Is Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government supporting another Oil War?

[donsu]

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/18/01326.html


Professor says America seeks Afghanistan Oil Deal


Is Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government supporting another Oil War? This would yield enormous profits for greed-driven investors, and the atmosphere will continue to dangerously heat from the increasing use of those fossil fuels.


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Moreover, anti-war activists and progressive writers argue that the war in Afghanistan has been, in large part, another "oil war." The September 11 attacks provided a compelling pretext for military action against the al-Qa'ida forces in Afghanistan. But a growing body of research by journalists and scholars reveals that the Bush Administration's decision in favour of a regime change and all-out war in Afghanistan was significantly influenced by the desire to install a new government that would be more sympathetic to U.S. economic interests in Central Asia.

Although Afghanistan itself has no significant oil or natural gas reserves, it is strategically located in a region which does. As Eric Margolis observed in the Toronto Sun ("The U.S. is Determined to Dominate the World's Richest New Source," Jan. 13, 2002), Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, is the world's "richest new source of oil." In the Jurist ("The Deadly Pipeline War," Dec. 8, 2001), Marjorie Cohn noted that some analysts have estimated the potential value of Caspian oil and natural gas reserves at four trillion dollars. Phil Gasper recalled in the Socialist Worker ("The Politics of Oil," Jan. 25, 2002) that the Middle East Economic Digest editors have described Central Asia as "the Middle East of the twenty-first century."

Even if this latter projection proves overly optimistic, Martha Hamilton concluded in a Washington Post article ("The Last Great Race For Oil Reserves," April 26, 1998) that the "largely untapped subterranean treasure" in the Caspian Basin may be "the third-largest reserve in the world, after the Persian Gulf and Siberia."

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According to Rashid, the Taliban's religious fundamentalism and harsh repression precluded normal diplomatic relations at the time but did not pose an insurmountable obstacle to a potential business deal. Strikingly, neither did the relocation of Osama bin Laden and numerous al-Qa'ida fighters to Afghanistan in 1996 and 1997. As Rashid recounted, UNOCAL Vice President Marty Miller and other company executives even wined and dined Taliban representatives in Houston in November 1997. Mullah Mohammed Ghaus and his Afghan colleagues stayed at an expensive hotel and visited the Houston Zoo and the NASA Space Center during their visit. Miller offered the Taliban representatives a lucrative contract and thought a formal agreement was imminent.

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In May 2001, the mainstream media widely reported that the new U.S. Bush Administration had awarded the Taliban regime forty-two million dollars to support the eradication of opium production in Afghanistan. Less well known is the fact that, shortly after taking office, the Bush Administration had quietly resumed negotiations with the Taliban. In an important new book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth (2001), French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have revealed that the Bush Administration worked long and hard to "decouple" bin Laden from the Taliban and lay the foundations for U.S. diplomatic recognition and pipelines for oil and natural gas.

Brisard and Dasquie have drawn on numerous sources, including discussions with John O'Neill, the former FBI Deputy Director who retired in July 2001. Ironically, O'Neill then became security director for the World Trade Center, where he died in the September 11 attacks. According to the authors, O'Neill resigned from the FBI because the State Department had continually blocked his investigation into al-Qa'ida's roots in Saudi Arabia. The authors report that O'Neill bitterly complained about the ability of the U.S. oil companies and their State Department allies to thwart an investigation that might offend the Saudi royal family and jeopardize U.S. economic interests in that country.
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forewarned


(there are maps with the article)