America's wooing and then abandonment of the Taliban!

[Kharian_Beast]

Karzai should go back to chicken farming in the USA, something he was apparently very successful at...

Not only that...

 

[Zarbe Momin]

This is war to control resources. America is a super power and they want to control but regional countries especially Pakistan should tell USA, without pakistan they can not have the complete cake.

 

[Rabbit.Rabbit]

Well clearly Karzai is much more desirable than Pakistan's previous choice - Mullah Omar. Less said about him the better.

 

[DarkStar]

Well clearly Karzai is much more desirable than Pakistan's previous choice - Mullah Omar. Less said about him the better.

Is this the same MUllah Omar, whose Taliban ministers were taken on a trip to Washington, TExas and other places, on Unocol money, in order to get them to agree to a contract on gas/oil supplies from CAR?

And when the Taliban decided to take up the better offer of the ARgentian oil consortium, the USA proceded with forcing Pakistan to block all food and oil supply to the landlocked country, in the name of sanctions, until the local population was desperate enouch for world food programe handouts, in early 2001?

The cheek of you...

 

[Rabbit.Rabbit]

Wow, where do you get this stuff? Intriguing...

 

[muse]

Wabbit

Have you read "Ghost Wars" Blenty interesting as our araby friends say

 

[DarkStar]

Wow, where do you get this stuff? Intriguing...

The wooing of the Taliban by unocol and other oil companies is common knowledge, as well as the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan, where all food and oil supplies via Pakistan were stopped. This was before 9/11.

I remember this, because I was as much a follower of Pakistan/AFghanistan happenings, as I am now.

I'll post futher links (trying to find them) that will shed light on the happenings of that time.

New US envoy to Kabul lobbied for Taliban oil rights

Thursday, 10 January 2002

The United States' new special envoy to Kabul once lobbied for the Taliban and worked for an American oil company that sought concessions for pipelines in Afghanistan.


The United States' new special envoy to Kabul once lobbied for the Taliban and worked for an American oil company that sought concessions for pipelines in Afghanistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, has arrived in Kabul amid much publicity. As the representative of the country that put the new government in power, he has a highly influential position.

In one of his first press conferences, Mr Khalilzad condemned the Taliban as sponsors of terrorism and vowed the US would continue the military campaign until they and their allies in Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network are eradicated.

But in 1997, as a paid adviser to the oil multinational Unocal, he took part in talks with Taliban officials regarding the possibility of building highly lucrative gas and oil pipelines. He had drawn up a risk analysis report for the project that would have exploited the natural reserves of the region, estimated to be the world's second largest after the Persian Gulf.

At the same time, he urged the Clinton administration to take a softer line on the Taliban. By 1997 some of the regime's worst excesses had become public and Mr bin Laden was ensconced in Afghanistan. That year, the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, described the Taliban's abuses of human rights as "despicable".

But Mr Khalilzad defended them in The Washington Post. "The Taliban do not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practised by Iran," he wrote. "We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. It is time for the United States to re-engage."

Without such "re-engagement", it would not have been possible for Unocal to pursue its goal to build a gas pipeline from the landlocked former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan, with a possible extension to India.

Unocal had been involved in a commercial war for the pipeline concession with the Argentinian company Bridas. As well as Mr Khalilzad – who had been an undersecretary of defence under George Bush Snr and has worked as a defence analyst for the Rand Corporation – Unocal hired a string of high-profile names with connections to the region to fight its cause, including Robert Oakley, the former US ambassador to Pakistan and later the US special envoy to Somalia.

American policy towards Afghanistan was increasingly being criticised because it seemed to be guided by oil and gas interests. That changed in August 1998, when the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed and Washington blamed Mr bin Laden for the attacks. Unocal concluded that its pipeline was no longer tenable as long as the Taliban were in power.

At that point Mr Khalilzad, too, changed his tune. In a highly influential article published in the Winter 2000 edition of The Washington Quarterly, an academic journal, he laid out what were to become the founding principles of the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan.

Engagement with the Taliban was no longer possible, he argued: indeed, the sanctuary given to Mr bin Laden posed a grave threat to US interests at home and abroad. Opposition to the Taliban should be orchestrated through both the Northern Alliance and anti-Taliban Pashtun groups, with talks on a successor regime channelled through the former king, Zahir Shah, in Rome.

Largely thanks to that article and the success of the war based on its premises, Mr Khalilzad has become an influential adviser to President Bush. His credibility relies to a large extent on his birth. He was born 50 years ago in Mazar-i-Sharif and brought up in Kabul as part of Afghanistan's Dari-speaking elite, before travelling to Lebanon and then to the US in the 1970s to complete his education in political science.

His many critics point out that he has been wrong as often as he has been right – going back to the 1980s when, as a state department official in the Reagan administration, he argued vociferously in favour of providing surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weaponry to the very mujahedin groups that later gave birth to the Taliban.

"If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago," Anatol Lieven, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said.

Such criticisms, and the possible conflict of interest arising from Mr Khalilzad's former role in Unocal, perhaps explains why he was appointed to the National Security Council, a position that did not require confirmation hearings in the Senate.

