Stuck in the Gulf

Could Central Asian oil, piped through a rebuilt Afghanistan, wean the West from the Mideast? Chances are slim.

By Damien Cave

Oct. 29, 2001 | Any war worth its salt deserves a nifty conspiracy theory, and the war on terrorism is no exception. Here's how it goes: the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan is not really aimed at toppling the Taliban and nabbing Osama bin Laden, it's about gaining access to Central Asian oil and natural gas. Just as in the Gulf War, American troops are fighting to keep gasoline prices low and factories humming, led by a commander-in-chief with intimate ties to the oil industry.

There are some clear differences between the war on terrorism and the Gulf War -- namely, the thousands of casualties the U.S. has already faced. But as the conspiracy theorists suggest, there's also little doubt that overthrowing the Taliban could be economically advantageous to the U.S. At least one U.S. oil company, Unocal, spent much of the 1990s striving to start work on a pipeline that would cross Afghanistan and connect Central Asia to Pakistan and India -- without having to pass through Iran. The continuing civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance made any such plans impossible to realize, but the possibility remains.

The Caspian Basin -- a region that includes Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Khirgistan -- does have largely untapped oil and gas reserves. If the U.S.-led coalition succeeded in stabilizing Afghanistan, new pipelines could finally be constructed. Access to Central Asian oil and gas might well decrease the Western world's dependence on the Middle East.

And it's that last possibility that has most longtime followers of the oil biz and Mideast politics intrigued. Never mind the conspiracy muttering -- anything that offers a chance of eliminating the chokehold that the Mideast has over the world's oil supplies demands serious attention. As Michael Klare, author of "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict," notes, the idea that the war in Afghanistan isn't just about terrorism, but also about securing a replacement for Persian Gulf oil "keeps circulating in the netherworld of opinion."

The stakes seem to be huge. A replacement for Persian Gulf oil would allow the U.S. to extricate itself from its intimate embrace of repressive regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia. It might even present the possibility that the seemingly inevitable showdown between the West and the Muslim world could be averted.

Unfortunately for conspiracy theorists and assorted dreamers, Central Asian oil is unlikely to be the "ace in the hole" freeing the West from its oil shackles. The role that Central Asia might play in the story of worldwide energy "has been substantially overestimated," says Klare. "It's not another Persian Gulf."

Even if ways were found to get oil and gas out of Central Asia -- a task that will be expensive and difficult -- the unhappy truth is that there just isn't enough fuel there to make a significant difference. The most wildly optimistic estimates, coming from U.S. government analysts, theorize that the region has only 200 billion barrels of oil, which means that Caspian oil supplies are decidedly second-tier -- far smaller than what's known to exist in Saudi Arabia alone and about as substantial as oil fields now being developed off the coast of Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. Natural gas deposits in the region are more substantial but still not enough to remove the need for Persian Gulf supplies.

Barring a radical shift in technology or worldwide demand, the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin will remain only marginal in importance for at least the next 20 years. And as long as oil-producing countries outside the Persian Gulf can't supply all the world's needs, Arab countries like Saudi Arabia -- the world's largest producer of oil -- will have the power to set the all-important price of oil on world markets. Which means that, barring the unlikely prospect of a direct Western takeover of Mideast oil fields -- or the even unlikelier prospect of a concerted American effort to curb its voracious hunger for fossil fuels -- the U.S. and its allies will still have to kowtow to Gulf countries, no matter how corrupt or repressive their rulers are.

"Even if the United States got 100 percent of the output from the Caspian over the next couple of decades -- about 7 to 10 million barrels per day -- it wouldn't be enough," says Daniel Butler, an energy analyst with the U.S. Department of Energy. "The Persian Gulf will still have a huge amount of leverage."

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