HOUSTON - The Taliban
must have had a ball in this Texas city when they came
to visit the control tower of Planet Oil in the late
1990s to negotiate the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP). One
can imagine Mullah Omar's finest, in full black-turbaned
regalia, at the Houston Galleria - amid all those blond,
dermatologically sublime trophy wives credit-carding
their way to the Valhalla of conspicuous consumption at
Saks, Macy's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. Not to mention all those steak
houses! And all those sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) -
not only Kandahar-friendly Toyota Land Cruisers but
Durangos, Silverados, Pajeros, Discoveries and even
BMWs!
Of course this was ages before the
cluster-bombing of the Taliban back to Jurassic Park
became the secret casus belli for the "war on
terra" after September 11, 2001. And it was before those
gas-guzzling SUVs had to deal seriously with soaring oil
prices, or at least not to the heights we are seeing
now. On Monday a barrel of US light crude hit US$41.65,
the highest price since the New York Mercantile Exchange
launched its crude-oil contract in 1983.
Between
the Taliban taking over Kabul in September 1996 and the
Group of Eight (G-8) summit in the summer of 2001,
neither the administration of president Bill Clinton nor
that of his successor, President George W Bush, ever
designated Afghanistan as a terrorist or even a rogue
state: the Taliban were wined and dined as long as they
played the Pipelineistan game in Central Asia (see Pipelineistan revisited,
December 24-25, 2003). Unocal - which had put the
CentGas Pipeline Consortium in place - hired Henry
Kissinger as a consultant. Unocal also hired two very
well-connected Afghans: Zalmay Khalilzad, a Pashtun with
a PhD from the University of Chicago and former Paul
Wolfowitz aide, and Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from
Kandahar. In 1996, both Khalilzad and Karzai were
ultra-pro-Taliban. Karzai is now Afghanistan's US-backed
ruler. Khalilzad also made splendid career moves:
Bush-appointed National Security Council member (working
under Condoleezza Rice), "special envoy" to Afghanistan
(only nine days after the Karzai government was sworn
in), and current US ambassador.
The Taliban
didn't want to play ball: every time, they wanted more
money and more investments for the roads and the
infrastructure of their ravaged country - until an
exasperated Washington decided to finish them off. This
was discussed in Geneva in May 2001, at the G8 summit in
Genoa in July 2001, and finally at a Berlin hotel, also
that July, a meeting involving US, Russian, German and
Pakistani officials. Asia Times Online later learned in
Islamabad that the US plan was to strike against the
Taliban from bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan before
October 2001. Then the terrorist attacks of September 11
happened, providing Washington the perfect excuse to go
it alone.
There's still no oil flowing through
Afghanistan - not yet. With the price of oil now at its
highest level since 1983, the US population is getting
restless. The so-called US summer driving season - from
April to September - will have gasoline averaging $1.94
a US gallon (about 51 cents a liter; it is already $2.30
a gallon, or more than 60 cents a liter, and up in
California). A stop at Continental Airlines headquarters
in downtown Houston reveals that the airline has
increased its freight rates from 15 cents to 20 cents
per kilogram.
But for corporate Houston - where
virtually everyone's mood is inextricably related to the
price of a barrel - expensive oil is good business. Seth
Kleinman, an analyst for PFC Energy Group, goes straight
to the point: "These are market fundamentals. Demand is
incredibly strong and supply does not follow. Americans
love their SUVs. Car makers are offering 0 percent APR
[above prime rate] financing. And refining capacity also
does not follow demand. No new refinery was built in the
US in the last 20 years."
Whatever happens,
there is a consensus all over Houston: there will be no
new oil shock, at least for the foreseeable future -
only what financial circles are calling "Chinese
torture" - prices slowly going up.
What if
they invaded Texas? Houston is not a down-tempo
chill-out groove kind of place; it's more like ZZ Top
playing on a turbo Cadillac. But Houston - as people in
cooler-than-thou Austin are fond of saying - is
desperately trying to be hip. The severe glass-and-steel
towers of downtown are being sweetened by water gardens
on Main Street. The spectacular collapse of Enron in
December 2001 voided two downtown towers, and there are
plenty of second-hand Porsches for sale or for rent.
