China builds a natural gas pipeline in Central Asia, while US wages war

Juan Cole updates issues that reflect China's interests in Central Asia and how, among other projects, it is building a natural gas pipeline in the region. This is something the US and a corporation Unicol had in mind back in the 1990s. In the meantime, the US is becoming further embroiled in a complex, seemingly futile "war," with great harm to the Afghan people and the loss of and injury to US troops, while China extends its economic power and control over regional gas and oil resources. This is not to say that we prefer Chinese imperialism over US imperialism. It would be better for the people of the region if they were not dominated by tyrannical governments and if there were alternatives that advanced the interests of the people. Nevertheless, Cole's commentary helps to remind us that Afghanistan is part of a region of the world that has gas and oil resources and that as a result is the center for competition among big powers for control of these resources. At this level, it has nothing to do with democracy. It is rather what Michael Klare analyzes as a manifestation of intensifying or incipient resource wars.

Bob

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Juan Cole, Informed Comment

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

China wins struggle for Pipelinestan

A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington's interest in Central Asian fuel sources-- natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.

If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.So the US is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running off with the big regional prize.

On Tuesday, radical guerrillas deployed a bomb to kill 8 persons and wound 40 in an upscale area of Kabul where foreigners, including Indian aid workers, live-- in another sign of the deterioration of security in Afghanistan's capital. It is obvious how long a gas pipeline would last under these circumstances.

I'm not sure very many politicians in Washington were ever really so interested in the gas pipeline. For someone like then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, making Afghanistan a US base may have aimed at surrounding and weakening Russia and keeping it from reemerging as a peer (a la the attempted push of NATO into places like Georgia.) Some US leaders, however, were pushing for it. In recent years a Turkmenistan pipeline was seen as a way of forestalling India from breaking the embargo on Iran. And I remember that in fall 2001, when congressmen asked Colin Powell how the Afghanistan war would be paid for, he replied that the region is rich in resources. Since Afghanistan is not, he must have been speaking of places like Turkmenistan.

In any case the Chinese just demonstrated that you don't need war to get resources. Avoid costly adventurism and grow your economy like hell, and it all falls into your lap.