My Government Went to Afghanistan And All I Got Was This Stupid Pipeline

The Complete Truth About the U.S. Attack on Afghanistan

By Ted Rall
© 2002 All Rights Reserved

“American soldiers, oilmen, and diplomats are rapidly getting to know this remote corner of the world, the old underbelly of the Soviet Union and a region that’s been almost untouched by Western armies since the time of Alexander the Great. The game the Americans are playing has some of the highest stakes going. What they are attempting is nothing less than the biggest carve-out of a new U.S. sphere of influence since the U.S. became engaged in the Mideast 50 years ago.” (0)

—“The Next Oil Frontier,” Business Week, May 27, 2002.

PART 1: Bush’s Fake War on Terror

The Official Story goes like this:

Within days of the September 11 suicide attacks, U.S. intelligence zeroed in on perpetual-enemy-of-America Osama bin Laden as the diabolical mastermind behind the plot that had killed more than 3,000 innocent civilians in New York and Washington. Top Bush Administration officials told the public that they possessed proof that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization were the culprits of 9-11 (1); Great Britain and Pakistan asserted that the evidence was strong enough to convict the “evildoer” in a court of law -- their courts of law, in any case (2). Although bin Laden and his men had enjoyed the protection of Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban regime, a government diplomatically recognized by just three other countries (3), the United States politely requested extradition of these mass murderers to face justice in the West. When that demand -- er, request -- was supposedly refused, an America determined not to allow more of its citizens to die at the hands of terrorists had no choice but to defend itself against an ongoing threat: it took advantage of Afghanistan’s long-standing civil war to drive the Taliban -- bin Laden’s protectors -- out of power.

Regrettably, the official line continues, bin Laden and his followers sneaked off into the mountains of Tora Bora (where bin Laden was, according to some reports, possibly killed) as American bombs dropped. But though the United States failed to capture its most wanted man, the bombing campaign was a huge success in grander respects. It liberated ordinary Afghans, stabilized Central Asia, and struck a blow against Islamic extremism. Soon after the Northern Alliance swept into power, residents of Kabul and Herat rushed outside to shave their Taliban-mandated beards and burn their burqas. Music and kite-flying, both inexplicably banned under Taliban rule, filled the streets. Afghans freed to indulge their taste in Indian musical films, went the thinking, would lose their taste for flying planes into buildings in American cities.

The U.S., it was posited, had turned the tide of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.

Freedom, pundits wrote, wasn’t sufficient to ensure the long-term stability that counteracts the terrorist impulse among Afghans. In order to ensure that it didn’t lapse into another post-Soviet phase of “Mad Max”-like anarchy, Afghanistan required the paved roads, schools and strong central government that would allow a resumption of economic activity that would lift its long-suffering people, with an average life of expectancy of 43, out of grinding poverty. And so, under the watchful yet benevolent eye of the United States and its Western allies, the Afghans convened that clumsy yet charming tribal democratic gathering, the emergency loya jirga. At first the new transitional Afghan government was expected to take the form of an English-style ceremonial monarchy, along with that format’s institutions of representative democracy; the Americans went so far as to convince the elderly Afghan King Zahir Shah, who had been living in exile for nearly 30 years, to return to Kabul to serve as his country’s figurehead. But emerging instead from that convocation with overwhelming support to become the country’s new president was a man whose ethnically-inclusive philosophy extended to his eclectic wardrobe, a 45-year-old Pashtun tribal leader and former mujahed named Hamid Karzai (4). Karzai was well-bred, well-spoken and well-connected -- the latter with Bush Administration officials. (This cozy relationship was lauded as a boon for a nation in need of American financial assistance.) The old king was duly set aside (though told to remain in Kabul, as something less than a symbol),the United States pronounced itself pleased with the Afghans’ choice (though many delegates carped that the loya jirga had been as fixed as a Florida election), and pledged not to “abandon” Afghanistan to poverty and war as it had done after the Soviet withdrawal.

Karzai’s first duties as interim president were to bring Afghanistan’s provinces, then under control of local warlords, into the fold of his own central government, and to begin reconstruction of a nation devastated by 22 consecutive years of war. In the course of the latter function, he supposedly revived a long-abandoned idea: to revive the cross-cultural notion of the ancient Silk Road, this time with Caspian Sea oil and natural gas substituting for textiles in the economic exchanges of goods that has always characterized Central Asian economic activity.

Even before “liberating” Afghanistan, the United States had long supported the idea of a trans-Afghan oil/gas pipeline as a win-win scenario under which Afghans would gain jobs and revenues and American industry would enjoy the benefits of an additional source of fuel from a friendly ally. Kazakhstan had struck oil years before in its section of the Caspian Sea, discovering enough reserves to far surpass Saudi Arabia’s, but the shortest route for a pipeline to the Indian Ocean would have had to pass through “Axis of Evil” member Iran, an alleged backer of state terrorism. Turkmenistan possesses less oil than Kazakhstan, but enormous amounts of natural gas -- by some estimates, the world’s second-largest reserves. Connecting those Turkmen gas fields to an existing Soviet-era Russian network was considered unreliable -- the Russians had the unfortunate habit of diverting the oil without paying for it during the immediate post-independence period of the early ’90s -- and a proposed route across China was considered too long and too expensive.

Plans for a pipeline dated back to the mid-’90s, even before the Taliban seized power in 1996. After the Taliban consolidated control over more than 90 percent of the country, Western oil companies restarted negotiations with renewed vigor; the hardline Islamist regime crushed the warlordism that threatened the safety of a pipeline.

California-based Unocal Corporation had dropped previous plans for an Afghan pipeline deal in 1998, after it had become evident that the Taliban leadership were too unstable and unreasonable to make the idea feasible. But in the latter days of the Afghan war, although Unocal had officially lost its appetite for Caspian oil and moved on to focus on business in other parts of the world, reviving the idea made sense. Seizing the moment in anticipation of a new stable, safe and unified Afghanistan, Karzai signed a memorandum of understanding with its neighbors Turkmenistan and Pakistan in order to begin the process of calling for bids to construct a pipeline. The Kazakhs, Turkmen and other Central Asian republics would finally get their oil and gas to sea and on to market, the United States would enjoy cheaper gasoline and the Afghan people would benefit from construction jobs and transit fees. From the horrors of war would emerge a significant player in the lucrative world of international fossil fuel exploitation.

Most Americans believe the above scenario, and why shouldn’t they? Since 9-11 print and broadcast media in the United States have disseminated the Bush Administration line without question. On no subject has that been truer than on plans to run a pipeline across Afghanistan. Yet the role of energy resources in the U.S. “war on terror” has been anything but unreported. In Europe, mainstream media outlets like Reuters and the BBC have reported extensively on the subject. Wire services have distributed hard news about U.S.-led meetings, bank funding and related issues to every American newspaper, radio and television station in the United States.

American media has uniformly chosen to ignore these wire dispatches. Perhaps editors feel that their readers and viewers aren’t ready to hear unpleasant truths about their government’s actions in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. Perhaps they hope that other media -- some other media, somewhere -- will begin the coverage that would allow them to pick up the ball. Whatever the reason for the silence of the American media, it has contributed to the sense that those who mention oil, natural gas and Afghanistan in the same breath are “conspiracy theorists” on the political fringe.

The pipeline machinations are no theories; they are facts. All of the information in this piece is readily available from widely-respected mainstream media sources, and these outlets are cited throughout. The purpose of this endeavor is to group all of that information , most of it scattered in bits and pieces over the course of the last terrible year, into one place so that Americans can begin to understand the actions that are being taken under their name.

Why Attack Afghanistan?

The scenario summarized above -- a sleeping giant, rudely awakened by 19 Muslim hijackers on a sunny day in late summer, who rises to wreak vengeance to spread democracy and wealth among the world’s downtrodden -- is a charming one. It speaks well of the United States, its intents and its actions. However, it asks one to accept the following preposterous assumptions:

1. That the logical response to the September 11 attacks was a military campaign to curb Islamist terrorism, that Islamist terrorist groups (including the group responsible for 9-11) were based in Afghanistan, and that the obvious goal of that effort was the replacement of the terrorist-allied Taliban with the pro-U.S. Northern Alliance.

2. That the bombing campaign against Afghanistan, never even considered before 9-11, was planned from start to finish in three weeks (5).

3. That only after peace had been achieved in Afghanistan and after the United States had achieved its war aims did Bush Administration officials begin to consider the viability and desirability of a revived Unocal-style pipeline deal, not so much to obtain cheap oil as to help the Afghan people rebuild their country.

4. That a trans-Afghan pipeline deal -- never seriously contemplated before 9-11 due to security concerns -- was now determined to be possible in a newly safe Afghanistan, that it was discussed, negotiated and signed between the governments of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan within just three months.

As we shall see, the facts -- strong, well-reported evidence rather than shrill conspiracy theories concerning Enron and other recent scandals du jour making the rounds on the Internet -- do not support these assumptions. The following pages will demonstrate to the satisfaction of a reasonably open-minded reader that United States involvement in Central Asia and in Afghanistan specifically, a gruesome and cruel exercise that has already cost more lives than those taken on September 11 (6), is motivated primarily -- if not solely -- by the desire to control a significant stake of the world’s largest untapped reserves of oil and natural gas.

The United States began undermining the Taliban regime using covert CIA military operatives within Afghanistan more than a year before 9-11. By the summer of 2001, the U.S. government, amplifying policies previously in place under Bill Clinton, had decided to replace the Taliban regime, and had developed the air strategy to do so.

Did George W. Bush know in advance that the United States would be attacked on September 11? We do not know. When the attacks came, however, the Bush Administration had to decide how to react. In the end, their response was a call for a worldwide “war on terrorism” in which other nations would have to choose to side with the U.S. or be treated as its enemy (“you’re either with us or against us”); the first American implementation of that policy was its undeclared war in Afghanistan. And because the contingency plans for invading Afghanistan had already been developed (7), all that was needed was the few weeks necessary to transport U.S. troops halfway around the globe.

The decision to attack Afghanistan surprised experts on Central Asia and the Islamist terrorist organizations that were based there. Osama bin Laden lived in Afghanistan (near Kandahar) and Al Qaeda operated training camps there, but Al Qaeda’s primary operations were (and remain) in the dusty towns of the remote tribal areas and occupied sections of Kashmir -- places like Quetta and Gilgit -- in Pakistan. Pakistan was also the main source of money and weapons to the Taliban militia. The Pakistani intelligence service had helped install Mullah Omar’s Taliban in 1996. And General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in September 1999, had invited Taliban and Al Qaeda “holy warriors” into Pakistani Kashmir to fight the Indian army (8). Sharing a Pashtun majority with Afghanistan, Pakistan treated Afghanistan the way the U.S. often deals with Mexico -- as a sort of back lot, a place where more unsavory business can take place away from the prying eyes of curious reporters. To be sure, bombing Afghanistan inconvenienced Al Qaeda, but the heart and soul of the group remained unharmed after the war.

After 9-11 Pakistan’s government, the greatest exporter of anti-American jihadism in Central and South Asia, chose to abandon its Taliban allies for a new, cozier and more profitable relationship with the United States. Saudi Arabia, the source of most funding for radical Islamist groups and the Wahhabist madrassas that trained their members, remained immune from U.S. criticism because of American reliance on its oil; if anything its stock rose as Bush officials planned an attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And Egypt, the country of origin of the 19 hijackers and the group to which they belonged, Islamic Jihad, was never even mentioned by U.S. officials. The “war on terrorism” was less about fighting terrorism, or finding the perpetrators of 9-11, than about bombing Afghanistan.

The Afghan bombing campaign also demonstrated a monumental lack of understanding of both Muslim sentiment and the porous nature of Central Asian borders. The Taliban had created their regime as a grand Islamic experiment to create the world’s “purest” Muslim state. So dedicated to this proposition was this militia of former mujahedeen that it didn’t bother to write a constitution -- disputes were settled by village mullahs who interpreted the Koran. While most other Muslims throughout the world are comparably modern and secular, the bombing of Taliban Afghanistan appeared to many of these urban Arabs and Turks as a direct attack on Islam itself -- much as American Jews tend to react strongly to attacks against Israel because of its status as the world’s only Jewish state, Muslims were disinclined to believe the official U.S. line that a war on terrorism required the dispatch of the Taliban.

The choice of an air campaign over a ground assault inevitably led to the outcome that followed: the escape en masse of individuals wanted for involvement with militant groups. Many Islamist groups had been based in neighboring countries to begin with -- for example, the Taliban-aligned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which threatens to topple the regime of President Islam Karimov in Tashkent, is based in Tajikistan and southern Kyrgyzstan. After American bombs began dropping, Talibs and assorted Islamists fled to join their comrades in those countries as well as Pakistan. This outcome might have been prevented by a full-scale ground invasion closing the Afghan borders with those states (9).

It’s also worth noting that there was little cause to consider the Northern Alliance any more pro-U.S. or less prone to cooperating with Islamist terror organizations than the Taliban. As it does in the case of such civil conflicts as the split between Taiwan and mainland China, the U.S. State Department played a double game with the two factions, recognizing the Northern Alliance diplomatically as the legitimate government of Afghanistan (though it rudely dismissed its ruler, President Rabbani, after the invasion) while treating the Taliban as de facto rulers. Neither side ever got what it wanted from the United States -- to be treated as a fully realized state. In numerous meetings and negotations from 1996 to 2001, the U.S. promised diplomatic recognition, including Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations, to the Taliban, in exchange for various considerations. But when the Northern Alliance, who did hold that seat, asked for even the slightest economic assistance from Washington, it was denied until they gained military ground in the civil war against the Taliban.

Russia armed the Northern Alliance, often using money that originated with U.S. intelligence. Pakistan armed the Taliban, but most Pakistani munitions were themselves paid for by American dollars. Although -- or because -- both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance received their weapons from the United States, neither side trusted it. The leadership and militiamen of both sides shared common ideology and religion; all were hardcore Islamist, former anti-Soviet fighters whose factions had turned on each other after the Russians had withdrawn in 1989. Both sides, including the Northern Alliance, believed that the United States had used them to fight a brutal proxy war to finish off the Soviet Union, only to abandon them to a wasteland of violence and despair after they had succeeded. From the American point of view, deposing the Taliban, therefore, was tantamount to replacing one band of Islamist cynics with another.

Finally, despite Bush’s initial statements that the United States’ top priority was the arrest or death of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, little was done to achieve that end. The Taliban, desperate to avoid the onslaught to come, offered to turn over bin Laden upon the presentation of evidence of 9-11 culpability, but the U.S. refused even to discuss extradition (10). Months later, after Bush had to admit that his expeditionary force was no closer to capturing bin Laden than on September 11, he claimed that capturing the billionaire Saudi dissident had never been important (11) -- and the actions of the military during that period appeared to confirm his assertion.

Why, then, had the United States targeted Afghanistan? If the war wasn’t central to eliminating anti-American Islamist terrorist groups, if the perpetrators of 9-11 were several time zones away, if Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were allowed to slip away because their capture hadn’t ever been a priority -- then why? Why had the United States deployed 100,000 troops to Central Asian bases in Kygryzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan? Why was it spending $1 billion per month on this operation? Why was it willing to put its young men and women in harm’s way, much less drop so much ordnance that well over 3,000 Afghan civilians were killed in the process?

Why was Afghanistan so important?

PART 2: The Most Underreported Story -- Only in America

During the year following September 11, American newspapers and television news outlets studiously avoided mentioning oil, gas and Afghanistan in the same breath. Citing European and South Asian news sources, however, a few Western writers tried to draw the attention of a befuddled American public to its government’s impure interests in the “war on terrorism.” Historically, it’s no secret that war almost always goes hand in hand with economic motives, and economic incentives for American involvement often involves control of fossil fuels (12). U.S. intervention in Somalia, for instance, had less to do with feeding hungry Africans than controlling the strategic Gulf of Aden (13), through which oil tankers pass from the Indian Ocean en route to the Suez Canal via the Red Sea. While the Vietnam conflict is popularly believed to have stemmed from the Cold War-era “domino theory” obsession among U.S. officials, energy company interest in South Vietnamese natural gas reserves played at least as vital a role in American military intervention as anti-Communist ideology. And few doubt a relationship between the importance of Venezuela as the biggest producer of oil in the Western hemisphere and a botched Bush Administration coup attempt against its democratically-elected president, Hugo Chávez (14). Given the enormous energy resources at stake in Central Asia, these cynics suggested, there was much more to American adventurism in Afghanistan than immediately met the eye.

George W. Bush’s popularity has remained largely unaffected by intimations of dark intentions related to the war on terrorism (15), even though his use of 9-11 as a transparent ploy to fight an oil war is potentially a scandal of gargantuan proportions. It certainly helps that this, the biggest unreported story of 2001, received virtually no airing on American network news or in daily newspapers.