Even now, his oil contacts are bound to raise suspicions about both his priorities and those of the Bush administration. At the NSC, Mr Khalilzad worked for the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who had served on the board of the Chevron Corporation as an expert on another central Asian state with major oil reserves, Kazakhstan.

President Bush and Vice-president Dick Cheney have extensive backgrounds in the oil business, too, and it will not be lost on any of them that central Asia has almost 40 per cent of the world's gas reserves and 6 per cent of its oil reserves.

In addition, Mr Khalilzad has links to the most hawkish wing of the administration. In the 1980s, he worked on Afghanistan alongside Paul Wolfowitz, now the Deputy Secretary of Defence and an ardent advocate of military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq – a hardline view that has also sometimes been voiced by Mr Khalilzhad.

New US envoy to Kabul lobbied for Taliban oil rights - Asia, World - The Independent

 

[DarkStar]

Oil Corp Caught Assisting Taliban



Oil Corp Caught Assisting Taliban

Move to Revoke Oil Company's Charter


What should happen if a U.S. corporation is connected with slave labor and the Taliban? Here are excerpts from a story distributed by InterPress Service.


by Jim Lobe
A coalition of 30 environmental and human rights groups has asked the attorney-general of California to revoke the corporate charter of Union Oil Company (Unocal) for its activities in Burma and Afghanistan.
In a petition delivered to the attorney-general's office in Sacramento, the groups charged that the oil company had broken US and international laws, particularly in its dealings with the military government in Burma and with the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan.

Unocal denounced the move and denied any illegalities.

The company already is the target of several lawsuits, including one based on the Alien Tort Claims Act by Burmese nationals who claim to have suffered serious human rights abuses resulting from a Unocal project.

In Burma, Unocal owns a 28 percent share of a 1.2 billion-dollar consortium with the state-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, Total SA of France and a Thai company to build a gas pipeline running from off-shore fields in the Andaman Sea through Burma to Thailand.

Activists have charged that the project has involved the forcible relocation of villagers, the use of slave labor, and other serious abuses of human rights. They have insisted for years that Unocal withdraw from the project and from Burma altogether in light of the repressive measures used by the military regime.

In Afghanistan, Unocal has worked with the Taliban militia, which currently controls most of the country, to promote the construction of an estimated two billion-dollar gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan.

Women's groups have been upset this effort, which has included Unocal's sponsorship of visits by senior Taliban officials to Washington, because of the faction's notoriously harsh measures against the rights of women. Indeed, women's rights leaders have taken the lead in the campaign against Unocal in California.

''If Unocal thinks it can do business with a regime that, in effect, denies women their right to exist as human beings, then we think Unocal's privilege to exist as a corporation must also be denied,'' according to Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for the Feminist Majority Foundation, one of the groups behind the latest move against the oil company.

Other groups include the National Organisation for Women, the National Lawyers Guild, Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch, the Earth Island Institute, and Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based activist and public-education organisation.

In addition to its activities in Afghanistan and Burma, the petition also cites Unocal's alleged responsibility for for a 1969 oil blowout, a major environmental disaster which fouled beaches in southern California, as well as ''hundreds'' of violations of U.S. labour, safety, health, and pollution laws as reasons why its corporate charter should be revoked.

The petition rests on the idea that the state, as the sovereign power which grants life to a corporation, has the obligation to protect the public from its illegal activities.

''Courts have always held that corporations are artificial entities, 'mere creatures of the state,' and must be summoned to answer to the people for usurpations of power and violations of the public trust such as those repeatedly committed by Unocal,'' said Richard Grossman, a lawyer who helped draft the petition.

''[We don't have] to try to control these giant corporate repeat offenders one toxic spill at a time, one layoff at a time, one human rights violation at a time,'' added Robert Benson, a Loyola University law professor who is acting as the coalition's lead attorney. ''The law has always allowed the attorney general to go to court to simply dissolve a corporation for wrongdoing and sell its assets to others who will operate in the public interest,'' he said.

Precedents, according to Benson, include a recent suit by the attorney general of New York to revoke the charters of two corporations that allegedly put out deceptive information for the tobacco industry, and another request by an Alabama judge to dissolve the tobacco companies themselves. In California, a Republican attorney-general petitioned a court in 1976 to dissolve a private water company for allegedly delivering impure water to its consumers.

 

[DarkStar]

The link below, from fox news, who were defending George Bush, saying he did not invite the Taliban as the governor of texas, but the company Unocol did.

FOXNews.com - The Truth About 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - Celebrity Gossip | Entertainment News | Arts And Entertainment

Another source would be Ahmad Rashid's book on the Taliban, famously sported by Tony Blair after 9.11, and recommended all over for it's information about the Taliban. Ahmad Rashid, who is well respected in journalistic circles in the West, affirmed this meeting of Unocol and the Taliban in Huoston, where they were entertained lavishly by their American hosts.

 

[DarkStar]

I've never even herad of this 'Ghost Wars' stuff, until mr muse decided to mention this as the source of my post. Unlike some others, I've kept my eyes and ears open for a long time.

 

[DarkStar]

23 October, 2001

By George Monbiot

America's pipe dreamA pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here," Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.
The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naïve to believe that this is all it is doing.

George Monbiot: America's pipe dream | World news | The Guardian