Pipe Dreams

No one wants to be the Taliban’s friend now — but it wasn’t so long ago that US energy companies actively courted the Afghan regime

Image: AP/WideWorld

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Whenever the US takes military action in the Middle East, critics are quick to ask: Is this really about oil?

Clearly, that question is moot with respect to the current air strikes against Afghanistan. But Central Asia experts point out that energy politics did help set the stage for the current crisis, and that at least one US oil company has provided aid to the Taliban regime in pursuit of a business deal.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, Western energy interests have hungrily eyed the massive, untapped oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. It’s estimated that roughly 15 billion barrels of oil and about 9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas lie beneath the soil of Afghanistan’s neighbors, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. One calculation puts the potential value of Central Asian fossil fuels at $3 trillion.

Afghanistan itself is not known to have major energy reserves. Instead, the country’s most valuable natural resource is its location: It sits smack between the oil and gas fields of its neighbors and potentially huge markets in Pakistan, India, and beyond. So in the mid-1990s, while Russia, China, Iran, and several European nations squabbled over pipelines through Russia and Iran, California-based oil and gas giant Unocal was looking at another route — from Turkmenistan straight through Afghanistan to Pakistan or India. To build such a pipeline, however, the company would have to dance cheek-to-cheek with the Taliban, who were then rising to power.

Unocal’s strategy was straightforward enough: in 1996, the company cobbled together a coalition of six energy companies and the government of Turkmenistan, and went head to head with an Argentinian rival, in a race to win Afghanistan’s blessing for a $2 billion gas-pipeline project.

Unocal has long been criticized for doing business in countries with repressive governments, and the company wasn’t afraid to pursue the Taliban. “We’re an oil and gas company. We go where the oil and gas is,” Unocal spokesman Mike Thatcher told MotherJones.com.

According to one business analyst’s report, Unocal courted both the Taliban and the rival Northern Alliance, but paid special attention on the Taliban. In 1997, the Unocal vice president in charge of the pipeline project was quoted as saying that his company had provided “non-cash bonus payments” to members of the regime in return for their cooperation.

“We basically had to ‘pre-sell’ them on the idea of this pipeline,” says Thatcher. “Some of them didn’t understand the idea of profit motive. We had to educate them.”

The approach seemed to work. By late 1997, a Taliban delegation visited Unocal’s offices in Sugarland, Texas to meet with company executives. A few days later, the Taliban’s minister of mines met with the State Department’s top official for South Asia. The visit, which came just a month after then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chastised the regime for its human-rights record, was arranged by Unocal.

“US interest in the lucrative gas pipeline… gives the appearance that while democracy and women’s rights are defended in public, commercial interests may really drive US policy toward the Taliban,” the Washington Times’ Toni Marshall and Tom Carter opined at the time.

Ahmed Rashid, a journalist who has written extensively about Central Asia, says that US willingness to look the other way in the interest of profit helped the Taliban and other authoritarian regimes in the region gain legitimacy. “[T]his game has continued,” he told the radio program Living on Earth, “and has unfortunately resulted in probably destabilizing Central Asia.”

So did Unocal ever strike a deal with the Taliban? That depends on whom you ask. According to the US Department of Energy, “In January 1998, the Taliban signed an agreement that would allow a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project led by Unocal to proceed.” Other reports put the date of the deal even earlier. But Unocal now denies that a firm agreement was ever reached.

All the company had, according to Thatcher, was a “letter of support” signed by representatives of both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. “It wasn’t a binding business deal,” he says, “just a piece of paper that basically said they liked the idea of the project.”

But even with a symbolic nod from the Taliban, the pipeline never got off — or into — the ground. In August 1998, the US launched retaliatory air strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Investors bailed out of the pipeline project in droves; several months later Unocal quit CentGas, saying it was unwilling to collaborate with the oppressive regime, at least until it was recognized as a legitimate government by the West.

Still, in 1999 reports from Pakistan suggested that Unocal was considering rejoining Centgas. Unocal vehemently denied the reports, and Thatcher insists the company has no plans for pipelines in Afghanistan.

“There is compelling economic logic for a pipeline there,” he says. “We’re not going to do it, but sooner or later, someone will.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate