in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia. These first US combat troops on former Soviet territory have dramatically altered the geo-strategic power equations in the region, with Washington trying to seal the Cold War victory against Russia, contain Chinese influence, and tighten the noose around Iran.
Oil giants covet Caspian riches
Most importantly, however, the Bush Administration is using the "war on terror" to further US energy interests in Central Asia. The bad news is that this dramatic geopolitical gamble involving thuggish dictators and corrupt Saudi oil sheiks is likely to produce only more terrorists, jeopardizing US prospects of victory. The main spoils in today's Great Game are the Caspian energy reserves, principally oil and gas. On its shores, and at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, lie the world's biggest untapped fossil fuel resources. Estimates range from 85 to 190 billion barrels of crude, worth up to US$5 trillion. According the US Energy Department, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 130 billion barrels, more than three times the US reserves. Oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and British Petroleum have already invested more than US$30 billion in new production facilities. The aggressive US pursuit of oil interests in the Caspian did not start with the Bush Administration, but under Clinton who personally conducted oil and pipeline diplomacy with Caspian leaders. US industry leaders were impressed. "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 1998 in a speech to oil industrialists in Washington. Cheney was then still CEO of the oil-services giant Halliburton. In May 2001 Cheney, now US Vice President, recommended in the Administration's seminal 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."
Chemical dependency
Keen to outdo Clinton's oil record, the Bush Administration took the new Great Game into its second round. With potential oil production of up to 4.7 million barrels per day by 2010, the Caspian region has become crucial to the US policy of "diversifying energy supply”. The other major supplier is the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, where both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have vigorously developed US oil interests and strengthened ties with corrupt West African regimes. The strategy of supply diversification is designed to wean the US off its dependence on the Arab-dominated OPEC cartel, which has been using its near-monopoly position as leverage against industrialized countries. As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, OPEC is in the long run going to expand its share of the world market even further. At the same time, the US will have to import more than two-thirds of its total energy needs by 2010, mostly from the volatile Middle East. Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable with the growing turmoil in Saudi Arabia, whose terror ties have been exposed since the 11 September 2001 terror attacks. As the recent bombings and attacks on oil installations have shown, there is a growing risk that radical Islamist groups could topple the corrupt Saud dynasty, only to then stop the flow of oil to "infidels." The consequences of 8 million barrels of oil - 10 per cent of global production - disappearing from the world markets overnight would be disastrous. Even without any such anti-Western revolution, the Saudi petrol is already, as it were, ideologically contaminated. To supply the ideological deficit left by lack of democracy, the Saudi ruling elite relies on the fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Islam - many of whose preachers see no room for compromise with nations like the US.
Tapping new veins
To escape its Faustian pact with Saudi Arabia, the US has tried to reduce its dependence on Saudi oil sheiks by seeking to secure access to the fabulous oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Guinea and the Caspian. Central Asia, however, is no less volatile than the Middle East, and oil politics are only making matters worse: Fierce conflicts have broken out over pipeline routes from the landlocked Caspian region to high-sea ports. Russia, still regarding itself as imperial overlord of its former colonies, promotes pipeline routes across its territory, notably Chechnya, in the North Caucasus. China, whose dependence on imported oil increases with its rapid industrialization, wants to build eastbound pipelines from Kazakhstan. Iran is offering its pipeline network for exports via the Persian Gulf. By contrast, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have championed two pipelines that would avoid 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 Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean. Several months after the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal adviser, signed a treaty with Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf and the Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niazov to authorize construction of a US$3.2 billion gas pipeline through the Herat-Kandahar corridor in Afghanistan, with a projected capacity of about 1 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. A feasibility study is under way, and a parallel pipeline for oil is also planned for a later stage. So far, however, continuing warlordism in Afghanistan has prevented any private investor from coming forward. Construction has already begun on a gigantic, $3.8 billion oil pipeline from Azerbaijan's capital of Baku via neighboring Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. British Petroleum Amoco, its main operator, has invested billions in oil-rich Azerbaijan and can count on firm political support from the Bush Administration, which stationed about 500 elite troops in war-torn Georgia in May 2002.
