Pipelineistan goes
Af-Pak
By Pepe Escobar
May 14, 2009
As United States President Barack Obama heads into his second
100 days in office, let's head for the big picture ourselves, the
ultimate global plot line, the tumultuous rush towards a new,
polycentric world order. In its first 100 days, the Obama
presidency introduced us to a brand new acronym, OCO - for Overseas
Contingency Operations - formerly known as GWOT (as in "global war
on terror").
Use either name, or anything else you want, and what you're really
talking about is what's happening on the immense energy battlefield
that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean. It's there that the
liquid war for the control of Eurasia takes place.
Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas),
hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to
that ever-flowing wonderland - Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off
the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative
Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones
like IPI and TAPI. Above all, it's time to check out the most
recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington
wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.
We've already seen Pipelineistan wars in Kosovo and Georgia, and
we've followed Washington's favorite pipeline, the BTC, which was
supposed to tilt the flow of energy westward, sending oil coursing
past both Iran and Russia. Things didn't quite turn out that way,
but we've got to move on, the New Great Game never stops. Now, it's
time to grasp just what the Asian Energy Security Grid is all
about, visit a surreal natural gas republic, and understand why
that Grid is so deeply implicated in the Af-Pak war.
Every time I've visited Iran, energy analysts stress the total
"interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics". What
they mean is the ultimate importance to various great and regional
powers of Asian integration via a sprawling mass of energy
pipelines that will someday, somehow, link the Persian Gulf,
Central Asia, South Asia, Russia and China. The major Iranian card
in the Asian integration game is the gigantic South Pars natural
gas field (which Iran shares with Qatar). It is estimated to hold
at least 9% of the world's proven natural gas reserves.
As much as Washington may live in perpetual denial, Russia and Iran
together control roughly 20% of the world's oil reserves and nearly
50% of its gas reserves. Think about that for a moment. It's little
wonder that, for the leadership of both countries as well as
China's, the idea of Asian integration, of the Grid, is
sacrosanct.
If it ever gets built, a major node on that Grid will surely be the
prospective US$7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also
known as the "peace pipeline". After years of wrangling, a nearly
miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. At
least in this rare case, both Pakistan and India stood shoulder to
shoulder in rejecting relentless pressure from the Bush
administration to scotch the deal.
It couldn't be otherwise. Pakistan, after all, is an energy-poor,
desperate customer of the Grid. One year ago, in a speech
at Beijing's Tsinghua
University, then-president Pervez Musharraf did everything but drop
to his knees and beg China to dump money into pipelines linking the
Persian Gulf and Pakistan with China's far west. If this were to
happen, it might help transform Pakistan from a near-failed state
into a mighty "energy corridor" to the Middle East. If you think of
a pipeline as an umbilical cord, it goes without saying that IPI,
far more than any form of US aid (or outright interference), would
go the extra mile in stabilizing the Pak half of Obama's Af-Pak
theater of operations, and even possibly relieve it of its India
obsession.
If Pakistan's fate is in question, Iran's is another matter. Though
currently only holding "observer" status in the SCO, sooner or
later it will inevitably become a full member and so enjoy
NATO-style, an-attack-on-one-of-us-is-an-attack-on-all-of-us
protection. Imagine, then, the cataclysmic consequences of an
Israeli preemptive strike (backed by Washington or not) on Iran's
nuclear facilities. The SCO will tackle this knotty issue at its
next summit in June, in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell - and will
remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next
month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already
clinched a $100 billion gas "deal of the century" with the Iranians
and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less
close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well
as nuclear energy technology.
And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's
Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you
may never have heard a thing about. Let's correct that now.
Gurbanguly is the man
Alas, the sun-king of Turkmenistan, the wily, wacky Saparmurat
"Turkmenbashi" Nyazov, "the father of all Turkmen" (descendants of
a formidable race of nomadic horseback warriors who used to attack
Silk Road caravans) is now dead. But far from forgotten.
