reserves in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan are just under 8 billion barrels but that possible reserves may well reach over 200 billion barrels. Natural gas reserves are, for Turkmenistan, 101 trillion cubic feet proven and 159 trillion cubic feet probable and, for Kazakhstan, 65 tcf proven and 88 tcf probable. Turkmenistan may have the eighth-largest gas reserves in the world. (The agency defines proven reserves as oil and natural gas deposits that are 90 percent probable and possible reserves as deposits that are 50 percent probable.)22 The Bush administration’s national energy policy document of May 17, 2001, known as the Cheney Report, notorious because one of its chief sources of information was the chairman of the now discredited and bankrupt Enron Corporation, suggests that “proven oil reserves in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are about twenty billion barrels, a little more than the North Sea.”23 These proven reserves, whose value hovers between $3 trillion and $5 trillion, might supply all of Europe’s petroleum needs for eleven years.24 Two other elements add to the prospects of great profits: labor costs are extremely low and environmental standards nonexistent.
Even if the Caspian Basin is not the El Dorado that some claim, it is the world’s last large, virtually undeveloped oil and gas field that could for a time compete with the Persian Gulf in supplying petroleum to Europe, East Asia, and North America. It seems to have about 6 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40 percent of its gas reserves.25 China, which has the world’s fastest-growing economy, became a net oil importer in November 1993 and continues to try to negotiate a possible pipeline from Kazakhstan to Shanghai via Xinjiang Province. China is also attempting to obtain oil from Russia via a pipeline that would stretch from Angarsk in Siberia to the Daqing oil field in Manchuria.26
Imagining the five Central Asian republics that became independent when the USSR broke up in 1991 as potential suppliers of oil to the United States, however, involves numerous problems. Kazakhstan (by far the largest in terms of land area), Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan all share frontiers with China. Turkmenistan borders on Iran. Uzbekistan, in the center, is the only one that abuts all the others plus Afghanistan. All except one are ruled by former Communist Party apparatchiks. Only President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan was not a former Soviet boss, and he has arranged for all fuel for the military jets flying out of the U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan, the biggest American garrison in Central Asia, to be supplied by a firm owned by his son-in-law.27
All the leaders of these Central Asian republics have hopeless human rights records, the two worst being the president of Uzbekistan, where the big U.S. air base at Khanabad is located, and the president for life in Turkmenistan, who has established a personality cult surpassing that of Stalin and who has placed all oil revenues in an offshore account that only he controls. Even Kazakhstan, which is relatively developed and sophisticated—the famous Russian Cosmodrome that launched the world’s first space missions is located at Baykonur in south-central Kazakhstan and the country has a population that is 35-40 percent Russian—is hardly a model republic. Its foreign minister revealed that in 1996 President Nursultan Nazarbayev moved $1 billion in oil revenues to a secret Swiss bank account without informing his parliament.28
CENTRAL ASIA
These countries are also among the premier suppliers of narcotic drugs to world markets, and their repressive, monopolistic regimes have proved powerful breeding grounds for Islamic militants. Their “Kalash-nikov cultures” make ordinary business dealings close to impossible. President George W. Bush told
The biggest problem of all, however, is simply that the Central Asian republics are landlocked. Oil and gas must be transported to market through exposed pipelines, and on none of the proposed routes to market can security be fully guaranteed. Chechen rebels, Armenian irredentists, Iranian mullahs, and Afghan and Kurdish guerrillas threaten all known paths west and south from Baku.31 The only pipelines currently in operation connect the Caspian Basin north to Russia. International consortia have been created to lay pipelines on the bottom of the Caspian Sea but the five nations bordering on the sea do not have a legal agreement on how rights to the sea should be divided. Prior to the American attack on Afghanistan, the big American petroleum companies active in the area—Chevron (now ChevronTexaco), Union Oil Company of California (Unocal), Amoco (now British Petroleum- Amoco), Exxon (now ExxonMobil), and a few others—had all tried to get concessions from and strike pipeline deals with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan with little success. Only after the Americans started to build a complex of military bases in at least four different countries—Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan— did the situation begin to improve for these companies.
The pipeline race began in 1993 when Chevron entered into a forty-year deal with the government of Kazakhstan to exploit the Tengiz oil field and export its oil through a proposed new pipeline complex across the Caspian Sea to Baku and from there to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk.32 The obstacles to this project, in which Chevron has invested several billion dollars, have so far proved insuperable. The Western portion of the pipeline, which is complete, has two sections. One passes through Chechnya, where an anti-Russian rebellion is ongoing, and the other through Dagestan to the north, only slightly more settled politically. These are very difficult pipelines to protect from sabotage. Nor is export by ship from the Black Sea particularly profitable because the Turks have placed heavy constraints on the use of supertankers in the narrow Bosporus Strait into the Mediterranean to protect against a disastrous oil spill off Istanbul. The pipeline section from Kazakhstan to Baku across the Caspian remains in legal jeopardy because of conflicts over who owns the sea bottom. The project is also a joint venture with Russia, an arrangement that irritates the U.S. government, which wants to see oil and gas leaving Central Asia without passing through either Russia or Iran.
The list of people who backed the Kazakhstan pipeline reads like a who’s who of Republican oil politicians. Chevron’s chief adviser was Condoleezza Rice, then a Stanford University professor who joined the Chevron board in 1991 after serving for a year on Bush Senior’s National Security Council. She received a $35,000 annual retainer, plus generous stock options and other perks, and stepped down a decade later, just days before becoming Bush Junior’s national security adviser. The press often refers to her as Chevron’s “main expert on Kazakhstan” although she has never published anything about Central Asia. (The only book she has ever written without a collaborator is her doctoral dissertation,
Dick Cheney, Bush Senior’s secretary of defense and Bush Junior’s vice president, helped broker the deal, while out of office, between Chevron and Kazakhstan as a member of Kazakhstan’s Oil Advisory Board. James A. Baker III, former secretary of state, mastermind of the scheme to get the Supreme Court to appoint Bush Junior president in 2001, and senior partner of the Houston and Washington law firm of Baker Botts, had a hand in the negotiations. Baker’s firm maintains an office in Baku staffed by five attorneys. He is a member of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce’s advisory council, as is Cheney. During the 1990s, the council’s cochairman was Richard Armitage, a veteran administrator of the American-sponsored anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s and