But in an environment in which even soft-spoken Democratic leader Tom Daschle is smeared as “anti-American” for “questioning the President in time of war,” even these below-the-radar discussions have drawn disproportionately heavy fire. “Apart from the popular theory (in some parts of Europe as well as the Middle East) that this is a war on Islam,” the BBC’s Malcolm Haslett typically editorialized, “there is also the theory that it is a war motivated mainly -- or even purely -- by long-term economic and political goals. This line of argument falls down on a number of points.”

Haslett’s main point was that a trans-Afghan pipeline is intrinsically unfeasible, and that, presumably, countries don’t wage war over such lousy ideas: “Very few Western politicians or oil companies have taken Afghanistan seriously as a major export route -- for the simple reason that few believe Afghanistan will ever achieve the stability needed to ensure a regular and uninterrupted flow of oil and gas.” (16)

And yet, while American bombs were still falling, well before wedding guests were dying “accidentally” (July 1) (17) and an Afghan vice president was being assassinated in Kabul (July 6) (18), the presidents of three Central and South Asian nations were meeting to sign an agreement to seek investors for just that “bad idea”: a trans-Afghan pipeline.

Despite continuing internal strife and instability throughout Afghanistan, not to mention almost inconceivable poverty and chaos in the areas for which it is planned, the project became the transitional Afghan government’s top priority. On May 30, 2002, the BBC reported, “Pakistani President Musharraf, interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai and Turkmen President Niyazov agreed on the construction of a $2 billion pipeline to bring gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Officials in Islamabad said the 950-mile pipeline would take natural gas from the huge Daulatabad-Donmez fields in Turkmenistan to the southwestern Pakistani port of Gawadar.” (19)

The Bush Administration and its mainstream media allies ask us to believe that the United States bombed Afghanistan solely in order to kill or arrest Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and their Taliban protectors. It was while doing that, in the words of journalist and author John Flynn in 1944, we "blundered accidentally into their oil wells." (20) It was, conservative pundits claimed, only after the United States-backed Northern Alliance victory that thoughts turned to the possibility of building a potentially lucrative pipeline project across Afghanistan. (21) But the effort to revive an oil and gas pipeline through this link between Central and South Asia actually began during the very first days of the bombing campaign, while the Taliban still held power in Kabul.

As the Pentagon was laying out targets, the State Department was mapping pipelines.

U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain met with Pakistan’s oil minister to discuss reviving the old Unocal deal on the third day of the bombing campaign, October 10, 2001. This was when the U.S.-aligned Northern Alliance still controlled just five percent of the country and defeat of the Taliban was still anything but guaranteed. (22) On December 31, 2001, Bush appointed Afghan-American academic Zalmay Khalilzad as his special envoy and likely future U.S. ambassador to Hamid Karzai’s then nine-day-old interim government. (The Karzai regime was called “interim” before the loya jirga and “transitional” afterward.) Khalilzad was a former Unocal Corporation consultant who, as a member of the National Security Council on Persian Gulf- and Southeast Asian-related affairs, had reported to former ChevronTexaco general counsel Condoleezza Rice. (23)

The Karzai and Khalilzad appointments were understandably interpreted by Central Asia Kremlinologists as a move that signaled American support for a trans-Afghan pipeline in general and Unocal’s involvement in particular. (24) Karzai, after all, is himself a former Unocal consultant. (25) In February 2002, Khalilzad traveled to Ashkhabat to sign an initial letter of intent on the pipeline with Turkmenistan’s autocratic president-for-life, Saparmurat Niyazov. And on March 7, 2002, Reuters reported that Karzai had gone to Islamabad to cover the Pakistani side of the deal with that country’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf. (26) Two and half months later, all three countries met in Pakistan to ink a formal letter of understanding.

Will a pipeline ever be built? Probably not. At this writing, Afghanistan remains as politically and socially fractured as ever. At least seven major warlords and hundreds of minor warlords known locally as “commanders” control districts outside the control of Karzai’s American-backed regime, which mainly consists of his tiny Kabul city-state. Fighting has broken out repeatedly, claiming hundreds of lives at internal borders and checkpoints separating the turf of rival warlords and with representatives of the Karzai government. No fewer than three versions of the Afghan flag fly over a nation filled with an estimated five to ten million mines, where most boys over 14 years of age carry an AK-47 and where a culture of violence, theft and hostage-taking have been both historically and culturally endemic.

