The New 'Great Game'
by Lutz Kleveman
About a year
ago I visited
the US air base in Bagram, some thirty miles north of the Afghan
capital of Kabul. A US Army public affairs officer, a friendly Texan,
gave me a tour of the sprawling camp, set up after the ouster of the
Taliban in December 2001. It was a clear day, and one Chinook
helicopter after the other took off to transport combat troops into the
nearby mountains. As we walked past the endless rows of tents and men
in desert camouflage uniforms, I spotted a wooden pole carrying two
makeshift street signs. They read "Exxon Street" and "Petro Boulevard."
Slightly embarrassed, the PA officer explained, "This is the fuel
handlers' workplace. The signs are obviously a joke, a sort of irony."
As I am sure it was. It just seemed an uncanny sight, as
I was
researching the potential links between the "war on terror" and
American oil interests in Central Asia. I had already traveled
thousands of miles from the Caucasus peaks across the Caspian Sea and
the Central Asian plains all the way down to the Afghan Hindu Kush. On
that journey I met with and interviewed warlords, diplomats,
politicians, generals and oil bosses. They are all players in a
geostrategic struggle that has become increasingly intertwined with the
war on terror: the new "Great Game."
In this rerun of the first "Great Game," the
nineteenth-century
imperial rivalry between the British Empire and czarist Russia,
powerful players once again position themselves to control the heart of
the Eurasian landmass, left in a post-Soviet power vacuum. Today the
United States has taken over the leading role from the British. Along
with the ever-present Russians, new regional powers such as China,
Iran, Turkey and Pakistan have entered the arena, and transnational oil
corporations are also pursuing their own interests in a brash, Wild
East style.
Since September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration has
undertaken a
massive military buildup in Central Asia, deploying thousands of US
troops not only in Afghanistan but also in the newly independent
republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia. These first US combat
troops on former Soviet territory have dramatically altered the
geostrategic power equations in the region, with Washington trying to
seal the cold war victory against Russia, contain Chinese influence and
tighten the noose around Iran. Most important, however, the Bush
Administration is using the "war on terror" to further American energy
interests in Central Asia. The bad news is that this dramatic
geopolitical gamble involving thuggish dictators and corrupt Saudi oil
sheiks is likely to produce only more terrorists, jeopardizing
America's prospects of defeating the forces responsible for the
September 11 attacks.
The main spoils in today's Great Game are the Caspian
energy reserves,
principally oil and gas. On its shores, and at the bottom of the
Caspian Sea, lie the world's biggest untapped fossil fuel resources.
Estimates range from 85 to 219 billion barrels of crude, worth up to $4
trillion. According to the US Energy Department, Azerbaijan and
Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 110 billion barrels, more than
three times the US reserves. Oil giants such as ExxonMobil,
ChevronTexaco and British Petroleum have already invested more than $30
billion in new production facilities.
The aggressive US pursuit of oil interests in the
Caspian did not start
with the Bush Administration but during the Clinton years, with the
Democratic President personally conducting oil and pipeline diplomacy
with Caspian leaders. Despite Clinton's failure to reduce the Russian
influence in the region decisively, American industry leaders were
impressed. "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge
as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian,"
declared Dick Cheney in 1998 in a speech to oil industrialists in
Washington. Cheney was then still CEO of the oil-services giant
Halliburton. In May 2001 Cheney, now US Vice President, recommended in
the Administration's seminal National Energy Policy report that "the
President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign
policy," singling out the Caspian Basin as a "rapidly growing new area
of supply." Keen to outdo Clinton's oil record, the Bush Administration
took the new Great Game into its second round.
With potential
oil
production of up to 4.7 million barrels per day by 2010, the Caspian
region has become crucial to the US policy of "diversifying energy
supply." The other major supplier is the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, where
both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have vigorously developed
US oil interests and strengthened ties with corrupt West African
regimes. The strategy of supply diversification, originally designed
after the 1973 oil shock, is designed to wean America off its
dependence on the Arab-dominated OPEC cartel, which has been using its
near-monopoly position as pawn and leverage against industrialized
countries. As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells
outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, OPEC is in the long run
going to expand its share of the world market even further. At the same
time, the United States will have to import more than two-thirds of its
total energy needs by 2020, mostly from the volatile Middle East.
Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable
with the
growing power of Saudi Arabia, whose terror ties have been exposed
since the September 11 terror attacks. As the recent bombings in Riyadh
have shown, there is a growing risk that radical Islamist groups will
topple the corrupt Saud dynasty, only to then stop the flow of oil to
"infidels." The consequences of 8 million barrels of oil--10 percent of
global production--disappearing from the world markets overnight would
be disastrous. Even without any such anti-Western revolution, the Saudi
petrol is already, as it were, ideologically contaminated. To stave off
political turmoil, the regime in Riyadh funds the radical Islamic
Wahhabi sect, many of whose preachers call for terror against Americans
around the world.
To get out of its Faustian pact with Saudi Arabia, the
United States
has tried to reduce its dependence on Saudi oil sheiks by seeking to
secure access to other sources. Central Asia, however, is no less
volatile than the Middle East, and oil politics are only making matters
worse: Fierce conflicts have broken out over pipeline routes from the
landlocked Caspian region to high-sea ports. Russia, still regarding
itself as the imperial overlord of its former colonies, promotes
pipeline routes across its territory, notably Chechnya, in the North
Caucasus. China, the increasingly oil-dependent waking giant in the
region, wants to build eastbound pipelines from Kazakhstan. Iran is
offering its pipeline network for exports via the Persian Gulf.
By contrast, both the Clinton and Bush administrations
have championed
two pipelines that would circumvent both Russia and Iran. One of them,
first planned by the US oil company Unocal in the mid-1990s, would run
from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Pakistani port of Gwadar
on the Indian Ocean. Several months after the US-led overthrow of the
Taliban regime, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal adviser,
signed a treaty with Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf and the Turkmen
dictator Saparmurat Niyazov to authorize construction of a $3.2 billion
gas pipeline through the Herat-Kandahar corridor in Afghanistan, with a
projected capacity of about 1 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. A
feasibility study is under way, and a parallel pipeline for oil is also
planned for a later stage. So far, however, continuing warlordism in
Afghanistan has prevented any private investor from coming forward.
Construction has already begun on a gigantic, $3.6
billion oil pipeline
from Azerbaijan's capital of Baku via neighboring Georgia to Turkey's
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. British Petroleum Amoco, its main
operator, has invested billions in oil-rich Azerbaijan and can count on
firm political support from the Bush Administration, which stationed
about 500 elite troops in war-torn Georgia in May 2002. Controversial
for environmental and social reasons, as it is unlikely to alleviate
poverty in the notoriously corrupt transit countries, the pipeline
project also perpetuates instability in the South Caucasus. With
thousands of Russian troops still stationed in Georgia and Armenia,
Moscow has for years sought to deter Western pipeline investors by
fomenting bloody ethnic conflicts near the pipeline route, in the
Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and in the Georgian
breakaway regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ajaria.
Washington's Great Game opponents in Moscow and Beijing
resent the
dramatically growing US influence in their strategic backyard. Worried
that the American presence might encourage internal unrest in its
Central Asian province of Xinjiang--whose Turkic and Muslim population,
the Uighurs, are striving for more autonomy--China has recently held
joint military exercises with Kyrgyzstan.
The Russian government initially tolerated the American
intrusion into
its former empire, hoping Washington would in turn ignore Russian
atrocities in Chechnya. However, for the Kremlin, the much-hyped "new
strategic partnership" against terror between the Kremlin and the White
House has always been little more than a tactical and temporary
marriage of convenience to allow Russia's battered economy to recover
with the help of capital from Western companies. The US presence in
Russia's backyard is becoming ever more assertive, but it is
unthinkable for the majority of the Russian establishment to
permanently cede its hegemonic claims on Central Asia.
One man who is quite frank about this is Viktor
Kalyuzhny, the Russian
deputy foreign minister and President Vladimir Putin's special envoy to
the Caspian region, whom I interviewed in Moscow last year. "We have a
saying in Russia," he told me. "If you have guests in the house there
are two times when you are happy. One is when they arrive, and one is
when they leave again." To make sure that I got the message, Kalyuzhny
added, "Guests should know that it is impolite to stay for too long."
Unfazed by such
Russian
sensitivities, American troops in Central Asia seem to be there to
stay. Two years ago, when I visited the new US air base in Kyrgyzstan,
I was struck by the massive commitment the Pentagon had made. With the
help of dozens of excavators, bulldozers and cranes, a pioneer unit was
busy erecting a new hangar for F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets. Brawny
pioneers in desert camouflage were setting up hundreds of "Harvest
Falcon" and "Force Provider" tents for nearly 3,000 soldiers. I asked
their commander, a wiry brigadier general, if and when the troops would
ever leave Kyrgyzstan. "There is no time limit," he replied. "We will
pull out only when all Al Qaeda cells have been eradicated."
