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From
the November 2001 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 48,
No. 11)
The Taliban,
The CIA, And Oil
Pamela Mewes, Rocinante (monthly
newsmagazine), Santiago, Chile, October, 2001 issue.
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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