The Chinese were huge fans of the Turkmenbashi. And the joy was
mutual. One key reason the Central Asians love to do business with
China is that the Middle Kingdom, unlike both Russia and the United
States, carries little modern imperial baggage. And of course,
China will never carp about human rights or foment a color-coded
revolution of any sort.
The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new
Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly
Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All
Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from
eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the
longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers
of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion. When China
signed the agreement to build it in 2007, they made sure to add a
clever little geopolitical kicker. The agreement explicitly states
that "Chinese interests" will not be "threatened from
[Turkmenistan's] territory by third parties”. In translation: no
Pentagon bases allowed in that country.
China's deft energy diplomacy game plan in the former Soviet
republics of Central Asia is a pure winner. In the case of
Turkmenistan, lucrative deals are offered and partnerships with
Russia are encouraged to boost Turkmen gas production. There are to
be no Russian-Chinese antagonisms, as befits the main partners in
the SCO, because the Asian Energy Security Grid story is really and
truly about them.
By the way, elsewhere on the Grid, those two countries recently
agreed to extend the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to
China by the end of 2010. After all, energy-ravenous China badly
needs not just Turkmen gas, but Russia's liquefied natural gas
(LNG).
With energy prices low and the global economy melting down, times
are sure to be tough for the Kremlin through at least 2010, but
this won't derail its push to forge a Central Asian energy club
within the SCO. Think of all this as essentially an energy entente
cordiale with China. Russian Deputy Industry and Energy Minister
Ivan Materov has been among those insistently swearing that this
will not someday lead to a "gas OPEC [the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries]" within the SCO. It remains to be seen how the
Obama national security team decides to counteract the successful
Russian strategy of undermining by all possible means a US-promoted
East-West Caspian Sea energy corridor, while solidifying a
Russian-controlled Pipelineistan stretching from Kazakhstan to
Greece that will monopolize the flow of energy to Western
Europe.
The real Afghan war
In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question -
why Afghanistan matters - is simply not part of the discussion in
the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation
of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and
Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.
And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in
Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep
in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by
American strategists as crucial places to plant the flag; and once
the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former
Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to
future US global power. It would be there, as they imagined it,
that the US Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with
Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on
the defensive.
Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing
Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of US foreign policy
since president Richard Nixon's era in the early 1970s has been to
split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused
on this since the US Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act
five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999.
That act clearly identified American geostrategic interests from
the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American
protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy
corridor.
Afghanistan, as it happens, sits conveniently at the crossroads of
any new Silk Road linking the Caucasus to western China, and four
nuclear powers (China, Russia, Pakistan and India) lurk in the
vicinity. "Losing" Afghanistan and its key network of US military
bases would, from the Pentagon's point of view, be a disaster, and
though it may be a secondary matter in the New Great Game of the
moment, it's worth remembering that the country itself is a lot
more than the towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and immense
deserts: it's believed to be rich in unexplored deposits of natural
gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chrome, talc, barites, sulfur, lead,
zinc and iron ore, as well as precious and semiprecious
stones.
And there's something highly toxic to be added to this already
lethal mix: don't forget the narco-dollar angle - the fact that the
global heroin cartels that feast on Afghanistan only work with US
dollars, not euros. For the SCO, the top security threat in
Afghanistan isn't the Taliban, but the drug business. Russia's
anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov routinely blasts the disaster that
passes for a US/NATO anti-drug war there, stressing that Afghan
heroin now kills 30,000 Russians annually, twice as many as were
killed during the decade-long US-supported anti-Soviet Afghan jihad
of the 1980s.
And then, of course, there are those competing pipelines that, if
ever built, either would or wouldn't exclude Iran and Russia from
the action to their south. In April 2008, Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India actually signed an agreement to
build a long-dreamt-about $7.6 billion (and counting) pipeline,
whose acronym TAPI combines the first letters of their names and
would also someday deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to
Pakistan and India without the involvement of either Iran or
Russia. It would cut right through the heart of Western
Afghanistan, in Herat, and head south across lightly populated
Nimruz and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban, various Pashtun
guerrillas and assorted highway robbers now merrily run rings
around US and NATO forces and where - surprise! - the US is now
building in Dasht-e-Margo ("the Desert of Death") a new mega-base
to host President Obama's surge troops.
