Liquid war: Welcome to
Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar
What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia
will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards
a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great
Game.
Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which
the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more
important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to
think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the
pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of
the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier
these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its
chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.
All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the
1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in
an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion
Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its
acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of
Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to
them!)
I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or
perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from
Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own do-it-yourself routes for
LNG (liquefied natural gas).
I used to avidly follow the adventures of that
once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased
Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head
of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a
Conradian hero.
In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to
Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were
puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that
country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.")
Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy
giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow - which digitally details
every single pipeline in Eurasia - or the National Iranian Oil
Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of
female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering
Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil"
in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement for
me.
Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively
cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or
not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their
hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a
long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be,
made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on
unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this
week.
Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead
or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that
"war on terror", whatever name it goes by. These are diversions
compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that
follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.
Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?
Calling Dr Zbig In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard,
Zbigniew Brzezinski - realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and
former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who
launched the US on its modern energy wars - laid out in some detail
just how to hang on to American "global primacy". Later, his master
plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr No's
congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century
(PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and
its followers went down).
For Dr Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia - from, that
is, thinking big - it all boils down to fostering the emergence of
just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for
Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he
so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more
cooperative trans-Eurasian security system".
By now, Dr Zbig - among whose fans is evidently President Barack
Obama - must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to
deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part
of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.
Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the
long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the
West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan - and despite all the
dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be
Washington - will have the upper hand in whatever is to come, and
there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a "long war", that
can change that.
Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying
the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over
Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and
difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully
slow development of energy alternatives". Though you may not have
noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are
already on, and even in the worst of economic times, the risk
mounts constantly, given the relentless competition between the
West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or
in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.
In these early skirmishes of the 21st century, China reacted
swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, its
leaders were formulating a response to what they saw as the
reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of
Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific,
in June 2001, its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an
acronym you should memorize. It's going to be around for a
while.
Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the
Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union -
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan - which the Bill
Clinton administration and then the new George W Bush
administration, run by those former energy men, had been eyeing
covetously. The organization was to be a multi-layered economic and
military regional cooperation society that, as both the Chinese and
the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of security blanket
around the upper rim of Afghanistan.
Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that
country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the
New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign
investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves -
and thus sell much more to the West than US-imposed sanctions now
allow.
No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air
assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted
Likudniks as well as former vice president Dick ("Angler") Cheney
and his neo-conservative chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen
by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a US
attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would
be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole
project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming to
represent.
Global BRIC-a-brac
Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its
Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to
dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk
Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus
Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang province, its Far West.
The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran,
India
, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that
increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy
supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course,
the role the Washington ruling elite would like the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) to play across Eurasia. Given that
Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia,
clashes of various sorts are inevitable.
Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood
as a historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations
- Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist - and, because of
that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security
system in Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic
inside-the-Beltway global strategists like Dr Zbig and president
George H W Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the
21st century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of
BRIC countries - for those of you by now collecting New Great Game
acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China - plus
the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Add
in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and
you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a
high-octane dream.
The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente
cordiale.
Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively
expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game
for what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil
and natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling
the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North
Africa to the Chinese border.
No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in
bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they
would be built, the countries they would cross, would
determine much in the world to come. And this was where the
empire of US military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in
Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the
AMBO pipeline).
AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an
entity registered in the US, is building a $1.1 billion pipeline,
aka "the Trans-Balkan", slated to be finished by 2011. It will
bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either
Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical
strategy of creating a US-controlled energy-security grid that was
first developed by president Bill Clinton's energy secretary Bill
Richardson and later by Cheney.
Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of
an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in
Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the
Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (from
thence onto Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy
plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the
Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the
Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to
the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline would connect
to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.
As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that
Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It
would be the largest overseas base the US had built since the
Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root
would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares
of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo.
Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo
with perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and
loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant
immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not
only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region
(considered in the neo-con-speak of the Bush years "the new
interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater
Middle East").
How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo,
then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously
tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of
another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by
the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and
finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy
transportation junction) as straightforward wars for
Pipelineistan?
Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the
Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy
stretching from Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's
"global war on terror". Blowback, as then Russian President
Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable - but that's
another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another
time.
Rainy night in Georgia
If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan,
you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was
crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to
Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine
arc of instability - in part because of a continuing obsession with
cutting Iran out of the energy flow.
It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed
out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed.
Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy
consultant", less than four years after Azerbaijan became
independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC
was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku,
across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish
port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.
Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel
serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential:
Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and
Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and
Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and
Turkish Kurdistan.
From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A
"BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg
Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to
nothing - and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing
both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern
Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring
Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much
followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to
occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC
pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas
analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly
cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear
to global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit
country. In other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's
world.
For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success
story in the US version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill
Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by
promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now,
however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in,
Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it
off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash
President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all,
Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at
least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.
Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on
Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next
Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy
Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of
previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have
offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a
deal involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline,
which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while
considering pumping less oil for the BTC.
Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri
oil on the BTC - its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day,
mostly shipped to Europe - means the pipeline may go broke, which
is exactly what Russia wants.
In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the
monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the
absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9
billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to
which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after
production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the
Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump
Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.
In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow
from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC - once hyped by
Washington as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on
Persian Gulf oil - lives or dies.
Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good
times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be
Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial
acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those US bases
across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines
are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of
monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's
Gazprom.
And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent
off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly
adapt a quote from Terminator). Think of this as a door opening
onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to
be the most important question on the planet.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent
for Asia Times Online and an analyst for the Real News. This
article draws from his new book, Obama does Globalistan. He is also the
author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving
into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the
surge. Pepe may be reached at [email protected]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/
