"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." - Dick Cheney speaking in 1998, current Vice-President and former chief executive of Halliburton, a company with major oil interests.
Whatever the
moral,
legal and
practical issues* of
American and
British military forces operating in their
Afghanistan campaign against the terrorist
Osama Bin Ladin, his
Al-Qaida network and/or the
Taliban government the subtext of the region’s geo-political significance cannot and should not be ignored.
As the above quote notes the vast oil and gas reserves of the Caspian basin are of immense importance in global power play over the next century – if based on the presumption that one of the relevant global players (principally the US, Russia, China or Iran) will soon be able to stake and efficiently exploit their interest in the region.
The reason the USA has a particular interest in a passive and friendly Afghanistan relates to the physical problem of how to export the fuel.
To transport all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics and diminish America’s long-term influence on the region.
To export it via Iran would turn a regime which the US has been relentlessly seeking to isolate into a major regional power in it’s own right.
Whereas attempting to deliver it via Chinese territory would create both the problems of trying to construct the world’s longest, most difficult and most expensive pipeline ever attempted in history – and the considerable of the assistance it would bring to a China striving relentlessly to rival the USA’s superpower status later in the 21st century, providing a regular, secure and plentiful supply of fuel to Chinese military planes, tanks and warships.
The only other exit for the fuel is via Afghanistan to Pakistan ports, and it’s the only exit the US has a chance of controlling. If a Afghanistan government friendly to US interests would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply", controlling supply, and to be the profitable middle-man in marketing via it’s major oil companies to the world.
*The author would like it to be noted that he casts no aspersions on the motives and actions of any government in writing this summary.
Update 15/04/02
US backed (chosen?) Interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan is Hamid Karzai - Previous job as consultant to major oil company Unocol for the planning of a Trans-Afghan Pipeline.
US Envoy to Karzai's Government is Zalmay Khalilzad - Also previously a consultant to Unocol, coincidentally, ahem, on the same Trans-Afghan pipeline.
Various deals have been signed since to ensure the piping of oil now flows solely through Afghanistan and Pakistan, closing the pipeline exit to the north of Afghanistan via Turkmenistan and other CIS countries. (Source: Ted Rall)