[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:7405] Oil company adviser named US representative to Afghanistan (fwd)

[Al Kagan]

Some interesting reading!

>Delivered-To: akagan at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
>Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2002 01:14:40 -0600 (CST)
>From: Dale Wertz <dwertz at mc.net>
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>Cc: PLGNet-L at listproc.sjsu.edu
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:7405] Oil company adviser named US representative 
>to Afghanistan (fwd)
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>Status:  
>
>	Four articles in the New York Times Electronic Edition since
>December 31, mention Zalmay Khalilzad, the newly appointed U.S. envoy to
>Afghanistan.  None of the articles mentioned Khalilzad's Unocal
>connection.  Maybe they'll get around to it in due time.  Or maybe it's
>not news fit to print.  dw
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 21:03:53 EST
>From: SIUHIN at aol.com
>To: peacenowar at lists.riseup.net
>Subject: [iac-disc.] Oil company adviser named US representative to 
>Afghanistan
>
>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’Äôs 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,
>’ÄúThe Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of
>fundamentalism practiced by Iran.’Äù
>
>’ÄúWe should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian
>assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction,’Äù
>he declared. ’ÄúIt is time for the United States to reengage’Äù the
>Afghan regime. This ’Äúreengagement’Äù 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’Äîthe milieu out of which
>both the Taliban and bin Laden’Äôs 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’Äôs 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: ’ÄúThe 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’Äôs 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’Äôs Chevron, Exxon, and Arco;
>France’Äôs TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and
>other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of
>dollars of investment in the region.’Äù
>
>
>Silence in the media
>
>This reality is well understood in official Washington, but the
>most important corporate-controlled media outlets’Äîthe television
>networks and major national daily newspapers’Äîhave 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, ’ÄúAs the War
>Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals Follow.’Äù The Times reported, ’ÄúThe State
>Department is exploring the potential for post-Taliban energy
>projects in the region, which has more than 6 percent of the
>world’Äôs proven oil reserves and almost 40 percent of its gas
>reserves.’Äù
>
>The Times noted that during a visit in early December to
>Kazakhstan, ’ÄúSecretary of State Colin L. Powell said he was
>’Äòparticularly impressed’Äô 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.’Äù
>
>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’ÄôReilly, 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’Äôs 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, ’ÄúThe CPC project also advances my
>Administration’Äôs 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.’Äù
>
>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’Äôs father and chief spokesman for the 2000 Bush campaign during
>its successful effort to shut down the Florida vote recount.
>
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-- 


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