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The
Taliban, The CIA, And Oil
Pamela Mewes, Rocinante
(monthly newsmagazine), Santiago, Chile, October, 2001 issue.
Translated, posted to the Web Oct. 18, 2001.
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| Map: CIA World Factbook |
Taking
a broad view of contemporary history, certain movements seem
to burst onto the political stage suddenly, triumphantly, and
seemingly out of nowhere. In reality, no movement can exist
in a vacuum. Major economic interests are almost always behind
them, and those interests tend to work in cooperation with the
intelligence services of large or middle-size powers. This was
the case with the meteoric rise of the Taliban, who took much
of the world completely unprepared when they burst onto the
international stage at the end of 1994. The outside world, scrambling
to understand their roots, has alternately seen the Taliban
as the political, religious, or military expression of fundamentalist
Muslims in Afghanistan, one of the poorest and most devastated
countries in the world.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, the government of
Boris Yeltsin left the five former-Soviet republics of Central
Asia to their own devices. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, cut from their Soviet economic lifeline,
were all plunged into a severe economic crisis. In order to
recover from this crisis, the newly independent Central Asian
states all turned to the only source of hard currency at their
command: the rich natural gas and oil resources of the Caspian
Sea.
It didn't take long for consortia of the largest international
oil companies to arrive with cash in hand. The geologists returned
optimistic reports. But the engineers found that the region's
geographic isolation posed the most serious problem in extracting
the region's hydrocarbon resources. And so constructing gas
and oil pipelines immediately became a pressing priority for
the governments of the region and for their partners, the Western
oil companies.
In March 1995, Saparmurat Niyazov, then President of Turkmenistan,
and Benazir Bhutto, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, signed
an agreement in Islamabad, Pakistan. The accord called for the
construction of a gas pipeline, passing through Afghanistan,
which would export natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan,
and from thence to the world.
According to this accord, a consortium made up of Unocal International
Energy, the American oil company, and Saudi Delta Oil would
build the gas pipeline, at an estimated cost of $2 billion.
There were also plans to build an oil pipeline, at an estimated
cost of US$4 billion. The project's total estimated costs, then,
amounted to over $6billion.
The plan quickly ran up against opposition from Iran and Russia.
Iran, a major gas and oil producer, had ambitions of sending
its own gas to Pakistan and India, and wanted the natural gas
pipelines to begin in Iran. Moreover, the Iranian government
did not look favorably upon the presence of American companies
in the region. Nor did Russia, for that matter. For decades,
Russia had benefited from a monopolistic control of Central
Asian oil and gas pipelines.
Pacifying Afghanistan
There was one other small problem. Afghanistan had been at war
for the better (or worst) part of the past 200 years. In order
for the project to succeed, Afghanistan would need to be pacified.
No sooner had Afghanistan's war with the Soviet Union ended
than the country was torn apart by warring factions, each backed
by a neighboring state. In broad terms, Gen. Rashid Dostum's
Uzbek forces, backed by Uzbekistan, controlled most of the North.
Ahmad Shah Masud's Tajik forces, backed by the Iranian government
and Burhanuddin Rabbani's government in Kabul, controlled most
of the nation's heartland. Finally, Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, a Pashtun
[the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan], dominated southern
Afghanistan with Pakistani support.
The oil companies promoting the proposed pipelines quickly found
that Rabbani's pro-Iranian government in Kabul posed the greatest
obstacle. But who would remove it? The answer came from an incident
related to the eternal need to establish new avenues of communication
in the region. At the end of 1994, a truck convoy left Pakistan,
destination the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet
Union. The convoy was intended to inaugurate a new trade route
that would link the countries bordering the Indian Ocean with
Central Asia by crossing Afghanistan. But the trucks had scarcely
crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan when they
were attacked by one of the many armed bands of mujaheddin operating
in the country.
It was then that the Taliban, who were at that time just one
of many armed groups battling for control, suddenly sprang up.
In a spectacular operation, considered an act of heroism, a
Taliban unit was able to track down the robbers, recover the
trucks, and escort them to their destination. Overnight, they
became national heroes for a population exhausted by chaos and
internecine fighting. [The reality was far more complex than
Mewles suggests. For a more detailed history, consider Ahmed
Rashid's excellent study, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, And
Fundamentalism in Central Asia, published by Yale Nota Bene
press —WPR].
The popularity the Taliban's success brought them led the American
and Pakistani intelligence services, allied in the region, to
see the Taliban as the force for pacification they had been
seeking. The Taliban, armed to the teeth with the most modern
weapons and with ample financial support, first occupied southern
Afghanistan, and then launched an offensive toward the North,
eventually capturing the capital, Kabul. They did all this,
and made themselves the government, in just four months from
November 1994 to February 1995 [The Taliban in fact captured
Kabul in 1996 —WPR]. The vice-president of Unocal International
Energy, Chris Taggard, declared that the Taliban's ascent to
power was a "very positive" thing for the country,
and urged the United States government to recognize the new
regime.
Russian opposition to Western oil companies' designs was overcome
in a very simple way: Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly,
was invited to participate. On Aug. 8, 1996, an agreement was
signed in Moscow by Gazprom, the Unocal-Delta group, and Turkmenistan,
setting up a new consortium of companies to build the pipeline.
By 2002, the consortium hoped, it would supply Pakistan with
40 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
The very week that this agreement was signed, a curious coincidence
occurred, which was noted in the Russian press. At that time
the media were following events on the southern border attentively,
and they noted that Russian pilots held by the Taliban had managed
to escape from Kandahar.
At the time, one could read analytical pieces in the Russian
press describing the Taliban as "the advance guard of the
Pakistani oil companies." On Oct. 8, 1996, Komersant,
a Moscow business weekly, wrote that "the military successes
of the Taliban movement are too much in accord with the business
plans of important corporate interests for them not to be under
their control."
All this demonstrates, once again, how the economic interests
of the big multinational corporations are linked to political
and social forces and military dictators, all of which they
try to use to their own ends—sometimes with results completely
contrary to their intentions. Assuredly no one imagined that
the Taliban, the favorites of the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence
agencies, would end up as bitter enemies of the United States,
as was also the case with Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire
allegedly recruited by the CIA in their clandestine fight against
the Soviet Union in the 1980s. 
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