TAPI's rival is the already mentioned IPI, also theoretically
underway and widely derided by Heritage Foundation types in the US,
who regularly launch blasts of angry prose at the nefarious idea of
India and Pakistan importing gas from "evil" Iran. Theoretically,
TAPI's construction will start in 2010 and the gas would begin
flowing by 2015. (Don't hold your breath.) Embattled Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, who can hardly secure a few square blocks
of central Kabul, even with the help of international forces,
nonetheless offered assurances last year that he would not only rid
his country of millions of land mines along TAPI's route but
somehow get rid of the Taliban in the bargain.
Should there be investors (nursed by Afghan opium dreams) delirious
enough to sink their money into such a pipeline - and that's a
monumental if - Afghanistan would collect only $160 million a year
in transit fees, a mere bagatelle even if it does represent a big
chunk of the embattled Karzai's current annual revenue. Count on
one thing though, if it ever happened, the Taliban and assorted
warlords/highway robbers would be sure to get a cut of the
action.
A Clinton-Bush-Obama great game
TAPI's roller-coaster history actually begins in the mid-1990s, the
Clinton era, when the Taliban were dined (but not wined) by the
California-based energy company Unocal and the Clinton machine. In
1995, Unocal first came up with the pipeline idea, even then a
product of Washington's fatal urge to bypass both Iran and Russia.
Next, Unocal talked to the Turkmenbashi, then to the Taliban, and
so launched a classic New Great Game gambit that has yet to end and
without which you can't understand the Afghan war Obama has
inherited.
A Taliban delegation, thanks to Unocal, enjoyed Houston's
hospitality in early 1997 and then Washington's in December of that
year. When it came to energy negotiations, the Taliban's leadership
was anything but medieval. They were tough bargainers, also cannily
courting the Argentinean private oil company Bridas, which had
secured the right to explore and exploit oil reserves in eastern
Turkmenistan.
In August 1997, financially unstable Bridas sold 60% of its
stock to Amoco, which merged the next year with British Petroleum.
A key Amoco consultant happened to be that ubiquitous Eurasian
player, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, while
another such luminary, Henry Kissinger, just happened to be a
consultant for Unocal. BP-Amoco, already developing the
Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, now became the major player in
what had already been dubbed the Trans-Afghan Pipeline or TAP.
Inevitably, Unocal and BP-Amoco went to war and let the lawyers
settle things in a Texas court, where, in October 1998 as the
Clinton years drew to an end, BP-Amoco seemed to emerge with the
upper hand.
Under newly elected president George W Bush, however, Unocal snuck
back into the game and, as early as January 2001, was cozying up to
the Taliban yet again, this time supported by a star-studded
governmental cast of characters, including undersecretary of state
Richard Armitage, himself a former Unocal lobbyist. The Taliban
were duly invited back to Washington in March 2001 via Rahmatullah
Hashimi, a top aide to "The Shadow," the movement's leader Mullah
Omar.
Negotiations eventually broke down because of those pesky transit
fees the Taliban demanded. Beware the Empire's fury. At a Group of
Eight summit meeting in Genoa in July 2001, Western diplomats
indicated that the Bush administration had decided to take the
Taliban down before year's end. (Pakistani diplomats in Islamabad
would later confirm this to me.) The attacks of September 11, 2001
just slightly accelerated the schedule. Nicknamed "the kebab
seller" in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, a former Central Intelligence
Agency asset and Unocal representative, who had entertained
visiting Taliban members at barbecues in Houston, was soon forced
down Afghan throats as the country's new leader.
Among the first fruits of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 was the
signing by Karzai, Pakistani president Musharraf and Turkmenistan's
president Saparmyrat Nyazov of an agreement committing themselves
to build TAP, formally launching a Pipelineistan extension from
Central to South Asia with brand USA stamped all over it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did nothing - until September
2006, that is, when he delivered his counterpunch with panache.
