crucial

from The Guardian, Saturday September 20, 2003
John Pilger reports

"I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard," said Lord Curzon,
viceroy of India in 1898, "upon which is being played out a great game for
the domination of the world." Brzezinski, adviser to several presidents
and a guru admired by the Bush gang, has written virtually those same
words. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its
Geostrategic Imperatives, he writes that the key to dominating the world
is central Asia, with its strategic position between competing powers and
immense oil and gas wealth. "To put it in terminology that harkens back to
the more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, one of "the grand
imperatives of imperial geostrategy" is "to keep the barbarians from
coming together".

Surveying the ashes of the Soviet Union he helped destroy, the guru mused
more than once: so what if all this had created "a few stirred up
Muslims"? On September 11 2001, "a few stirred up Muslims" provided the
answer. I recently interviewed Brzezinski in Washington and he vehemently
denied that his strategy precipitated the rise of al-Qaida: he blamed
terrorism on the Russians.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the chessboard was passed to the
Clinton administration. The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the Taliban,
now ruled Afghanistan. In 1997, US state department officials and
executives of the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) discreetly
entertained Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas. They were
entertained lavishly, with dinner parties at luxurious homes in Houston.
They asked to be taken shopping at a Walmart and flown to tourist
attractions, including the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and Mount
Rushmore in South Dakota, where they gazed upon the faces of American
presidents chiselled in the rockface. The Wall Street Journal, bulletin of
US power, effused, "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving
peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history."

In January 1997, a state department official told journalists in a private
briefing that it was hoped Afghanistan would become an oil protectorate,
"like Saudi Arabia". It was pointed out to him that Saudi Arabia had no
democracy and persecuted women. "We can live with that," he said.

The American goal was now the realisation of a 60-year "dream" of building
a pipeline from the former Soviet Caspian across Afghanistan to a
deep-water port. The Taliban were offered 15 cents for every 1,000 cubic
feet of gas that passed through Afghanistan. Although these were the
Clinton years, pushing the deal were the "oil and gas junta" that was soon
to dominate George W Bush's regime. They included three former members of
George Bush senior's cabinet, such as the present vice-president, Dick
Cheney, representing nine oil companies, and Condoleezza Rice, now
national security adviser, then a director of Chevron-Texaco with special
responsibility for Pakistan and Central Asia.

Peel the onion of this and you find Bush senior as a paid consultant of
the huge Carlyle Group, whose 164 companies specialise in oil and gas and
pipelines and weapons. His clients included a super-wealthy Saudi family,
the Bin Ladens. (Within days of the September 11 attacks, the Bin Laden
family was allowed to leave the US in high secrecy.)

The pipeline "dream" faded when two US embassies in east Africa were
bombed and al-Qaida was blamed and the connection with Afghanistan was
made. The usefulness of the Taliban was over; they had become an
embarrassment and expendable. In October 2001, the Americans bombed back
into power their old warlord friends, the "Northern Alliance". Today, with
Afghanistan "liberated", the pipeline is finally going ahead, watched over
by the US ambassador to Afghanistan, John J Maresca, formerly ofUnocal.

Since it overthrew the Taliban, the US has established 13 bases in the
nine former Soviet central Asian countries that are Afghanistan's
resource-rich neighbours. Across the world, there is now an American
military presence at the gateway to every major source of fossil fuel.
Lord Curzon would never recognise his great game.