[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Efforts to remove Taliban revive hopes for trans-Afghanistan pipelines

[Al Kagan]

>Delivered-To: akagan at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
>Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 10:27:30 +0400
>From: Fiona Hunt <Fiona.Hunt at zu.ac.ae>
>Subject: Efforts to remove Taliban revive hopes for 
>trans-Afghanistan	pipelines
>To: "<" <mai-list at moon.bcpl.gov.bc.ca>
>Sender: owner-mai-list at moon.bcpl.gov.bc.ca
>Status:  
>
>http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/business.pat,business/3acd1dec.b06,.html
>
>The Kansas City Star						   11/06/01
>
>Efforts to remove Taliban revive hopes for trans-Afghanistan pipelines
>
>      By Sudarsan Raghavan - Knight Ridder Newspapers
>
>Tashkent, Uzbekistan -- Afghanistan in the midst of a grinding war may not
>look like an investor's paradise. Yet oilman Joseph Naemi sees the conflict
>-- and America's involvement -- as a potential opportunity for vast riches.
>
>
>The 39-year-old executive plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in
>the next five to seven years developing oil and natural gas fields in
>neighboring Uzbekistan, in hope of eventually selling oil and gas to and
>through Afghanistan by pipeline.
>
>"If the United States' presence continues in the region, (Sept. 11) is
>probably the best thing that could have happened here for the Central Asian
>republics," said Naemi, managing director of Chase Energy, a small oil
>company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
>
>America's efforts to replace the Taliban and bring stability to Afghanistan
>are resurrecting hopes for trans-Afghanistan oil and natural gas pipelines,
>once strongly backed by the United States.
>
>And wildcatters such as Naemi are lining up to capitalize on what may be the
>most valuable, inaccessible stretch of land in Central Asia.
>
>"This region in terms of oil economics is the frontier for this century,"
>Naemi said. "And Afghanistan is part and parcel of this."
>
>In 1998, the Taliban signed a $2 billion agreement for a proposed 890-mile
>natural gas pipeline that would start in Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields,
>snake through Taliban-controlled areas in Herat and Kandahar, Afghanistan,
>and end in Quetta, Pakistan. A $2.5 billion oil pipeline stretching 1,000
>miles through Afghanistan also was considered.
>
>The pipelines would provide the most direct route from Central Asia's oil
>and gas fields to Arabian Sea ports such as the Pakistani city of Karachi.
>They would link oil and gas fields in landlocked Central Asia to lucrative
>markets in Asia and Australia, and could free more Middle East oil to flow
>to the United States and Europe. They also could reduce U.S. dependence on
>oil from OPEC nations, which have dictated oil prices for decades.
>
>The proposal has been seriously batted around in corporate boardrooms from
>Texas to Saudi Arabia since the mid-1990s. But given Afghanistan's 22 years
>of war, there were serious doubts that the pipelines would be built. Now,
>with the United States vowing to uproot the Taliban, the project seems more
>possible.
>
>In recent weeks, the English-language newspaper Baku Sun in oil-rich
>Azerbaijan has published stories discussing the hopes for proposed Afghan
>pipelines. Last month, Turkmenistan's president, Saparamurad Niyazov, asked
>the United Nations to help revive the project, saying it would be
>"advantageous for all the neighboring countries, and primarily Afghanistan,"
>according to Turkmenistan's official news agency.
>
>Some Central Asian oil consultants are publicly lobbying for the pipeline to
>be a key part of any post-Taliban "Marshall Plan" for the United States to
>help rebuild Afghanistan.
>
>"It should be an absolute must for the U.S. to pursue this option," said Rob
>Sobhani, president of Washington-based Caspian Energy Consulting and a
>former consultant in Central Asia for Amoco, which is now part of British
>Petroleum. Sobhani has pushed the pipeline on various U.S. television
>programs.
>
>The Afghan pipelines would make it cheaper and faster for Naemi and Chase
>Energy to get their oil and natural gas to Asian markets. They plan to use
>railroads along long, circuitous routes through the Caspian Sea region and
>Turkey.
>
>Afghanistan, at war since the Soviets invaded in 1979, has never been able
>to fully tap its deposits of natural gas, oil and coal. Conflict after
>conflict has shattered its infrastructure, eroded its economy and spawned
>one of the world's largest refugee populations.
>
>All that seemed to be forgotten when the Taliban grabbed power in 1996,
>bringing stability to much of the country. By then, an international
>consortium of oil companies led by Houston-based Unocal Corp. was wooing the
>hard-line Islamic regime to sign the pipeline deal.
>
>The group included companies from Saudi Arabia, Russia, South Korea, Japan
>and Pakistan. The Argentine firm Bridas also was competing for the rights to
>build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
>
>Unocal pulled out of the pipeline consortium in December 1998, after the
>U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the subsequent American
>military strikes on Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. The
>civil war in Afghanistan, low oil prices and pressure at home from U.S.
>women's groups protesting the Taliban's subjugation of women also played
>roles.
>
>The State Department was helping Unocal, despite the Taliban's brutal human
>rights record and their harboring of bin Laden. U.S. officials said they
>hoped that the Taliban would moderate their policies and that the pipeline
>would boost Afghanistan's crippled economy.
>
>According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy
>organization, the U.S. diplomatic dance with the Taliban was partly an
>attempt to prevent the construction of a pipeline through Iran and to reduce
>Russian leverage over Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.
>
>U.S. ties with the oil-producing former Soviet republics are closer after
>the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Uzbekistan's government, which hopes that a
>stable Afghanistan will open direct routes for its oil and natural gas, and
>its neighbors have supported the American-led anti-terrorism coalition.
>
>Although the United States is talking about buying oil from Russia, it also
>is supporting the proposed construction of a pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan,
>to the Turkish seaport of Ceyhan, which would allow the Caspian Sea nations
>to lessen their reliance on Moscow.
>
>While modern-day wildcatters such as Naemi are betting on the Afghan
>pipelines, larger oil companies are not jumping in so soon. A Unocal
>spokeswoman said the company had no plans to invest anywhere in Central
>Asia.
>
>Abdul Raheem Yaseer, assistant director of the Center for Afghanistan
>Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, said: "The prospects are there;
>the potential is there. But first the Taliban have to be removed; then the
>terrorists have to be removed. Then the Afghans have to be helped to form
>their own government, and then they'll need a lot of money for
>reconstructing their country. Then they will talk about oil projects."

-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu