Why are UK and USA in Afghanistan?

By Tim Coles

22 January 2011

Tim Coles argues that underlying the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is the desire to acquire and secure energy sources in Central Asia and Iran as part of the strategy of full spectrum dominance.

The year 2011 marks the 10th anniversary of the occupation of Afghanistan: Britain’s fourth in 200 years. The previous occupations were undertaken to gain geostrategic advantage. In those days, one could admit that Afghanistan and the surrounding countries “are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out the great game for world domination” (Lord Curzon).¹ More recently, the former CIA agent for Pakistan, Milton Bearden, explained how America “saw the Taliban as the source of a new order and a possible tool in yet another replay of the Great Game – the race for the energy riches of Central Asia”.² Today, one needs pretexts. The Project for the New American Century explained in 2000 that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.³ So, what are we doing in Afghanistan this time around?


In 2010, Britain’s unelected coalition government published its Strategic Defence and Security Review, which stated that Britain will “deepen engagement with energy producers … ensuring that business and political conditions support key infrastructure projects, including pipelines to bring gas from the Caspian region”.⁴

Two British House of Commons Library analysts explained how, in 1991, “The new-found independence of the Soviet successor states and the world’s future energy needs came together by the mid-1990s to provide the opportunity to renew the exploitation of rich sources of gas and oil in the Caspian basin”. Consequently, “the fuel needs of Pakistan, India and China with their rapidly growing economies, could be addressed”.⁵ Or, to put it another way, made dependent upon Anglo-American pipeline hegemony.

Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert with America’s Council on Foreign Relations, noted the surrounding states’ perception of “a US strategy to encircle and contain Iran”, a country with huge oil and gas reserves coveted by India, China, Britain and America.⁶

This perception is accurate. A 2005 Strategic Studies Institute report saw that “the most attractive long-term strategy for Iran is traditional containment”, meaning military and economic, “which would emphasize breaking Iran’s ties to China”,⁷ hence Britain and America have surrounded Iran, either with occupation forces or with client states. A Congressional report revealed Iran’s plans for “the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to India, through Pakistan, with a possible extension to China”.⁸ There are, however, long-standing Anglo-American plans to do the same thing.

Naturally, Iran’s plan had to be countered because it would not only mean Iranian success, but also Sino-Indian reliance on Iran instead of Britain and America – a position the elites will not tolerate. Hence, “In December 1997 Taliban representatives were in Texas and Washington for negotiations with the oil consortium Unocal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan”, a British House of Commons Library report conceded. ⁹ “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of shari’ah law”, a Clinton official stated in 1996. “We can live with that.”¹⁰ The Clinton administration could “live with that” because, “[n]ot just trade routes, but potentially lucrative oil and gas pipelines were at stake”, Barnett Rubin noted, and “the Taliban, who now controlled the entire route, had become their major partner”.¹¹

Neoconservatives like Douglas Murray can write accurately about the Taliban’s “aspirant-medieval tyranny”¹², but conveniently forget to mention that Britain was supporting the Taliban during their worst atrocities, which included scorching entire villages. People like Murray cite history selectively in order to try to justify contemporary atrocities. By the late 1990s, the Taliban’s atrocities were reaching their peak. Because America and Britain were also supporting other fascists, like Hekmatyar, Masoud, Dostum, and Sayyaf, who murdered 50,000 Afghans in the 1990s, the Taliban struggled to impose the Saudi-like dictatorship for which the Clinton administration was hoping.

America’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported in 1998 that “Unocal suspends plans for the construction of a 2-billion-dollar natural gas pipeline that would run from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. Unocal has stressed that the gas pipeline project will not proceed until an internationally recognized government is in place”.¹³ In 2002, when the Project for the New American Century had exploited – many believe engineered – 9/11 to be the “catastrophic and catalysing event” needed to occupy Afghanistan, the EIA wrote:

Until recently, the pipeline was considered effectively dead, but with a fragile peace in Afghanistan established and the Taliban removed from power, the idea of a trans-Afghan pipeline has been revived. Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai have expressed their support for the pipeline.¹⁴

In 2006, the USAID – and World Bank-sponsored Afghanistan Investment Support Agency (AISA) – of which former Unocal employee and Afghan puppet President Hamid Karzai is a member – issued a formal statement on the pipeline.

