[Reader-list] Unocal Oil Company adviser named US envoy to Afghanistan

[Soenke Zehle]

Oil company adviser named US representative to Afghanistan
By Patrick Martin
3 January 2002

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/oil-j03.shtml

President Bush has appointed a former aide to the American oil
company Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to
Afghanistan. The nomination was announced December 31, nine days
after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office
in Kabul.

The nomination underscores the real economic and financial
interests at stake in the US military intervention in Central Asia.
Khalilzad is intimately involved in the long-running US efforts to
obtain direct access to the oil and gas resources of the region,
largely unexploited but believed to be the second largest in the
world after the Persian Gulf.

As an adviser for Unocal, Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a
proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of
Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.
He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban
officials in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995
agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan.

Unocal was the lead company in the formation of the Centgas
consortium, whose purpose was to bring to market natural gas from
the Dauletabad Field in southeastern Turkmenistan, one of the
world's largest. The $2 billion project involved a 48-inch diameter
pipeline from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, passing near the
cities of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan near Quetta
and linking with existing pipelines at Multan. An additional $600
million extension to India was also under consideration.

Khalilzad also lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US
government policy towards the Taliban. Four years ago, in an op-ed
article in the Washington Post, he defended the Taliban regime
against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism, writing,
"The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of
fundamentalism practiced by Iran."

"We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian
assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction,"
he declared. "It is time for the United States to reengage" the
Afghan regime. This "reengagement" would, of course, have been
enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to
bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan.

Khalilzad only shifted his position on the Taliban after the
Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at targets in
Afghanistan in August 1998, claiming that terrorists under the
direction of Afghan-based Osama bin Laden were responsible for
bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One day after the
attack, Unocal put Centgas on hold. Two months later it abandoned
all plans for a trans-Afghan pipeline. The oil interests began to
look towards a post-Taliban Afghanistan, and so did their
representatives in the US national security establishment.


Liasion to Islamic guerrillas

Born in Mazar-e Sharif in 1951, Khalilzad hails from the old ruling
elite of Afghanistan. His father was an aide to King Zahir Shah,
who ruled the country until 1973. Khalilzad was a graduate student
at the University of Chicago, an intellectual center for the
American right-wing, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in
1979.

Khalilzad became an American citizen, while serving as a key link
between US imperialism and the Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin
fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul-the milieu out of which
both the Taliban and bin Laden's Al Qaeda group arose. He was a
special adviser to the State Department during the Reagan
administration, lobbying successfully for accelerated US military
aid to the mujahedin, including hand-held Stinger anti-aircraft
missiles which played a key role in the war. He later became
undersecretary of defense in the administration of Bush's father,
during the US war against Iraq, then went to the Rand Corporation,
a top US military think tank.

After Bush was installed as president by a 5-4 vote of the US
Supreme Court, Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for
the Defense Department and advised incoming Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. Significantly, however, he was not named to a
subcabinet position, which would have required Senate confirmation
and might have provoked uncomfortable questions about his role as
an oil company adviser in Central Asia and intermediary with the
Taliban. Instead, he was named to the National Security Council,
where no confirmation vote was needed.

At the NSC Khalilzad reports to Condoleeza Rice, the national
security adviser, who also served as an oil company consultant on
Central Asia. After serving in the first Bush administration from
1989 to 1992, Rice was placed on the board of directors of Chevron
Corporation and served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where
Chevron holds the largest concession of any of the international
oil companies. The oil industry connections of Bush and Cheney are
well known, but little has been said in the media about the
prominent role being played in Afghan policy by officials who
advised the oil industry on Central Asia.

One of the few commentaries in the America media about this aspect
of the US military campaign appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle
last September 26. Staff writer Frank Viviano observed: "The hidden
stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single
word: oil. The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the
Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree, a
map of the world's principal energy sources in the 21st century....
It is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by
many as a war on behalf of America's Chevron, Exxon, and Arco;
France's TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and
other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of
dollars of investment in the region."


Silence in the media

This reality is well understood in official Washington, but the
most important corporate-controlled media outlets-the television
networks and major national daily newspapers-have maintained
silence that amounts to deliberate, politically motivated
self-censorship.

The sole recent exception is an article which appeared December 15
in the New York Times business section, headlined, "As the War
Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals Follow." The Times reported, "The State
Department is exploring the potential for post-Taliban energy
projects in the region, which has more than 6 percent of the
world's proven oil reserves and almost 40 percent of its gas
reserves."

The Times noted that during a visit in early December to
Kazakhstan, "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he was
'particularly impressed' with the money that American oil companies
were investing there. He estimated that $200 billion could flow
into Kazakhstan during the next 5 to 10 years."

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham also pushed US oil investments
in the region during a November visit to Russia, on which he was
accompanied by David J. O'Reilly, chairman of ChevronTexaco.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has also played a role in the ongoing
oil pipeline maneuvers. During a December 14 visit to Baku, capital
of Azerbaijan, he assured officials of the oil-rich Caspian state
that the administration would lift sanctions imposed in 1992 in the
wake of the conflict with Armenia over the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have aligned themselves with the US
military thrust into Central Asia, offering the Pentagon transit
rights and use of airfields. Rumsfeld's visit and his conciliatory
remarks were the reward. Rumsfeld told President Haydar Aliyev that
the administration had reached agreement with congressional leaders
to waive the sanctions.

On November 28 the White House released a statement hailing the
official opening of the first new pipeline by the Caspian Pipeline
Consortium, a joint venture of Russia, Kazakhstan, Oman,
ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and several other oil companies. The
pipeline connects the huge Tengiz oilfield in northwestern
Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, where
tankers are loaded for the world market. US companies put up $1
billion of the $2.65 billion construction cost.

The Bush statement declared, "The CPC project also advances my
Administration's National Energy Policy by developing a network of
multiple Caspian pipelines that also includes the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Supsa, and Baku-Novorossiysk oil
pipelines and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline."

There was little US press coverage of this announcement. Nor did
the media refer to the fact that the pipeline consortium involved
in the Baku-Ceyhan plan, led by the British oil company BP, is
represented by the law firm of Baker & Botts. The principal
attorney at this firm is James Baker III, secretary of state under
Bush's father and chief spokesman for the 2000 Bush campaign during
its successful effort to shut down the Florida vote recount.