Enron - in essence a giant casino - was involved in
everything from oil, gas and electricity to timber,
water, communications and the Internet, with a turnover
of more than $100 billion. But Enron executives were
sort of pardoned by the city because they're considered
to be the modern version of 19th-century wildcatters.
With Halliburton the story is more complicated.
Halliburton is making a killing of some $9 billion in
contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil industry and to service
US troops. Halliburton's stock has already risen 11
percent this year. But it is not being forgiven. The
United for Peace and Justice coalition is calling for a
mass protest on Wednesday against war profiteering and
crony capitalism outside Halliburton's annual
shareholder meeting.
The oil capital of the
world is transfixed by Iraq. Referring to the beheading
of Nick Berg, John Nugent says: "The abuse of captives
at Abu Ghraib, while unjustified, is a poor excuse for
murder." John Mundy says, "We should bring all our
troops home and recognize that we cannot negotiate with
fanatics. We cannot pacify or buy them off with good
works." But Anna Miller says, "We did not find weapons
of mass destruction or al-Qaeda in Iraq. However, we did
find the terrorists, and they are us."
Support
for Bush is far from monolithic. "Troops Yes Bush No",
reads a bumper sticker on a Jaguar. KPFT 90.1 FM, an
excellent community radio, insists on "giving a voice to
the voiceless" - and they come from everywhere in this
multicultural city of 5 million: India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, black musicians, the Reverend Robert
Muhamad, defenders of South Dakota Indians. The
Christmas Coup Comedy group produces an outstanding mix
with snippets of Bush press conferences and booming
metallic beats ("Bring Them On").
At a Brazilian
steak house in the steak-house Valhalla of Westheimer
Avenue, among the ballet of gauchos serving prime cuts
on sticks, the gloves slowly are off. "War is good for
business," says a red-meat fan, especially with the
barrel at $41.65. "And since it's not going down, this
is good for reviving oil production in the Gulf of
Mexico." This means more wealth for Houston. Iraq
reconstruction is a more problematic affair. Halliburton
is making billions, but how long will it last? "What if
this Muqtada [al-Sadr] guy steals the elections?"
"By God, they should be so lucky to be occupied,
we're doing them a great favor." This may seem to be a
consensus, like "We can't make those Arabs happy. And we
can't rule in the Middle East either." Everyone agrees
that "similar things go on in our prisons ... Our prison
population exploded because of the war on drugs, a third
generation of failure ... There's a sheriff in Arizona
who ordered pink underwear for people in jail."
But some Texans are somewhat startled when they
learn that the British Empire, via Lord Curzon 80 years
ago, wanted to create "an Arab facade veiled by
constitutional fictions" in Iraq and the Middle East.
They also start thinking when they are reminded
that the last time America was occupied was in the early
19th century; as for Britain, it was during the Roman
Empire. This leads to a thoughtful conclusion: "That's
right. If someone invaded Texas, we would do the same
thing."
Big Oil and bigger
military The people at the Petroleum Intelligence
Group in Houston confirm it, as well as the Don't Mess
With Oil elite at the Petroleum Club (housed since 1963
on the top two floors of the Exxon Tower, only 1,500
selected members, regal lunches with $50 lobsters and
bottles of sublime Margaux only for members): Big Oil is
not exactly fond of this war and its aftermath -
especially with news like this week's bombing of a
pipeline near Basra, instantly cutting 25 percent of
Iraq's exports. What the oil majors were saying more
than a year ago, before the war, has become a reality:
Iraq is terribly dangerous. Ergo, bad for business. In
terse Texas oilspeak, this is the message: Bush's
priorities were never the oil business's priorities. And
the elite is really worried about what the neo-cons are
up to next.
What do the intellectuals of the
conservative establishment have to say about this? On
the sprawling, extremely wealthy campus of Rice
University, the James Baker III Institute for Public
Policy regally sits as a sumptuous neo-Byzantine
spectacle - hall of fake Greek columns, round table fit
for royalty, priceless Persians, and of course a gallery
of photos of the former secretary of state smiling
alongside every player and his neighbor during the Cold
War.