That's when Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed to buy Nyazov's
natural gas at the 40% mark-up the dictator demanded. In return,
the Russians received priceless gifts (and the Bush administration
a pricey kick in the face). Nyazov turned over control of
Turkmenistan's entire gas surplus to the Russian company through
2009, indicated a preference for letting Russia explore the
country's new gas fields and stated that Turkmenistan was bowing
out of any US-backed Trans-Caspian pipeline project. (And while he
was at it, Putin also cornered much of the gas exports of
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well.)
Thus, almost five years later, with occupied Afghanistan in
increasingly deadly chaos, TAP seemed dead-on-arrival. The
(invisible) star of what would later turn into Obama's "good" war
was already a corpse.
But here's the beauty of Pipelineistan: like zombies, dead deals
always seem to return and so the game goes on forever.
Just when Russia thought it had Turkmenistan locked in …
A Turkmen bash
They don't call Turkmenistan a "gas republic" for nothing. I've
crossed it from the Uzbek border to a Caspian Sea port named - what
else - Turkmenbashi where you can purchase one kilo of fresh Beluga
for $100 and a camel for $200. That's where the gigantic gas fields
are, and it's obvious that most have not been fully explored. When,
in October 2008, the British consultancy firm GCA confirmed that
the Yolotan-Osman gas fields in southwest Turkmenistan were among
the world's four largest, holding up to a staggering 14 trillion
cubic meters of natural gas, Turkmenistan promptly grabbed second
place in the global gas reserves sweepstakes, way ahead of Iran and
only 20% below Russia. With that news, the earth shook seismically
across Pipelineistan.
Just before he died in December 2006, the flamboyant Turkmenbashi
boasted that his country held enough reserves to export 150 billion
cubic meters of gas annually for the next 250 years. Given his
notorious megalomania, nobody took him seriously. So in March 2008,
our man Gurbanguly ordered a GCA audit to dispel any doubts. After
all, in pure Asian Energy Security Grid mode, Turkmenistan had
already signed contracts to supply Russia with about 50 billion
cubic meters annually, China with 40 billion cubic meters and Iran
with eight billion cubic meters.
And yet, none of this turns out to be quite as monumental or
settled as it may look. In fact, Turkmenistan and Russia may be
playing the energy equivalent of Russian roulette. After all,
virtually all of Turkmenistani gas exports flow north through an
old, crumbling Soviet system of pipelines, largely built in the
1960s. Add to this a Turkmeni knack for raising the stakes non-stop
at a time when Gazprom has little choice but to put up with it:
without Turkmen gas, it simply can't export all it needs to Europe,
the source of 70% of Gazprom's profits.
Worse yet, according to a Gazprom source quoted in the Russian
business daily Kommersant, the stark fact is that the company only
thought it controlled all of Turkmenistan's gas exports; the newly
discovered gas mega-fields turn out not to be part of the deal. As
my Asia Times Online colleague, former ambassador MK Bhadrakumar
put the matter, Gazprom's mistake "is proving to be a misconception
of Himalayan proportions".
In fact, it's as if the New Great Gamesters had just discovered
another Everest. This year, Obama's national security strategists
lost no time unleashing a no-holds-barred diplomatic campaign to
court Turkmenistan. The goal? To accelerate possible ways for all
that new Turkmeni gas to flow through the right pipes, and create
quite a different energy map and future. Apart from TAPI, another
key objective is to make the prospective $5.8 billion
Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline become viable and thus, of
course, trump the Russians. In that way, a key long-term US
strategic objective would be fulfilled: Austria, Italy and Greece,
as well as the Balkan and various Central European countries, would
be at least partially pulled from Gazprom's orbit. (Await my next
"postcard" from Pipelineistan for more on this.)
IPI or TAPI?
Gurbanguly is proving an even more riotous player than the
Turkmenbashi. A year ago he said he was going to hedge his bets,
that he was willing to export the bulk of the eight trillion cubic
meters of gas reserves he now claims for his country to virtually
anyone. Washington was - and remains - ecstatic. At an
international conference last month in Ashgabat ("the city of
love"), the Las Vegas of Central Asia, Gurbanguly told a hall
packed with Americans, Europeans and Russians that "diversification
of energy flows and inclusion of new countries into the geography
of export routes can help the global economy gain stability”.
Inevitably, behind closed doors, the TAPI maze came up and TAPI
executives once again began discussing pricing and transit fees. Of
course, hard as that may be to settle, it's the easy part of the
deal. After all, there's that Everest of Afghan security to climb,
and someone still has to confirm that Turkmenistan's gas reserves
are really as fabulous as claimed.
Imperceptible jiggles in Pipelineistan's tectonic plates can shake
half the world. Take, for example, an obscure March report in the
Balochistan Times: a little noticed pipeline supplying gas to parts
of Sindh province in Pakistan, including Karachi, was blown up. It
got next to no media attention, but all across Eurasia and in
Washington those analyzing the comparative advantages of TAPI vs
IPI had to wonder just how risky it might be for India to buy
future Iranian gas via increasingly volatile Balochistan.
And then in early April came another mysterious pipeline explosion,
this one in Turkmenistan, compromising exports to Russia. The
Turkmenis promptly blamed the Russians (and TAPI advocates
cheered), but nothing in Afghanistan itself could have left them
cheering very loudly. Right now, Dick Cheney's master plan to get
those blue rivers of Turkmeni gas flowing southwards via a future
TAPI as part of a US grand strategy for a "Greater Central Asia"
lies in tatters.
Still, Brzezinski might disagree, and as he commands Obama's
attention, he may try to convince the new president that the world
needs a $7.6 billion-plus, 1,600-km steel serpent winding through a
horribly dangerous war zone. That's certainly the gist of what
Brzezinski said immediately after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war,
stressing once again that "the construction of a pipeline from
Central Asia via Afghanistan to the south ... will maximally expand
world society's access to the Central Asian energy market."
Washington or Beijing?
Still, give credit where it's due. For the time being, our man
Gurbanguly may have snatched the leading role in the New Great Game
in this part of Eurasia. He's already signed a groundbreaking gas
agreement with RWE from Germany and sent the Russians
scrambling.
If, one of these days, the Turkmenistani leader opts for TAPI as
well, it will open Washington to an ultimate historical irony.
After so much death and destruction, Washington would undoubtedly
have to sit down once again with - yes - the Taliban! And we'd be
back to July 2001 and those pesky pipeline transit fees.
As it stands at the moment, however, Russia still dominates
Pipelineistan, ensuring Central Asian gas flows across Russia's
network and not through the Trans-Caspian networks privileged by
the US and the European Union. This virtually guarantees Russia's
crucial geopolitical status as the top gas supplier to Europe and a
crucial supplier to Asia as well.
Meanwhile, in "transit corridor" Pakistan, where Predator drones
soaring over Pashtun tribal villages monopolize the headlines, the
shady New Great Game slouches in under-the-radar mode toward the
immense, under-populated southern Pakistani province of
Balochistan. The future of the epic IPI vs TAPI battle may hinge on
a single, magic word: Gwadar.
Essentially a fishing village, Gwadar is an Arabian Sea port in
that province. The port was built by China. In Washington's dream
scenario, Gwadar becomes the new Dubai of South Asia. This implies
the success of TAPI. For its part, China badly needs Gwadar as a
node for yet another long pipeline to be built to western China.
And where would the gas flowing in that line come from? Iran, of
course.
Whoever "wins," if Gwadar really becomes part of the Liquid War,
Pakistan will finally become a key transit corridor for either
Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field heading for China, or
a great deal of the Caspian gas from Turkmenistan heading
Europe-wards. To make the scenario even more locally
mouth-watering, Pakistan would then be a pivotal place for both
NATO and the SCO (in which it is already an official
"observer").
Now that's as classic as the New Great Game in Eurasia can get.
There's NATO vs the SCO. With either IPI or TAPI, Turkmenistan
wins. With either IPI or TAPI, Russia loses. With either IPI or
TAPI, Pakistan wins. With TAPI, Iran loses. With IPI, Afghanistan
loses. In the end, however, as in any game of high stakes
Pipelineistan poker, it all comes down to the top two global
players. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets: will the winner be
Washington or Beijing?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KE14Ag01.html