The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

“guest” of the Taliban and after al-Qaeda’s attacks of August 7, 1998, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, neither the Clinton nor the Bush State Departments ever designated Afghanistan a terrorist-sponsoring nation, since that would have ended any possibility of international funding for the pipelines. Both administrations were willing to accept the Taliban regime, despite its sponsorship of terrorism, so long as it cooperated with plans to develop the oil and gas resources of Central Asia.

A remarkable group of Washington insiders came together to promote the Unocal project. Unocal itself hired former national security adviser Henry Kissinger as a consultant in its negotiations with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Kissinger then worked with Turkmenistan’s chief consultant, General Alexander Haig, his former assistant in the White House and later Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. (Amoco, meanwhile, hired another former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had helped instigate the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s.) Unocal also paid for the services of Robert Oakley, a former U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a former ambassador to Pakistan, Zaire, and Somalia.³⁸

Most creatively, Unocal employed two well-connected Afghans to help influence the Taliban in its favor—a naturalized U.S. citizen, Zalmay Khalilzad, a Pushtun with a 1979 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and Hamid Karzai, a Pushtun from Kandahar with links to the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah, then living in Quetta, Pakistan. In 1991 and 1992, George Bush Senior had appointed Khalilzad deputy undersecretary of defense for policy planning, working under Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he became closely associated. While at the Pentagon Khalilzad was also noticed by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who in 2001 named him to head the Bush Junior transition team for defense. On May 23, 2001, President Bush appointed Khalilzad to the National Security Council staff working under Condoleezza Rice, and on December 31, 2001, Khalilzad became the United States’s “special envoy” (that is, unofficial ambassador) to Afghanistan only nine days after the U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul. In 1996, Khalilzad and Karzai were both pro-Taliban, thinking of the new government as Unocal’s best hope for “stability.” In November of the following year, Khalilzad participated in a major Unocal effort to entertain and impress a delegation of Taliban officials whom the company had invited to its engineering headquarters in Houston (with a side trip to the NASA Space Center thrown in). The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains as interested in oil as in terrorism in that region.³⁹

In the mid-1990s, Unocal put together the Central Asia Gas and Pipeline Consortium (CentGas), made up of the government of Turkmenistan, the Delta Oil Company of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia Petroleum, Itochu Oil Exploration Company of Japan, Hyundai Engineering and Construction Company of South Korea, the Crescent Group of Pakistan, and Gazprom, the Russian natural gas behemoth. Delta was included because it was close to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and Unocal’s advisers thought that he might help legitimize Unocal with the Taliban. (The only countries ever to recognize the Taliban government were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.) Gazprom was brought in to neutralize any Russian opposition. Unocal held 46.5 percent of the shares, Delta 15 percent, and the government of Turkmenistan 7 percent. According to the preeminent authority on the politics of Central Asia, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, by 1996, “strategy over pipelines had become the driving force behind Washington’s interest in the Taliban.”⁴⁰

Unocal’s scheme looked good on paper, but it didn’t fly. The Taliban was split between pro-Bridas and pro- Unocal factions, and it kept asking the CentGas consortium for more money and investments in roads and other infrastructure projects. Rumors suggest that Osama bin Laden favored working with Bridas rather than Unocal, in part because he did not like seeing his militant colleagues collaborating with Americans. The company was also encountering resistance from a quarter it normally did not deign to notice. Unocal’s indifference to the Taliban’s human rights record deeply offended the American women’s movement. An organization called the Feminist Majority Foundation of Los Angeles petitioned the state of California to revoke Unocal’s charter, and in June 1998, Mavis Leno, wife of Jay Leno, the host of TV’s The Tonight Show, attended a Unocal stockholders’ meeting and denounced the company for its willingness to cooperate with the Taliban.⁴¹ Then, on August 7, 1998, Osama bin Laden’s terrorists attacked the American embassies in East Africa, and on August 20, President Clinton retaliated by ordering Tomahawk cruise missiles fired into bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. The next day Unocal suspended work on the pipeline until the United States recognized the government of Afghanistan, and on December 4, it formally withdrew from the CentGas consortium, claiming that world oil and gas prices were too low to make it profitable. Most analysts concluded that no other major oil company would take its place and that the project was dead.

But the U.S. government was not ready to give up. Its purpose was not just to make money but to establish an American presence in Central Asia. It was pleased with the Taliban’s crackdown on Afghan poppy production and wanted the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden. The Taliban was also winning the war against the Northern Alliance and consolidating its rule throughout the country. It was, however, getting deservedly awful press. In November 1999, the United Nations imposed sanctions against Afghanistan because of its human rights abuses, and on March 1, 2001, the Taliban provoked international outrage by blowing up two monumental ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. The United States lost patience and concluded that “regime change” was in order.

As Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connections reported in February 2002, “Plans to destroy the Taliban had been the subject of international diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic discussions for months before September 11. There was a crucial meeting in Geneva in May 2001 between U.S. State Department, Iranian, German, and Italian officials, where the main topic was a strategy to topple the Taliban and replace the theocracy with a ‘broad-based government.’ The topic was raised again in full force at the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001 when India—an observer at the summit—contributed its own plans.”⁴² Further meetings took place after the G-8 session in Berlin among American, Russian, German, and Pakistani officials, and Pakistani insiders have described a detailed American plan of July 2001 to launch military strikes against the Taliban from bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan before mid-October of that year. It should be recalled that “Bush’s favorite Afghan,” Zalmay Khalilzad, joined the National Security Council on May 23, 2001, just in time to work on an operational order for an attack on Afghanistan. On August 2, 2001, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca, a former CIA officer, held the United States’s last official meeting with the Taliban in Islamabad.

In light of this trajectory, it would appear that the attacks of September 11 provided an opportunity for the United States to act unilaterally to remove the Taliban, without assistance from Russia, India, or any other country. In the weeks following 9/11, the Pentagon’s formidable public relations apparatus went into top gear to describe to a public almost totally ignorant of Afghanistan and of Central Asian oil politics generally how we proposed to smash Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, became something of a stand-up comic in his daily press conferences, quipping about how the United States wanted bin Laden dead or alive and was “smoking out” al-Qaeda operatives, who were said to be “on the run.” The primary strategy, however, was to reopen the Afghan civil war by having the CIA spread some $70 million in cash among the Tajik and Uzbek warlords that the Taliban had defeated.⁴³ The reemergence of the Northern Alliance, backed by massive American air power, resulted in the almost instantaneous collapse of the Taliban regime, leaving Afghanistan to revert to fighting among local satraps and the cultivation of opium poppies.

With astonishing speed and efficiency, the U.S. military managed to use the war to obtain the rights to military bases in Afghanistan and surrounding countries. For its immediate military operations, which were largely over by the beginning of 2002, it occupied three main sites within Afghanistan itself—Mazar-i-Sharif airport in the extreme north of the country, Bagram Air Base in the suburbs of Kabul, and Kandahar International Airport in the south. It also placed troops in Kabul to provide immediate security for Hamid Karzai’s newly installed government, whose powers hardly extended beyond Kabul, much less the rest of the country. For the first few weeks, all of these places were occupied by Special Forces, marines, and frontline army troops, but as the Taliban collapsed and al-Qaeda dispersed into the countryside and across the Pakistan border, these combat forces were replaced with army units