The director of the institute is ambassador
Edward Djerejian, a former official of the
administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan, George H W
Bush and Bill Clinton, and allegedly one of the best
American specialists on the Middle East. But his
secretary says his schedule is very hectic, so "he has
decided to decline the interview due to time
constraints". A Rice University PhD now living in Austin
has a different take: "The last thing these people want
now in the middle of this mess is to talk to a
journalist they don't know about American foreign policy
in Iraq and the Middle East." It's also a pity not to
hear the hectic Djerejian's take on how his boss -
senior partner of the Houston and Washington law firm
Baker & Botts - masterminded the scheme to get the
Supreme Court to appoint George W Bush president in
2001. Baker & Botts, by the way, keeps a very
substantial office in Baku, Azerbaijan, a key node of
Pipelineistan. Yes, it is always about oil.
It's
raining Texas cats and dogs, so detailed research at
Rice University may yield some enlightenment. In January
2001, George W Bush created the National Energy Policy
Development Group (NEPDG), directed by Vice President
Dick Cheney. When they published the so-called Cheney
Report, one thing was clear: the priority for this
administration was never the "war on terra", but
America's dependence on energy sources. The Cheney
Report was not strategic analysis. But it was published
during the Enron scandal - with Enron executives working
as NEPDG members. Question: What were they really up to?
Last July, the Department of Commerce was forced
by the Supreme Court to unveil the documents used by the
Cheney Energy Task Force. There are maps of oilfields in
Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as well
as charts detailing which foreign companies closed deals
with Saddam Hussein for oil exploitation in Iraq. Among
other things, these documents prove that long before
September 11, 2001, regime change in Iraq was the order
of the day.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson,
energy secretary for the last two years of the Clinton
administration and now widely tipped to be Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry's running mate, has a
starring role in all this. In February 2000, Richardson
went on a tour of all member states of the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) except Iraq,
Iran and Libya. He discovered that none of these
countries had excess production capacity. Conclusion: an
energy crisis, sooner or later, would be inevitable.
Matt Simmons, a consultant for the Council on Foreign
Relations, learned about this by e-mail and later became
a consultant to the Bush administration.
The
eighth chapter of the Cheney Report, titled
"Strengthening Global Alliances", says it's imperative
for the United States to get rid of strategic, political
and economic obstacles in its quest to ensure the extra
7.5 million barrels of oil a day it will need by 2020.
This is the equivalent of the current total consumption
of India and China put together. As most of the
countries that are among these "obstacles" are
politically and socially unstable, this means that
secure supplies to the US imply the presence of US
troops. The Cheney Report stresses the growing US - as
well as Asian and Western European - dependence of
Middle East oil. And as the solution for the energy
problem, it proposes a military solution. This is the
meaning of General Tommy Franks saying on the record
that "we will be in Afghanistan for years", and the
meaning of the 14 US military bases to be built in Iraq.
At the time, the Cheney Energy Task Force also
had to refer to the United Nations sanctions imposed on
Iraq. Lifting the sanctions on Iraq would mean the
go-ahead for contracts frozen by the sanctions - most
with Russian and European companies and not with US
companies, since Saddam was not in business with the US.
So war was the only option to get the big prize - the
second-largest oil reserves in the world, which come as
well with very low production costs.
It's
possible to extract a major conclusion from the Cheney
Report. The White House says that the terrorists want to
destroy the American way of life. But what if the whole
thing is upside down? To preserve an American way of
life that guzzles - and wastes - tremendous amounts of
energy, Washington is forced to go military all the way,
under the pretext of the "war on terra". And the
process, on top of it, feeds on itself. Who is the
largest world consumer of energy? It's the US Army.
Houston, one of the world capitals of oil, red
meat and frenetic consumption, misses its Taliban. But
no more Taliban in Texas does not mean that Texas does
not need the Taliban. In line with the Cheney Report and
with oil ever more expensive, now more than ever there's
need for the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP), which would
bring oil and gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistani ports
and then to the United States. Hamid Karzai cannot
maintain order even in Kabul. Fickle Washington may
change its mind - again - and issue a "Houston, we got a
(Taliban) problem". Then sooner or later those dashing,
black-turbaned Pashtuns will be seen parking their
brand-new SUVs at the Galleria.
(Copyright 2004
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
to mention all those steak
houses! And all those sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) -
not only Kandahar-friendly Toyota Land Cruisers but
Durangos, Silverados, Pajeros, Discoveries and even
BMWs! 
