New York Times - 03.17.2002

 

The New York Times

Today's Silk Road Might Carry Black Gold

By Stephen Kinzer

With fighting now ending in Afghanistan's eastern mountains and Bush administration officials asserting that the Afghan campaign will be over in a matter of months, the world is beginning to focus on rebuilding that shattered country.

It is a daunting task. Poor in natural resources, Afghanistan has been ravaged by years of drought as well as war. The president of neighboring Uzbekistan was simply stating fact when he said last week that since time immemorial, Afghanistan has been dominated by warlords and torn by "constant, permanent interethnic strife."

Donor nations have pledged more than $4.5 billion over the next five years toward the reconstruction effort. But in trying to help the country learn to stand on its own financial feet, they may conclude that — as in the time of the ancient Silk Road — a central source of Afghanistan's wealth lies not in what it holds or produces, but in what passes through it.

In the early 1990's, three countries around the Caspian Sea — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan — were found to be awash in vast reserves of oil and gas, second only to those beneath the Persian Gulf. Because all three are landlocked, control over their billions of dollars worth of oil and gas depends on control over the pipelines that will carry it to market. Several lines already exist; new ones are urgently needed.

The Afghan conflict, the first major war in Central Asia since the oil and gas finds, has reshuffled the geopolitical deck and made a pipeline route through Afghanistan, for which some American oil executives were lobbying as recently as the mid-1990's, feasible once again. A variety of other routes — each of which would benefit a different constellation of countries and energy companies — are also under consideration.

"Whoever can shape the way that pipeline map looks will shape the future of a huge part of the world," said S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia- Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "The main feature of these states is their remoteness. Pipelines are the only way they can overcome their isolation. Transit fees are real money, and who gets that real money will go a long way toward determining which of these countries succeed and which don't."

Afghanistan's main hope lies with the huge gas reserves in neighboring Turkmenistan, which other Asian nations crave. Today, the only pipelines through which Turkmen gas and oil can be exported run to Russia. American companies have been seeking to build new lines from Turkmenistan to a port from which this wealth could be shipped to other markets.

The pipeline proposed several years ago by the Texas oil company Unocal would run across the breadth of Afghanistan to an outlet near the Pakistani port of Karachi; an extension might lead further south to India. Rob Sobhani, a Washington-based consultant who monitors Central Asian energy projects, calculates the cost of this project at $1.9 billion to $2.7 billion, up to $500 million of which would be spent in Afghanistan. Unocal was unable to build its pipeline because foreign banks and governments concluded they could not do business with the Taliban. With the Taliban now overthrown, the pipeline is again a real possibility.

THOSE who thought about this pipeline during the Taliban period were thinking about a pipe dream," said Ariel Cohen, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "Today, provided these people can adapt themselves to new international realities, it's looking more feasible."

Those new realities include greatly strengthened American power in the region, a friendly but unstable regime in Afghanistan and the unreliability of local Afghan chieftans. Some oil executives say their companies might insist on managing an Afghan pipeline themselves, rather than letting Afghans do it, and on hiring a private security force to guard the line.

Such a pipeline could bring trouble as well as wealth. Since it would pass through much remote and mountainous terrain, regional warlords who believed they were not receiving a just share of the profits might be in a position to blackmail the government. Nor is it certain that wealth from transit fees would trickle down to the masses; precisely the opposite has happened in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, where corrupt elites have become rich while many live in misery. So a pipeline, which could bring more cash into Afghanistan than any other step short of legalizing opium, could just as easily promote destabilization and upheaval.

No American company has publicly expressed interest in the project, but Russians are among those convinced that planning has begun. When the United States lifted its economic sanctions on Afghanistan recently, the Moscow economic journal Rossiiskaya Biznes-Gazeta called the move "the first harbinger of U.S. companies' intentions to rejoin the trans-Afghan gas consortium."

Russia, seeking to preserve the profits it makes from distributing Central Asian oil and gas, might resist a pipeline across Afghanistan. So might Iran, which also wants routes that run across its territory. India would hardly be thrilled with any project that strengthens its archrival Pakistan, and given their hostility it is difficult to imagine those two countries agreeing to share the pipeline's benefits (although some suggest that a "peace pipeline" might actually become a basis for cooperation between them).

Pipeline politics may also influence the future foreign policy of the United States. American oil companies that spend billions of dollars on pipelines will expect the government to protect their investment. The United States has shown, notably in Kuwait, that it is ready to go to war to protect its access to foreign energy reserves.

As President Bush considers these issues, he has some experienced advisers close at hand. Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American he appointed as American envoy to Afghanistan, once advised Unocal on ways to build its pipeline there.