Today, the troops are still there and many tents have
been replaced by
concrete buildings. Increasingly annoyed, Russian Defense Minister
Sergei Ivanov has repeatedly demanded that the Americans pull out
within two years. Significantly, President Putin has signed new
security pacts with the Central Asian rulers and last October
personally opened a new Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan. It is the
first base Moscow has set up outside Russia's borders since the end of
the cold war. Equipped with fighter jets, it lies only twenty miles
away from the US air base.
Besides raising the specter of interstate conflict, the
Bush
Administration's energy imperialism jeopardizes the few successes in
the war on terror. That is because the resentment US policies cause in
Central Asia makes it easier for Al Qaeda-like organizations to recruit
new fighters. They hate America because in its search for antiterrorist
allies in the new Great Game, the Bush Administration has wooed some of
the region's most brutal autocrats, including Azerbaijan's Heydar
Aliyev, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and Pakistan's Musharraf.
The most tyrannical of Washington's new allies is Islom
Karimov, the
ex-Communist dictator of Uzbekistan, who allowed US troops to set up a
large and permanent military base on Uzbek soil during the Afghan
campaign in late 2001. Ever since, the Bush Administration has turned a
blind eye to the Karimov regime's brutal suppression of opposition and
Islamic groups. "Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I
will shoot them myself," Karimov once famously told his rubber-stamp
Parliament.
Although the US State Department acknowledges that Uzbek
security
forces use "torture as a routine investigation technique," Washington
last year gave the Karimov regime $500 million in aid and rent payments
for the US air base in Khanabad. Though Uzbek Muslims can be arrested
simply for wearing a long beard, the State Department also quietly
removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of
religion is under threat.
In the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, I once met 20-year-old
Ahmad, who
declined to give his family name out of fear of reprisal. Over a cup of
tea the young man told me that he had just been released from prison,
after serving a three-year sentence for allegedly belonging to an
Islamic terrorist organization. "The guards beat me every day," Ahmad
said, his eyes cast down. "It was awful, but I never stopped praying to
Allah."
The group the Muslim belonged to was a religious Sufi
order that, he
insisted, had nothing to do with terrorists such as the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan, which is blamed for several deadly attacks in
the late 1990s. "But maybe in the future my brothers and I have to
defend ourselves and fight," he told me. I asked Ahmad how he felt
about the arrival of American antiterror troops in Uzbekistan. "They
only make things worse. They don't help us, the people, but only the
government. I hate America."
What makes a
man a
terrorist? On my travels, I met countless angry young men who, with
nothing to lose but their seemingly valueless lives, were prepared to
fight for whatever radical Islamic leaders told them was worth the
fight. As in the Middle East, lack of democracy is one of the root
causes of terrorism in Central Asia: The young men's anger is primarily
directed against their own corrupt and despotic regimes. As Washington
shores up these rulers, their disgusted subjects increasingly embrace
militant Islam and virulent anti-Americanism.
Recent events in Azerbaijan are perfect examples of how
this works.
Whenever I travel to the capital of Baku, I am impressed with the new
glittery office buildings in the city center and the many flashy
Mercedes cars on the streets. Smart biznizmeny and their wives
stroll past expensive boutiques, wearing Versace and Cartier jewelry.
They are the few winners of the oil boom. Just ten miles out of Baku,
however, in the desolate suburb of Sumgait, about 50,000 people live in
abject poverty. Many are refugees who fled the war between Azerbaijan
and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in the early 1990s.
All of Sumgait's fourteen Soviet-era factories have been
shut down,
leaving everybody jobless. There is little electricity or running
water. One man, who eked out a living with his wife and several
children and grandchildren in a single room of a shabby highrise block,
told me, "What oil boom? Our president's family and the oil companies
put all the money into their pockets."
Azerbaijan is known as "BP country," as the company
wields a budget of
$15 billion to be invested off the Azeri coast over the coming years.