Pipeline perpetuates instability
Controversial for environmental and social reasons, as it is unlikely to alleviate poverty in the notoriously corrupt transit countries, the pipeline project also perpetuates instability in the South Caucasus. With thousands of Russian troops still stationed in Georgia and Armenia, Moscow has for years sought to deter Western pipeline investors by fomenting bloody ethnic conflicts near the pipeline route, in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and in the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Adjaria. Washington's Great Game opponents in Moscow and Beijing resent the dramatically growing US influence in their strategic backyard. Worried that the US presence might encourage internal unrest in its predominantly Muslim Central Asian province of Xingjian, China has recently held joint military exercises with Kyrgyzstan. The Russian government initially tolerated the US intrusion into its former empire, hoping Washington would in turn ignore Russian atrocities in Chechnya. However, for the Kremlin, the much-hyped "new strategic partnership" against terror between the Kremlin and the White House has always been little more than a tactical and temporary marriage of convenience to allow Russia's battered economy to recover with the help of capital from Western companies. It is unthinkable for the majority of the Russian establishment to permanently cede its hegemonic claims on Central Asia. Russia's Defense Ministry has repeatedly demanded that the US pull out of Russia's backyard within two years. Significantly, President Putin has signed new security pacts with the Central Asian rulers and last October personally opened a new Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan. It is the first base Moscow has set up outside Russia's borders since the end of the cold war. Equipped with fighter jets, it lies only thirty-five miles away from the US airbase.
Strange bedfellows
Besides raising the specter of interstate conflict, the Bush Administration's energy imperialism jeopardizes the few successes in the war on terror. That is because the resentment US policies cause in Central Asia makes it easier for al Qaida-like organizations to recruit new fighters. They hate the US because in its search for antiterrorist allies in the new Great Game, the Bush Administration has wooed some of the region's most brutal autocrats, including Azerbaijan's Heidar Aliev, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbaev and Pakistan's Musharraf. The most tyrannical of Washington's new allies is Islam Karimov, the former Stalinist dictator of Uzbekistan who allowed US troops to set up a large and permanent military base on Uzbek soil during the Afghan campaign in late 2001. Ever since, the Bush Administration has turned a blind eye to the Karimov regime's brutal suppression of opposition and Islamic groups. "Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I will shoot them myself," Karimov once famously told his rubber-stamp parliament. Although the US State Department acknowledges that Uzbek security forces use "torture as a routine investigation technique," Washington in 2002 gave the Karimov regime US$500 million in aid and rent payments for the US airbase in Khanabad. Though Uzbek Muslims can be arrested simply for wearing a long beard, the State Department also quietly removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat. Even though the US this year held back US$18 million in aid, Powell assured Karimov he was still in their good books. "Uzbekistan is an important partner of the United States in the war on terror and we have many shared strategic goals. This decision does not mean that either our interests in the region or our desire for continued cooperation with Uzbekistan has changed," the State Department said. The current US policy of aiding Central Asian tyrants for the sake of oil politics repeats the very same mistakes that gave rise to bin Ladenism in the 1980s and 1990s because their disgusted subjects increasingly embrace militant Islam and virulent anti-Americanism. Tellingly, Uzbekistan has recently seen a sharp increase in terrorist activities, with several bomb attacks shaking Tashkent in April, including the first-ever suicide bombings in Central Asia. More than forty people died in gun battles between the terrorists and security forces.
Alternatives to fossil fuels needed
The 11 September attacks have shown that the US government can no longer afford to be indifferent toward how badly dictators in the Middle East and Central Asia treat their people, as long as they keep the oil flowing. So, while the war on terror may not be all about oil, certainly in one sense it should be about just that. A bold policy to reduce the addiction to oil would be a wise strategy to win the epic struggle against terrorism. In the short term, this means saving energy through more efficient technologies, necessary anyway to slow the greenhouse effect and global warming. The Bush Administration's old-style energy policies of yet more fossil-fuel production and waste are continuing in the wrong direction. It is time to realize that more gas-guzzling Hummers on US highways only lead to more Humvees (and US soldiers) near oilfields. What is urgently needed instead - for security reasons - is a sustainable alternative energy policy. Ultimately, no matter how cleverly the US plays its cards in the New Great Game in Central Asia and no matter how many military forces are deployed to protect oilfields and pipelines, the oil infrastructure might prove too vulnerable to terrorist attacks to guarantee a stable supply anyway. The Caspian region may be the next big gas station but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men running around throwing matches.
- Lutz Kleveman (lutz@kleveman.com) is the author of The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (Atlantic Books, 2003, http://www.newgreatgame.com).
Geostrategic considerations, the struggle against terrorism, and concrete economic interests are among the intertwining strands of a new 'Great Game' in Central Asia, with the US inheriting Britain's imperial role and trying to consolidate its post-Cold War sphere of influence.
By Lutz Kleveman for ISN Security Watch
About two years ago, I visited the US airbase in Bagram, some thirty miles north of the Afghan capital Kabul. A US Army public affairs officer, a friendly Texan, gave me a tour of the sprawling camp, set up after the ouster of the Taliban in December 2001. It was a clear day, and one Chinook helicopter after the other took off to transport combat troops into the nearby mountains. As we walked past the endless rows of tents and men in desert camouflage uniforms, I spotted a wooden pole carrying two makeshift street signs. They read "Exxon Street" and "Petro Boulevard”. Slightly embarrassed, the PA officer explained, "This is the fuel handlers' workplace. The signs are obviously a joke, a sort of irony." As I am sure it was. It just seemed an uncanny sight as I was researching the potential links between the "war on terror" and US oil interests in Central Asia.
