State's Support Of The Taliban example essay topic

Prior to September 11th many Americans did not know where the country of Afghanistan was or the significance of the now demolished Taliban regime that was ruling it. Ironically Afghanistan, a mountainous country located in the heart of Central Asia, has been a main focus of the United States government since the Soviet invasion. Ever since then, the United States has been funding fundamentalism in the region, either through Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, in order to keep it under control for future United States exploitation. Due to it's strategic positioning for transportation of oil, Afghanistan, mainly through the use of the Taliban, has been one of the many victims of United State's foreign policy. The Soviet invasion was the United State's first interference in Afghanistan's affairs. In order to stop the communist expansion through the region, it developed the Afghan Mujaheddin (as resistance), funded and administered by the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Government, in the name of Jihad, or holy-war. (web) The United States also wanted to keep Afghanistan from going under the control of the Soviets in order to have access to the land for future purposes.

After the war, however, the United States left Afghanistan and the damages behind. Included in these damages were the group of people we now know as the Taliban, a group of deracinated fanatics bred in Pakistan. (web) The Taliban consisted of Pakistani and Afghan children left over from the Soviet invasion that were trained in religious schools, or 'madressas', in Pakistan. Acclaimed Pakistani historian and novelist Tariq Ali explains the United State's role in the creation of the Taliban. It has to be said that the United States and Saudi Arabia were fully involved in the funding and financing of these schools. I mean, the United States used Saudi as a conduit to do it. (web) Contrary to popular belief, the Taliban are not true Afghans that were born within the culture, they are merely a group of young boys that were raised militaristic ally, with a strong emphasis on seventh century Islam that is ten times more constrained than the Saudi version. (web) Another Pakistani journalist captures the Taliban's outlook vividly. These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the 1980's- men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remember their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recounted legends and stories from Afghan history.

These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours, nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in messianic, puritan Islam was the only prop they could hold onto which gave their lives some meaning. (Rashid, 2000, p. 106) Afghanistan was recognized for it's strategic positioning near the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan, the sources of ten percent of the worlds oil and gas reserves, and the United States wanted to tap into these. (web) The Caspian is the centre of the last great oil rush of this century, laps across a huge mine, liquid gold. Some 200 billion bbl., or ten percent of the earth's potential oil reserves, which cost at today's prices up to US$4 trillion. Turkmenistan has ranked the fourth largest natural gas reserve in the world. (web) For gas exporters, the prices rise as the pipeline is lengthened, and the shortest way to get the gas and oil from the Caspian region is through Afghanistan. (web) Afghanistan, however, was not stable enough for the building of a pipeline, and that's why the project was postponed until the mid-nineties, when the Pakistani and United States governments decided to throw in the Taliban in hopes for political stability in the region.

(Personal communication, February 8, 2002) In 1994, the United States State Department and Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence agency sought to install a stable regime in Afghanistan to enhance the prospects for Western oil pipelines. They financed, armed and trained the Taliban in its civil war against the Northern Alliance. (web) This following quote gives a more in- depth illustration of how the United States gave support to the Taliban and some advantages of it. For much of the 1990's the United States supported the Taliban's rise to power, both by encouraging the involvement of US oil companies, and by implicitly tolerating Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two of it's key regional allies, in their direct financial and military support for the Taliban. The Taliban, which is committed to a particularly primitive version of Islam, had the added advantage for the US of being deeply hostile to Shia Muslims in neighbouring Iran. (web) As early as 1995, California- based Unocal proposed the construction of an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan, south through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Arabian Sea. ( web) Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan agreed in 1997 to build a large Central Asian Gas pipeline through the less mountainous southern parts of Afghanistan to Pakistan, and then possibly on to the growing market of India. The Central Asian Gas Pipeline Consortium, or Centgas, was made up of Unocal (US, 47% share), Delta Oil (Saudi Arabia, 15% share), Government of Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan, 7% share), Ito chu Oil Exploration (Japan, 6.5% share), Indonesia Petroleum [INDEX] (Japan, 6.5%), Hyundai Engineering and Construction (5%), and the Crescent Group (Pakistan, 3.5%). (web) Exactly how much the Centgas consortium agreed to pay the Taliban for transit fees is unknown, but Unocal's competitor, Argentinean- based Brid as, reportedly offered them $1 billion in transit fees. (web) This following quote explains how and why the deals were temporarily put on hold. In 1997, Centgas got the gas pipeline contract, but by the time it was ready to commence work, the political situation in Afghanistan that had looked promising in US eyes in the mid-1990's had deteriorated.

Civil war continued, the Taliban's cultural extremism and hostility to women had exploded in the world media, and Afghanistan had become a major terrorist base. In August 1998, the US attacked bin Laden's Afghanistan camps, and four months later, Unocal pulled out of Centgas. The combination of instability and pressure from the US government and attacks from shareholders and women's groups in the US was too much. (web) The United States soon found that the Taliban were not as reliable as they thought. There were many more obstacles to overcome now that the Taliban were in the media, shocking the world with the gruesome oppressions brought on by their regime. United States Representative Dana Rohrabacher said regarding the United State's support of the Taliban: I am making the claim that there is and has been a covert policy by this administration to support the Taliban movement's control of Afghanistan... This amoral or immoral policy is based on the assumption that the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan...

I believe the administration has maintained this covert goal and kept the Congress in the dark about its policy of supporting the Taliban, the most anti-Western, anti-female, and anti-human rights regime in the world. It doesn't take a genius to understand that this policy would outrage the American people, especially America's women. (web) From this quote we can see that the United States has been hiding intelligence about their policy towards Afghanistan even from their own Congress. Even though the Centgas proposal is said to have been dropped, the series of meetings held between United States, Pakistani, and Taliban officials after 1998, indicates the project was never off the table. (web) After Bush's accession to the presidency, various Taliban envoys were received at the State Department, CIA, and National Security council. The CIA, which appears, more than ever, to be a virtual extended family of the Bush oil interests, facilitated a renewed approach to the Taliban. (web) Ahmed Rashid states in Taliban the peculiar link between the American people have with the Taliban regime that the likely do not even know about. As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a-gallon gas.

(Rashid, 2000, p. 175) September 11th has caused a new turn in the United State's approach to the pipelines. The Bush administration took it's opportunity to wage war against the Taliban, and gain access to the land. (web) The groundwork for the current U.S. military actions in Afghanistan was being built up for several years. What comes into focus is that the September 11 the terrorist attacks have provided a qualitatively new opportunity for the U.S. acting particularly on behalf of giant oil companies, to permanently entrench its military in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, and the transcaucusus where there are vast oil reserves- the second largest in the world. (web) Conveniently enough, the now interim Prime-Minister, Hamid Karzai, is a former Unocal executive, Vice-President Dick Cheney was, until the end of last year, president of Halliburton, a company that provides services for the oil industry. United States National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was, for the past decade, manager for Chevron, one of the largest refiners and marketers of petroleum products in the United States. (web) The United States, has for the past two decades, manipulated forces such as the Mujaheddin and the Taliban in order to gain control over oil routes going through Afghanistan. Their primary goal has always been to gain access to oil that will ensure their way of life for decades to come. This, however, comes at the cost of an entire country, and the lives of many.

Driven from their homes, the people of Afghanistan have been victims of outside interference mainly due to their countries strategic positioning in Central Asia. Although the future of Afghanistan is uncertain, one can only hope that some regime will come into power to stabilize Afghanistan, not for the purposes of building oil routes, but to return Afghanistan to what it once was, a country with a government representative of the history and culture, that's main focus is not the transport of oil.