"If we pulled out of Baku," a former BP spokesman once told me, "the
country would collapse overnight." So Big Oil's interests had to be
taken into account when Azerbaijan's late ruler, Heydar Aliyev, feeling
that his death was nigh, rigged the presidential elections last October
to pass on his crown to his playboy son Ilham. This establishment of
the first dynasty in the former Soviet Union triggered popular protests
in the capital that were brutally put down by Aliyev's security forces.
They arrested hundreds of opposition members and killed at least two
people.
The next day, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage officially
congratulated the new baby dictator on his "strong showing." Armitage
is also a former board member of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
in Washington, set up in 1995 to promote US companies' interests in
Azerbaijan's multibillion-dollar oil industry. Democracy versus
stability for oil investments--few Azeris will forget what side the US
government took.
It need not be that way. The US-supported overthrow in
November of
strongman Eduard Shevardnadze in neighboring Georgia, a linchpin
country for the pipeline export of Caspian oil and gas, showed that
protecting strategic energy interests can, however accidentally, go
hand in hand with promoting democracy. To be sure, the Bush
Administration's motives for dropping Shevardnadze had less to do with
a sudden pro-democracy epiphany than with hard-nosed realpolitik:
Washington's longtime pet ally--who had secured nearly $100 million in
annual US aid for Georgia, which is more per capita than any other
country except Israel--could no longer provide stability in Georgia and
had recently allowed Russian companies to buy up most of the country's
energy sector, which increased Moscow's clout on this crucial Great
Game battleground at Washington's expense.
While it is too
early to
tell how things in Georgia will play out, one general lesson appears
clear: The September 11 attacks have shown that the US government can
no longer afford to be indifferent toward how badly dictators in the
Middle East and Central Asia treat their people, as long as they keep
the oil flowing. American dealings with Saudi Arabia have become a
fatal affair. President Bush acknowledged as much in recent speeches
calling on Saudi Arabia to start democratic reforms to dry up the
breeding ground for terrorism.
In Central Asia, however, the current US policy of
aiding tyrants
repeats the very same mistakes that gave rise to bin Ladenism in the
1980s and '90s. Most Central Asians believe that US antiterror troops
are stationed in their region mainly to secure American oil interests.
I lost count of how many Azeris, Uzbeks, Afghans and Iraqis I met
during my travels who told me that "it's all about oil." Right or
wrong, this distrust of the US government's motives is one of the key
factors in the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The presence of US
troops on their soil motivates angry Muslim men to sign up with Al
Qaeda-like terror groups. However terribly they suffered under Saddam
Hussein, few Iraqis today believe that America would have sent its
young men and women to the region if there were only strawberry fields
to protect.
With or without military force, there are obvious limits
to any US
government's ability to nudge autocratic petrostate regimes toward
democratic reform--especially as long as America is becoming ever more
dependent on oil imports. An addict is hardly able to force his pusher
to change his criminal activities. In the United States, 4 percent of
the world's population consumes one-fourth of the world's energy. One
out of every seven barrels of oil produced in the world is burned on
American highways. This is not quite a position that allows us to tell
Arab oil sheiks and Central Asian despots, "If you don't stop churning
out angry young men, we won't do business with you anymore."
For the common people in all oil-producing countries
(except Norway and
Britain), oil wealth has been more of a curse than a blessing, leading
to corruption, political instability, economic decline, environmental
degradation, coups and often bloody civil wars. This is why oil is
known as the "devil's tears." Today, however, the local people's
problems are America's too, because it has become clear since the
September 11 attacks how the politics of oil contribute to the rise of
radical Islamic terrorism.
So, while the war on terror may not be all about oil,
certainly in one
sense it should be about just that. A bold policy to reduce the
addiction to oil would be the most powerful weapon to win the epic
struggle against terrorism. In the short term, this means saving energy
through more efficient technologies, necessary anyway to slow the
greenhouse effect and global warming. The Bush Administration's
old-style energy policies of yet more fossil-fuel production and waste
continue in the wrong direction. It is time to realize that more
gas-guzzling Hummers on US highways only lead to more Humvees (and
American soldiers) near oilfields. What is urgently needed instead--for
security reasons--is a sustainable alternative energy policy.
Ultimately, no matter how cleverly the United States
plays its cards in
the new Great Game in Central Asia and no matter how many military
forces are deployed to protect oilfields and pipelines, the oil
infrastructure may prove too vulnerable to terrorist attacks to
guarantee a stable supply. The Caspian region may be the next big gas
station, but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men
running around throwing matches.
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