Strategic struggle for Wild East
I had already traveled thousands of miles from the Caucasus peaks across the Caspian Sea and the Central Asian plains all the way down to the Afghan Hindu Kush. On that journey I met with and interviewed warlords, diplomats, politicians, generals, and oil bosses. They are all players in a geo-strategic struggle that has become increasingly intertwined with the war on terror: the "New Great Game". In this re-run of the first "Great Game," the nineteenth-century imperial rivalry between the British Empire and czarist Russia, powerful players once again position themselves to control the heart of the Eurasian landmass, left in a post-Soviet power vacuum. Today the US 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 in a brash, Wild East style. Since 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration has undertaken a massive military buildup in Central Asia, deploying thousands of US troops, not only in Afghanistan but also in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia. These first US combat troops on former Soviet territory have dramatically altered the geo-strategic power equations in the region, with Washington trying to seal the Cold War victory against Russia, contain Chinese influence, and tighten the noose around Iran.
Oil giants covet Caspian riches
Most importantly, however, the Bush Administration is using the "war on terror" to further US energy interests in Central Asia. The bad news is that this dramatic geopolitical gamble involving thuggish dictators and corrupt Saudi oil sheiks is likely to produce only more terrorists, jeopardizing US prospects of victory. The main spoils in today's Great Game are the Caspian energy reserves, principally oil and gas. On its shores, and at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, lie the world's biggest untapped fossil fuel resources. Estimates range from 85 to 190 billion barrels of crude, worth up to US$5 trillion. According the US Energy Department, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 130 billion barrels, more than three times the US reserves. Oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and British Petroleum have already invested more than US$30 billion in new production facilities. The aggressive US pursuit of oil interests in the Caspian did not start with the Bush Administration, but under Clinton who personally conducted oil and pipeline diplomacy with Caspian leaders. US industry leaders were impressed. "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 1998 in a speech to oil industrialists in Washington. Cheney was then still CEO of the oil-services giant Halliburton. In May 2001 Cheney, now US Vice President, recommended in the Administration's seminal 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."
Chemical dependency
Keen to outdo Clinton's oil record, the Bush Administration took the new Great Game into its second round. With potential oil production of up to 4.7 million barrels per day by 2010, the Caspian region has become crucial to the US policy of "diversifying energy supply”. The other major supplier is the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, where both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have vigorously developed US oil interests and strengthened ties with corrupt West African regimes. The strategy of supply diversification is designed to wean the US off its dependence on the Arab-dominated OPEC cartel, which has been using its near-monopoly position as leverage against industrialized countries. As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, OPEC is in the long run going to expand its share of the world market even further. At the same time, the US will have to import more than two-thirds of its total energy needs by 2010, mostly from the volatile Middle East. Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable with the growing turmoil in Saudi Arabia, whose terror ties have been exposed since the 11 September 2001 terror attacks. As the recent bombings and attacks on oil installations have shown, there is a growing risk that radical Islamist groups could topple the corrupt Saud dynasty, only to then stop the flow of oil to "infidels." The consequences of 8 million barrels of oil - 10 per cent of global production - disappearing from the world markets overnight would be disastrous. Even without any such anti-Western revolution, the Saudi petrol is already, as it were, ideologically contaminated. To supply the ideological deficit left by lack of democracy, the Saudi ruling elite relies on the fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Islam - many of whose preachers see no room for compromise with nations like the US.
Tapping new veins
To escape its Faustian pact with Saudi Arabia, the US has tried to reduce its dependence on Saudi oil sheiks by seeking to secure access to the fabulous oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Guinea and the Caspian. Central Asia, however, is no less volatile than the Middle East, and oil politics are only making matters worse: Fierce conflicts have broken out over pipeline routes from the landlocked Caspian region to high-sea ports. Russia, still regarding itself as imperial overlord of its former colonies, promotes pipeline routes across its territory, notably Chechnya, in the North Caucasus. China, whose dependence on imported oil increases with its rapid industrialization, wants to build eastbound pipelines from Kazakhstan. Iran is offering its pipeline network for exports via the Persian Gulf. By contrast, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have championed two pipelines that would avoid 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 Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean. Several months after the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal adviser, signed a treaty with Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf and the Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niazov to authorize construction of a US$3.2 billion gas pipeline through the Herat-Kandahar corridor in Afghanistan, with a projected capacity of about 1 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. A feasibility study is under way, and a parallel pipeline for oil is also planned for a later stage. So far, however, continuing warlordism in Afghanistan has prevented any private investor from coming forward. Construction has already begun on a gigantic, $3.8 billion oil pipeline from Azerbaijan's capital of Baku via neighboring Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. British Petroleum Amoco, its main operator, has invested billions in oil-rich Azerbaijan and can count on firm political support from the Bush Administration, which stationed about 500 elite troops in war-torn Georgia in May 2002.