Experts say that a trans-Afghan pipeline would be subject to continuous threats of sabotage committed by local warlords in the sectors through which it ran, and immense amounts of ever-increasing protection fees would have to be paid to safeguard the steady flow of fossil fuels. In addition, a large foreign -- read, American -- occupation force would be required for many years to enforce comparative law and order, and it remains to be seen whether the Bush Administration -- much less future American presidents -- will be inclined to devote substantial financial and military resources to the aftermath of our 2001 Afghan adventure. If pragmatism triumphs over ideology, it seems likely that the oil companies involved, reported to be led once again by the California-based Unocal Corporation (27), will reconsider their decision to bypass the shorter, cheaper and infinitely more workable Iranian proposal.

For the time being, however, the Bush Administration and its puppet regime in Kabul are working furiously to make this highly dubious scheme become reality. And various parties -- Russia, Japan and the Asian Development Bank -- are already committing millions of dollars to the job.

Right-wing commentators -- the same guys who previously denied the existence of any pipeline scheme -- now shrug: so what? To the victor goes the spoils, their logic goes, and if a country ever deserved to be compensated for its travails -- in this case with cheap fuel -- it’s the United States. We lost more than 3,000 lives and billions of dollars in property on September 11 -- maybe an unlimited supply of 50-cent-per-gallon gas will help soothe our pain.

There is no smoking gun, no leaked White House memo, dated August 2001, signed by George W. Bush, that calls for invading Afghanistan on whatever pretext imaginable to secure it as a possible pipeline route. There is, however, a preponderance of evidence that the drive to establish an American-friendly regime in Kabul was undertaken not to protect American interests from the attacks of Islamist radicals, but to enter the “New Great Game” for Central Asian oil. This is certainly the accepted view among leaders and ordinary citizens of other Western nations, and it is one that is impossible to avoid after examining the published evidence.

The profoundly cynical Bush Administration war against Afghanistan that was waged during the fall of 2001, while body parts were still being extracted from smoldering rubble at Ground Zero, has profoundly negative implications for the United States at home and around the world. These include, but are hardly limited to the following:

1. Rather than attempt to bring the perpetrators of September 11 to justice, rather than end the reign of terror carried out over the years by Islamist extremists, the United States allowed the real criminals -- officials in the Egyptian, Saudi and Pakistani governments who tolerated and worked with Islamic Jihad and their allies -- to get away, as it let bin Laden and Al Qaeda operatives escape. These people and these groups will kill again, and the Bush Administration will be partly responsible for those deaths.

2. The U.S. was so desperate to control a key exit route for landlocked Central Asian oil that it was willing to cause the deaths of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians and remove from power the first Afghan government in two decades to bring some measure of stability and order to the country. The Muslim world, disgusted by the carnage caused by the U.S. in Afghanistan as well as our impudent coup de bombe against an attempt to create the purest Islamic state in the world, will merely experience further shudders of anti-Americanism in response to a perceived war against Islam. This will fuel the popularity and funding of radical groups bent on spreading Islamic fundamentalism.

3. Rather than take up the Iranian government on its recent overtures to thaw relations, the U.S. established a puppet regime on Iran’s eastern border whose express purpose is to “freeze out” Iran. If Iran drifts away from Western-style reforms, if anti-Americanism sweeps the richest, most culturally and politically potent nation in the Middle East, the Bush Administration will certainly be to blame.

4. The U.S. has lost its moral imperative to wage war, and its bull-in-a-china-shop sort of unrepentant arrogance is now seen as a problem that needs to be addressed by the world’s diplomatic community. Had the U.S. waited a respectful period before allowing Karzai to begin discussing a pipeline -- a year or two, say -- our European allies might have looked the other way as the United States spread its domination over Afghanistan and built military bases throughout the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. As it is, American intent is indecently obvious -- and Europe is far less likely to join our next oil-related conflict, whether against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or elsewhere. If we fail to secure the support of our allies when we genuinely need it, we may lose our status as a superpower -- and this will be the Bush Administration’s responsibility. The geopolitical consequences of this breach are currently unknowable.

5. Russia is understandably dismayed to watch the United States building permanent military bases throughout its former Soviet republics -- Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan all have American troops stationed on their territory -- in order to safeguard American oil interests. (28) The Chinese government is worried about the establishment of an U.S. puppet state bordering its wild western underbelly, the Xinjiang Muslim Autonomous Region. It’s the Cuban missile crisis all over again, but this time we’re playing the role of Russia. If war with one of these nuclear superpowers somehow develops from the rash actions taken today, the Bush Administration will have been responsible.

The funda