The participants of the regional conference held in New Delhi supported the project for constructing a gas pipeline between Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India (TAPI) … [which] would allow Afghanistan [under Anglo-American occupation] to realize its potential as an “energy bridge between central and southeast Asia”. The two-day forum in the Indian capital was attended by officials from 18 countries, including Russia and about 10 international organizations. The delegation of Afghanistan was headed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.¹⁵

According to Britain’s Penspen, the project will cost 2.5 billion dollars and will carry 30 billion cubic metres of gas per year from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan on to Pakistan and India, in association with Nippon Koei UK.¹⁶  The Penspen map shows the proposed route. For several years now the Pashtun region has been patrolled by the murderous Anglo-American drones, such as Britain’s Watchkeeper – and America’s Predator – models, the latter fitted with British-American-made Hellfire missiles.¹⁷ But that must be a coincidence.

  

Although it is unclear if BAE Systems’s HERTI drone is operational in the Pashtun region, it is just one of many drones whose functions include “Border patrol … Infantry/front line support ... Pipeline surveillance”.¹⁸ The BBC enthused that, as part of a new breed of autonomous systems, “HERTI can think for itself”,¹⁹ whereas a US Navy-commissioned study into robot ethics warned that aside from a legal backlash, “we may also be unable to halt some (potentially-fatal) chain of events caused by autonomous military systems that process information and can act at speeds incomprehensible to us, e.g. with high-speed unmanned aerial vehicles”, or worse, space weapons.²⁰

The horrors documented in this article are a tragic but slight component of the “full spectrum dominance” underway.²¹

Notes

1. Cited in Verrier, A., 1991, Francis Younghusband and the Great Game, London: Jonathan Cape.
2. Bearden, M., “Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 6, November-December, 2001, pp. 17-30.
3. Donnelly, T., “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”, September, 2000, Washington, DC: PNAC.
4. Cabinet Office, “Strategic Defence and Security Review”, October, 2010, London: Stationary Office.
5. Winstone, R. and R. Young, “The Caspian Basin, energy reserves and potential conflicts”, House of Commons Library, Research Paper 05/24, 16 March, 2005, London: HCL.
6. Rubin, B.R., “Women and Pipelines: Afghanistan’s Proxy Wars”, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 73, No. 2, Asia and the Pacific, April, 1997, pp. 283-296.
7. Thomas Donnelly in Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson (eds.), “Getting Ready for a Nuclear Ready Iran”, Strategic Studies Institute, October, 2005.
8. Kenneth Katzman, “The Iran Sanctions Act”, Congressional Research Archive, Order Code RS20871, October 12, 2007.
9. Winstone and Young, “The Caspian Basin”.
10. Dreyfuss, R., 2006, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, NY: Metropolitan.
11. Rubin, “Women and Pipelines”.
12. Murray, D., 2005, Neoconservatism: Why we need it, London: Social Affairs Unit.
13. Energy Information Administration, “Monthly Energy Chronology – 1998”.
14. Energy Information Administration, “Caspian Sea Region: Natural Gas Export Options”, July, 2002.
15. Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, “Gas pipeline project Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India approved”, 21 November, 2006.
16. Penspen, 2008, “Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan Gas Pipeline Project Techno-Economic Feasibility Study for Gas Supply to Pakistan and India Asian Development Bank”.
17. BBC News South Asia Online, “Mapping US drone and Islamic militant attacks in Pakistan”, 22 July, 2010.
18. B.A.E. Systems, “HERTI, Next Generation Autonomous System”, news release.
19. Tim Bowler, “BAE spyplane eyes commercial sector”, BBC News Online, 20 July, 2006.
20. Lin, P., Bekey, G. and K. Abney, “Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design”, 20 December, 2008, San Luis Obispo: Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group,
21. On “full spectrum dominance”, see US Space Command, “Vision for 2020”, February, 1997 and Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2000, Joint Vision 2020. On the frightening plans for the future, including insect-machine hybrids capable of killing people in their living rooms, see United States Air Force, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047”, 18 May, 2009.

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