By Conn Hallinan – August 09, 2009
In the past month, two seeming unrelated events have turned
Central Asia into a potential flashpoint between an aggressively expanding
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a nascent strategic alliance
between Russia and China. At stake is nothing less than who holds the future
high ground in the competition for the world’s energy resources.
Early this summer, the U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA) predicted a sharp drop in world oil reserves, which energy
expert Michael Klare says means that the “era of cheap and plentiful oil is drawing to a close” and is likely
to result in “a new era of cutthroat energy competition.”
In early July, after a full court press by Washington and an
agreement to increase its yearly rent, Kyrgyzstan reversed a decision to close
the U.S. base at Manas, thus allowing the U.S. a powerful toehold in the
countries bordering the oil and gas rich Caspian Basin.
While Manas is portrayed as a critical base for the ongoing
campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the war in Central
Asia is less over “terrorism” than it is over energy. “Never reading the words
‘Afghanistan” and ‘oil’ in the same sentence is still a source of endless
amusement” says the Asia Times’ Pepe
Escobar, author of “Globalistan.”
Escobar, who has coined the term “Pipelineistan” to describe
the vast network of oil and gas pipelines that “crisscross the potential
imperial battlefields of the planet,” sees Afghanistan as strategically placed
between the Middle east, Central and South Asia, “at the core of
Pipelineistan.”
As Escobar points out, “It’s no coincidence that the map of
terror in the Middle East and Central Asia is practically interchangeable with
the map of oil.”
As the old joke goes: It’s not all about oil; some of it is
about natural gas.
For most Americans and Europeans, Afghanistan appeared on
their radar screens shortly after the 9/11 assaults on the World Trade Towers
and the Pentagon. But according to Escobar, three months before the 2001
attack, U.S., Iranian, German and Italian officials got together in Geneva and
discussed toppling the Taliban because it was “the proverbial fly in the
ointment” in a scheme to run a $2 billion, 800 mile natural gas pipeline from
Turkmenistan to Karachi, Pakistan via southern Afghanistan.
According to the Pakistanis, the U.S. developed a plan in
July for launching attacks into Afghanistan from bases in Tajikistan.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO moved
aggressively to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the Warsaw Pact. One time
Soviet allies Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Republic, along with the
former Soviet provinces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were recruited. The
Ukraine and Georgia are currently up for membership.
According to Escobar, one of NATO’s first forays in the
energy war was the Balkans.
While NATO represented the Yugoslav war as a fight to
liberate the Albanians in Kosovo, Moscow and Beijing viewed it as an
opportunity for the Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation (AMBO) to
build a $1.1 billion pipeline to bring Caspian Basin oil to the West, thus
bypassing Iran and Russia
The AMBO pipeline—due to open in 2011—will
transport Caspian Basin oil via Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia and
Albania. The pipeline is protected by the huge U.S. “Bondsteel” base in Kosovo,
“The equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising
surveillance not only over the Balkans but over Turkey and the Black Sea
region,” says Escobar.
Certainly the AMBO pipeline, as well as the current
Baku-Tblisis-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, makes little economic sense. It would be
vastly easier and cheaper to send the oil through Iran.
“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), and finally Georgia (that critical energy
transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan?” Escobar
asks.
For every action, however, there is an opposite and equal
reaction.
In 2001, Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan
and Tajikistan founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which now
has observer status from Iran, Pakistan and India, and growing relations with
the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, formally a U.S.-dominated
alliance.
Unlike NATO, the SCO is a regional organization, not a
military alliance, but one—counting observers— that embraces a
growing percentage of the world’s GNP, and 75 percent of both the world’s
energy resources and global population.
However, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)
is a military alliance that, besides being made up of all of the SCO members,
also includes Belarus and Armenia.
Last February CSTO created a collective rapid reaction
force, which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says, “will be just as good or
comparable with NATO.” The force
will consist of a Russian airborne division and air assault brigade, a Kazakh
air assault brigade, and battalions from each of the other members, excepting
Uzbekistan. According to Russian expert Ilya Kramnik, the collective action
force “will give CSTO a quick tool, leaving no time for third parties to
intervene.”
The only “third party” capable of intervening in Central
Asia is NATO.
In many ways, Beijing is the linch pin in this 21st century “Great game,” because China is weathering the current worldwide
depression better than most countries. While its exports have taken a beating,
the Chinese have successfully fallen back on their enormous internal market to
take up some of the slack. As a result, China recently opened the aid spigots
to nations in the region.
In June, China loaned Turkmenistan $3 billion, which will
give it a stake in the Turkman’s enormous Yolotan Osman gas field, rumored to
be the world’s largest. The Turkmenistan loan also benefits Moscow by
underwriting the Russian oil company Roseneft, and the pipeline buildier,
Transneft. Kazakhstan got a $15 billion loan, giving China a 22 percent share
in Kazak oil production.
According to former Indian diplomat and current Asia Times commentator M.K. Bhadrakumar,
after years of tension between Moscow and Beijing, the two countries are
burying that past and “steering their relationship” in the direction of a
“strategic partnership in the overall international situation,” rather than
competing over energy resources.
This past April, Russia and China signed a $25 billion oil
agreement that will supply Beijing with 4 percent of its needs through 2034.
The two countries are currently negotiating a natural gas deal.
Beijing is planning an almost 4,000 mile, $26 billion
Turkman-Kazakh-China pipeline to run from the Caspian Basin to Guangdong
Province in China. Included in the deal is a proviso to keep “third
parties”—NATO bases—out of the country
In the meantime, Russia is paying premium prices to lock up
Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkman gas. It is also negotiating to buy more Azerbaijani
oil, which if successful, could end up bankrupting the western-controlled BTC
pipeline that runs through Georgia.
Writing in Business
Week, S. Adam Cardais, former editor of the Prague Post, says that Russia is “doing its damnedest to keep Europe
out of Central Asia,” and that Russia and China “may have already outmaneuvered
Europe.”
But Washington is hardly throwing in the towel. The Manas
coup is a case in point, and the Obama administration is increasing aid to
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Apparently the gas pipeline project from
Turkmenistan to Pakistan that fell apart shortly before the U.S, invaded
Afghanistan has also been revived.
In short, the
Central Asian chessboard is enormous, the pieces are numerous, and the stakes
are high.
Pipelineistan
is not limited to the Middle East and Central Asia. It exists wherever gas and
oil flow, from the steamy depths of Venezuela’s Oronoco Basin, to the depths of
the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil.
“Oil and gas by themselves are not the U.S.’s ultimate aim,”
argues Escobar, “It’s all about control.” And if “the U.S. controls the sources
of energy of its rivals—Europe, Japan, China, and other nations aspiring
to be more independent—they win.”
The U.S. has enormous military power, but as Iraq, and now
Afghanistan, makes clear, the old days when one could corner a market by
engineering a coup or sending in the Marines are fast receding. The old
imperial nations are fading, and the up and comers are more likely to be
speaking Portuguese, Chinese and Hindi than English. The trick over the next
several decades will be how to keep the competition for energy from sparking
off brush fire wars or a catastrophic clash of the great powers. 