Pipeline perpetuates instability
Controversial for environmental and social reasons, as it is unlikely to alleviate poverty in the notoriously corrupt transit countries, the pipeline project also perpetuates instability in the South Caucasus. With thousands of Russian troops still stationed in Georgia and Armenia, Moscow has for years sought to deter Western pipeline investors by fomenting bloody ethnic conflicts near the pipeline route, in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and in the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Adjaria. Washington's Great Game opponents in Moscow and Beijing resent the dramatically growing US influence in their strategic backyard. Worried that the US presence might encourage internal unrest in its predominantly Muslim Central Asian province of Xingjian, China has recently held joint military exercises with Kyrgyzstan. The Russian government initially tolerated the US intrusion into its former empire, hoping Washington would in turn ignore Russian atrocities in Chechnya. However, for the Kremlin, the much-hyped "new strategic partnership" against terror between the Kremlin and the White House has always been little more than a tactical and temporary marriage of convenience to allow Russia's battered economy to recover with the help of capital from Western companies. It is unthinkable for the majority of the Russian establishment to permanently cede its hegemonic claims on Central Asia. Russia's Defense Ministry has repeatedly demanded that the US pull out of Russia's backyard within two years. Significantly, President Putin has signed new security pacts with the Central Asian rulers and last October personally opened a new Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan. It is the first base Moscow has set up outside Russia's borders since the end of the cold war. Equipped with fighter jets, it lies only thirty-five miles away from the US airbase.
Strange bedfellows
Besides raising the specter of interstate conflict, the Bush Administration's energy imperialism jeopardizes the few successes in the war on terror. That is because the resentment US policies cause in Central Asia makes it easier for al Qaida-like organizations to recruit new fighters. They hate the US because in its search for antiterrorist allies in the new Great Game, the Bush Administration has wooed some of the region's most brutal autocrats, including Azerbaijan's Heidar Aliev, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbaev and Pakistan's Musharraf. The most tyrannical of Washington's new allies is Islam Karimov, the former Stalinist dictator of Uzbekistan who allowed US troops to set up a large and permanent military base on Uzbek soil during the Afghan campaign in late 2001. Ever since, the Bush Administration has turned a blind eye to the Karimov regime's brutal suppression of opposition and Islamic groups. "Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I will shoot them myself," Karimov once famously told his rubber-stamp parliament. Although the US State Department acknowledges that Uzbek security forces use "torture as a routine investigation technique," Washington in 2002 gave the Karimov regime US$500 million in aid and rent payments for the US airbase in Khanabad. Though Uzbek Muslims can be arrested simply for wearing a long beard, the State Department also quietly removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat. Even though the US this year held back US$18 million in aid, Powell assured Karimov he was still in their good books. "Uzbekistan is an important partner of the United States in the war on terror and we have many shared strategic goals. This decision does not mean that either our interests in the region or our desire for continued cooperation with Uzbekistan has changed," the State Department said. The current US policy of aiding Central Asian tyrants for the sake of oil politics repeats the very same mistakes that gave rise to bin Ladenism in the 1980s and 1990s because their disgusted subjects increasingly embrace militant Islam and virulent anti-Americanism. Tellingly, Uzbekistan has recently seen a sharp increase in terrorist activities, with several bomb attacks shaking Tashkent in April, including the first-ever suicide bombings in Central Asia. More than forty people died in gun battles between the terrorists and security forces.
Alternatives to fossil fuels needed
The 11 September attacks have shown that the US government can no longer afford to be indifferent toward how badly dictators in the Middle East and Central Asia treat their people, as long as they keep the oil flowing. So, while the war on terror may not be all about oil, certainly in one sense it should be about just that. A bold policy to reduce the addiction to oil would be a wise strategy to win the epic struggle against terrorism. In the short term, this means saving energy through more efficient technologies, necessary anyway to slow the greenhouse effect and global warming. The Bush Administration's old-style energy policies of yet more fossil-fuel production and waste are continuing in the wrong direction. It is time to realize that more gas-guzzling Hummers on US highways only lead to more Humvees (and US soldiers) near oilfields. What is urgently needed instead - for security reasons - is a sustainable alternative energy policy. Ultimately, no matter how cleverly the US plays its cards in the New Great Game in Central Asia and no matter how many military forces are deployed to protect oilfields and pipelines, the oil infrastructure might prove too vulnerable to terrorist attacks to guarantee a stable supply anyway. The Caspian region may be the next big gas station but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men running around throwing matches.
- Lutz Kleveman (lutz@kleveman.com) is the author of The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (Atlantic Books, 2003, http://www.newgreatgame.com).