[Reader-list] Uncocal and the Taliban

[Ravi Sundaram]

Interesting Story of how a sleazy US firm  pushed the Taliban..
Ravi

Strange Boardfellows

by ERIC SCIGLIANO , Nation

What goes down comes around. Amidst all the attention to United Airlines' 
post-September 11 woes, no one noticed the ringing irony of its tapping 
John W. Creighton Jr. as the new CEO to pull it out of a downward spiral. 
John Creighton is best known as the Weyerhaeuser president who turned the 
timber giant around in the early 1990s, but he's held another position 
closer to the events that sent one United jet crashing into the World Trade 
Center and another into the Pennsylvania countryside two months ago. 
Creighton has sat on the board of the California-based oil multinational 
Unocal since 1995--the period in which Unocal became the main American 
corporate suitor seeking to do business with the Taliban.
When it comes to building in war zones and dealing with unsavory regimes, 
Unocal has long been renowned as what Burma democracy activist Larry Dohrs 
calls "the bottom feeder of the oil business." It completed a 
billion-dollar gas pipeline in Burma even after Texaco and Arco bowed to 
environmental and human rights protests. And in 1995, during the scramble 
for Central Asia's newly opened oil and gas bonanza, it conceived an 
audacious plan: a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and 
Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. It enlisted Saudi, Pakistani, Japanese, Korean 
and Indonesian partners. And it embarked on a fossil-fuel version of the 
Great Game against the Argentine firm Bridas, which also sought the 
pipeline franchise.

In December 1997 Unocal hosted Taliban delegates in Texas and even took 
them to the beach. It also gave nearly $1 million to a job-training program 
in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, out of up to $20 million it spent on 
the pipeline effort. It hired former US ambassador to Pakistan Robert 
Oakley to press its case; hired special ambassador John J. Maresca to, in 
Unocal spokesman Barry Lane's words, "look at corporate responsibility 
globally"; and hired Henry Kissinger to cap the Turkmenistan side of the 
deal. "We didn't focus on the Taliban," Lane insists. "We also sponsored a 
training program in Northern Afghanistan," and hosted some of the warlords 
now in the Northern Alliance. But with the Taliban gaining, and controlling 
the pipeline's southern route, the focus was inevitable. "If the Taliban 
leads to stability and international recognition," Unocal executive vice 
president Chris Taggart declared after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, 
"then it's positive."

That merely mirrored the US government's complacent, fumbling Afghan 
dealings; Lane claims, and Ahmed Rashid confirms, in his book Taliban: 
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, that Unocal even 
disadvantaged itself against Bridas by admonishing the Taliban on human 
rights. But the company hung in even after women's groups protested, after 
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called Taliban practices "despicable" 
in 1997 and after Taliban guest Osama bin Laden declared a fatwa against 
the United States in 1998. After the summer 1998 embassy bombings and US 
missile reprisals, Unocal had to pull out of Afghanistan. In December 1998 
it formally withdrew from the project.
Jack Creighton became Unocal board chairman in 2001 but stepped down on 
August 31. Unocal spokespeople will say only that this resignation was 
prompted by his United Airlines appointment. His new office at United will 
say only that "Any inquiries regarding Unocal or its business 
practices--past, present or future--should properly be directed to the 
Unocal Corporation." Creighton remains on Unocal's board.