I'm quite used to having opinions on Afghanistan that are unpopular on DU.

Robb

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Thu Mar-04-10 12:23 PM
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I'm quite used to having opinions on Afghanistan that are unpopular on DU.

(By request, I'm putting down my thoughts on the war. If you're looking for a short read, look elsewhere. This will take you a bit to get through, and will likely drop like a stone in GD.)

In October of 2001, I "stood" right here and told you the war in Afghanistan was about a natural gas pipeline.

That may surprise the more recent members who like to call me (and everyone who has a nuanced view toward Central Asia) a "warmonger."

For those of you who weren't around, it was an exceptionally unpopular notion at the time -- 9/11 was only weeks old. I don't have to tell you what I was called then. It sure wasn't "warmonger."

I stood here and told you we would've found some reason to "secure" Afghanistan in the near future regardless. Turkmenistan was sitting on what we figured was 100 trillion cubic feet of gas, and since August of 1998 we'd been watching it just sit there.

(That was about the time the West learned about how awful the Taliban were, and Western oil and gas interests decided they didn't need the bad press. Unocal et al had just inked a $50-100 million per year "transit fee" deal with the Taliban, but the BBC did a documentary on them cutting off women's feet and other such things, and they backed out. This is all history now, but at the time I was the only one talking about it. You can check, DU 1.0 is a searching nightmare but here's a link to a piece I wrote for Bartcop a few weeks later, boiled down for the public. If you think you have a rant that's earlier, I'd be interested to see it.)

Anyhow, the deal was simple: secure the country, make deals with Turkmenistan, get the gas flowing, pick it up in the Gulf of Oman (south of Pakistan). Say what you like about the Neocons, their agenda was painfully transparent. And, in a twisted way, I could see their point. The global economy is driven by energy and, however misguided, they probably honestly thought they were doing the right thing for the country. That it would make them rich in the process made it all the easier to believe, I expect.

It's been long enough since that most people at least agree "we" were looking at the region in the 1990s, before 9/11, and at a minimum were going to take advantage of the situation after 9/11. No big conspiracy theory needed, just a lot of energy and wealth at stake: the "energy prize" was Turkmenistan's gas, and we needed Afghanistan to tidily get it.

Cynical, eh? There it is, though. Not particularly warmonger-ish, either.

That the Bush cabal lost sight of the "prize" and got greedy is little surprise in hindsight -- I like to say they went after Iraq to secure oil for a few years, not tending to the opportunity to secure natural gas for a generation. And, in hindsight, it's also little surprise they botched even the simple task of securing Iraq's oil for American companies. In the end, in Iraq, they underestimated not only how long it would take to secure the area militarily, but also how quickly multinational oil and gas companies would swoop in and "steal" it back from them.

What did surprise me, however, was that they also botched the effort in Central Asia. While we've been frittering away lives and capital in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan's old nutjob ruler finally kicked the bucket and the new guy changed the game.

In the past, Turkmenistan was hampered by a couple of obstacles in getting its gas to market. First, the former Soviet states were crap for paying on time, but their options were limited -- they were the only ones they could get it to easily, from a strictly geographic standpoint.

Second, Turkmenistan's policy had always been to award foreigners the crap oil and gas fields for exploration, and keep the good ones for themselves. This seemed a good strategy on its face, but the problem remained lack of capital to develop the resources -- to do it right, you need money to make money, if you follow.

The damnedest things started happening in the past year or so. In December, the big board completely changed as Turkmenistan not only awarded a Chinese state-owned company exploration and development rights on its best oil and gas field, but also completed a pipeline to China's grid, through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Leaving Afghanistan to sit like a midwest Main Street after the interstate bypasses it.

This will make a little more sense with a map:

...The blue lines are what we're talking about: natural gas pipelines. The dotted ones are "proposed," meaning unbuilt (for obvious reasons). The solid ones are done. Notice the two that would bring gas to the West -- the TAPI and Trans-Caspian -- are still sitting on the drawing board. And there's about zero reason for Turkmenistan to care if they get finished or not, they've got a fantastic buyer in China -- China will take all they can send.

So really, after December, I was pretty sure we'd see the troops leave Afghanistan with little fanfare. Politically it would've made perfect sense, economically there's no reason to be there, strategically Afghanistan's completely insignificant.

Imagine my surprise when we didn't.

Here's the thing: anyone who's studied the history of the area knows we screwed it up but good when we left in 1989, right after the Soviets withdrew. We had armed an incredibly young (demographically-speaking) and poor country to the teeth, and just split when the Red Menace was defeated. That it sank into fundamentalism, deeper poverty and despair courtesy the Taliban is completely unsurprising. There was just no compelling reason for us to "care" about it, much less send in troops or money to fix the situation.

We broke it. But we sure as hell weren't going to fix it.

But Obama seems to have a different opinion on the matter. To me, the only reason we could still be there is to actually try to fix the mess we made. Nothing else even begins to approach that as a motivation.

Even the well-heeled "feed the military-industrial-complex" theory doesn't float in Afghanistan. If you know the military, you know the money's in the fancy technology. It would've been the easiest thing in the world to continue pouring troops and dollars into Iraq to feed the MIC, and it would've cost far less political capital to do so.

But Afghanistan is a low-tech war, lots of sand and mud and boots and bullets. Not profitable for the MIC, no matter how big it gets.

What I've been left with is the impression that this administration is seizing the opportunity given it -- much as the last did, in its cynical and greedy way. But in this case it's to right a wrong we did to a country that didn't deserve it.

The irony of thinking this has become a war with a "noble" or "just" cause for fighting it is not lost on me, anyone who's followed my ramblings in the past would be hard pressed to find much jingoism. But it's all we're left with as far as motivation.

Ask any soldier who's done both whether they feel better guarding an oil derrick in Iraq, or going after real "bad guys." And they are bad guys. No one could disagree Afghanistan would be better off were the Taliban gone. We are engaged in that pursuit at the moment, at great cost of lives and treasure, with no "energy prize" at the end.

And if the effort is indeed successful by July 2011 as planned -- and at this point I see nothing but good signs indicating it will be so -- we will have done something huge, noble, and worthwhile with armed troops for the first time in a generation.

If being surprised and pleased about that idea makes me a "warmonger," then the term has no function any more, and I'll wear it -- along with "liberal" and any other labels that don't mean what they used to.