From Kabul to Baghdad: war on terror or war on oil?

the ‘Axis of Evil.’ It singled out three regimes—North Korea, Iran and Iraq—as posing a special problem for the New American Century.

Months before the world, courtesy of CNN, witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or had even heard of Osama bin Laden, Cheney’s PNAC had targeted Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for special treatment, stating bluntly that U.S. policy should be to take direct military control of the Arabian Gulf. The report declared:

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved confl ict with Iraq provides the immediate justifi cation, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

That sentence, on the ‘need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf,’ was later read and reread in many quarters around the world, in the months before the bombing of Baghdad. Iraq was simply a useful excuse for Cheney, Wolfowitz and others to justify ‘the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf …’ There was no talk of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or of its ties to terrorists.2

FROM KABUL TO BAGHDAD: WAR ON TERROR OR WAR ON OIL?

If the Bush administration had been unprepared for the shock of September 11, 2001, they certainly wasted no time in preparing their response, the war on terror. Terror was to replace communism as the new global image of ‘the enemy.’ The new terrorists could be anywhere and everywhere. Above all, as the war was defi ned in Washington, they were mostly to be found in the Islamic regions which also happened to control most of the world’s oil reserves. Old ‘cold warriors’ were galvanized again into action. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, now in his seventies, was in the center of global power politics as never before.

According to the account of Washington Post editor Bob Woodward in his book Bush at War (for which he got access to sensitive National Security council documents), one day after the collapse of the World Trade towers, on September 12, 2001, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz began to urge the president that Iraq should be ‘a principal target of the fi rst round in the war

against terrorism.’ This was even before any conclusive evidence had been presented as to who was behind the terror attacks.

With the support of Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been in charge of the fi rst Gulf War, reportedly persuaded Bush that ‘public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible.’ Not that Powell was any dove. In 1992, he had declared that the United States needed suffi cient power to ‘deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.’ The impending campaign to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan was just to be the warm-up for the bigger fi ght. At the same time as the Afghan campaign was taking shape, Woodward reported that Bush was already ordering secret plans for an Iraq invasion.

Afghanistan, under the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban, had given sanctuary to a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaida, was to be the fi rst military target in Bush’s newly-proclaimed war on terror. On September 18, 2001, the BBC quoted Niaz Niak, former Pakistani foreign secretary. Niak told the BBC he had been informed by senior U.S. offi cials at a mid-July Berlin meeting that ‘military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.’

Washington had initially considered the Taliban government as a possible pipeline business partner. Taliban representatives were invited by Unocal to Texas in late 1997 to talk turkey, though no agreement was reached. Another Texas company, this one intimately close to Bush and Cheney, was also quietly negotiating possible pipeline routes through Afghanistan for Caspian oil and gas. The company was Enron, which collapsed in November 2001, in the largest case of corporate bankruptcy and fraud in U.S. history.

The company that Enron had asked to build the multibilliondollar Afghan pipeline was Cheney’s old Halliburton Company. There were indications that secret talks between Vice President Cheney and Enron chief and Bush fi nancial backer Ken Lay involved Washington backing for the Enron pipeline through Afghanistan. Curiously, Cheney refused to release documents of his secret talks with Enron to the Congress General Accounting Offi ce, forcing a court showdown. By that time, Enron’s fi nancial house of cards was collapsing.

The Taliban fell out of favor in Washington in July 2001, when U.S. negotiators proposed conditions for their pipeline, reportedly telling the Taliban leaders, ‘Either you accept our offer on a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.’ The Taliban was

demanding U.S. aid to rebuild the Afghan infrastructure. They wanted the pipeline not only to be a transit line to India and beyond, but also to serve Afghan needs for energy. Washington rejected the demands. September 11, 2001, gave Washington the excuse to deliver its carpet of bombs to Kabul.

Unocal had broken off negotiations with the Taliban over possible pipeline routes. President Bush’s national security adviser on Afghanistan and central Asia at the time was Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan close to the exiled Afghan king. Khalilzad was subsequently to be Bush’s envoy to Afghanistan and later Iraq. He had also worked for Unocal on Afghan pipelines.

The Pentagon, with a touch of both the poetic and the patriotic, called the bombing of Afghanistan ‘Operation Enduring Freedom.’ The freedom seemed to be freedom for American troops to destroy what they deemed necessary in Afghanistan, a point later noted by disappointed Afghans with biting irony. How enduring it would be was open to doubt.

The Afghan military campaign ended with little fi ghting. The Taliban regime collapsed in early 2002. Most soldiers surrendered after getting generous CIA handouts of dollars. Khalilzad then recommended that Bush name another former Unocal consultant, Hamid Karzai, to be provisional Afghan president in the postwar ruins of Afghanistan.

Several years earlier, in February 1998, before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on international relations, a Unocal vice president, John Maresca, had urged Washington to back an Afghan pipeline route for the vast oil and gas reserves of central Asia. He spoke of the possible routes and declared, ‘a route through Afghanistan appears to be the best option … the one that would bring Central Asian oil closest to Asian markets.’ It would proceed from northern Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and on to the Indian Ocean. From there it could serve the huge oil and gas markets of India, China and Japan. ‘The territory across which the pipeline would extend is controlled by the Taliban,’ he noted. After February 2002, the Taliban was no longer an obstacle.

The military attack on Afghanistan, the fi rst strike in the new war on terror gave Washington many things. It gave it the pretext for a huge Pentagon budget increase to nearly $400 billion a year, and for building a ring of permanent U.S. military bases from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, places deep inside the former Soviet Union territory. (The latter point was not lost on Russian thinkers