*************
The Independent (London)
January 10, 2002, Thursday
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 11
HEADLINE: CAMPAIGN AGAINST TERRORISM: NEW US ENVOY TO KABUL LOBBIED FOR
TALIBAN OIL RIGHTS
BYLINE: Kim Sengupta In Kabul And Andrew Gumbel US special envoy to
Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad arrives at Kabul airport with bodyguards
Reuters
THE UNITED STATES' new special envoy to Kabul once lobbied for the Taliban
and worked for an American oil company that sought concessions for pipelines
in Afghanistan.
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, has arrived in Kabul amid
much publicity. As the representative of the country that put the new
government in power, he has a highly influential position.
In one of his first press conferences, Mr Khalilzad condemned the Taliban as
sponsors of terrorism and vowed the US would continue the military campaign
until they and their allies in Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network are
eradicated. But in 1997, as a paid adviser to the oil multinational Unocal,
he took part in talks with Taliban officials regarding the possibility of
building highly lucrative gas and oil pipelines. He had drawn up a risk
analysis report for the project that would have exploited the natural
reserves of the region, estimated to be the world's second largest after the
Persian Gulf.
At the same time, he urged the Clinton administration to take a softer line
on the Taliban. By 1997 some of the regime's worst excesses had become
public and Mr bin Laden was ensconced in Afghanistan. That year, the
Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, described the Taliban's abuses of
human rights as "despicable".
But Mr Khalilzad defended them in The Washington Post. "The Taliban do not
practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practised by Iran," he wrote.
"We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance
and to promote international economic reconstruction. It is time for the
United States to re-engage."
Without such "re-engagement", it would not have been possible for Unocal to
pursue its goal to build a gas pipeline from the landlocked former Soviet
republic of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan, with a possible
extension to India.
Unocal had been involved in a commercial war for the pipeline concession
with the Argentinian company Bridas. As well as Mr Khalilzad - who had been
an undersecretary of defence under George Bush Snr and has worked as a
defence analyst for the Rand Corporation - Unocal hired a string of
high-profile names with connections to the region to fight its cause,
including Robert Oakley, the former US ambassador to Pakistan and later the
US special envoy to Somalia.
American policy towards Afghanistan was increasingly being criticised
because it seemed to be guided by oil and gas interests. That changed in
August 1998, when the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed and
Washington blamed Mr bin Laden for the attacks. Unocal concluded that its
pipeline was no longer tenable as long as the Taliban were in power.
At that point Mr Khalilzad, too, changed his tune. In a highly influential
article published in the Winter 2000 edition of The Washington Quarterly, an
academic journal, he laid out what were to become the founding principles of
the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan.
Engagement with the Taliban was no longer possible, he argued: indeed, the
sanctuary given to Mr bin Laden posed a grave threat to US interests at home
and abroad. Opposition to the Taliban should be orchestrated through both
the Northern Alliance and anti-Taliban Pashtun groups, with talks on a
successor regime channelled through the former king, Zahir Shah, in Rome.
Largely thanks to that article and the success of the war based on its
premises, Mr Khalilzad has become an influential adviser to President Bush.
His credibility relies to a large extent on his birth. He was born 50 years
ago in Mazar-i-Sharif and brought up in Kabul as part of Afghanistan's
Dari-speaking elite, before travelling to Lebanon and then to the US in the
1970s to complete his education in political science.
His many critics point out that he has been wrong as often as he has been
right - going back to the 1980s when, as a state department official in the
Reagan administration, he argued vociferously in favour of providing
surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weaponry to the very
mujahedin groups that later gave birth to the Taliban.
"If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been
sacked long ago," Anatol Lieven, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington, said.
Such criticisms, and the possible conflict of interest arising from Mr
Khalilzad's former role in Unocal, perhaps explains why he was appointed to
the National Security Council, a position that did not require confirmation
hearings in the Senate.
Even now, his oil contacts are bound to raise suspicions about both his
priorities and those of the Bush administration. At the NSC, Mr Khalilzad
worked for the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who had served
on the board of the Chevron Corporation as an expert on another central
Asian state with major oil reserves, Kazakhstan.
President Bush and Vice-president Dick Cheney have extensive backgrounds in
the oil business, too, and it will not be lost on any of them that central
Asia has almost 40 per cent of the world's gas reserves and 6 per cent of
its oil reserves.
In addition, Mr Khalilzad has links to the most hawkish wing of the
administration. In the 1980s, he worked on Afghanistan alongside Paul
Wolfowitz, now the Deputy Secretary of Defence and an ardent advocate of
military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq - a hardline view that has
also sometimes been voiced by Mr Khalilzhad.
***********
Knut Rognes
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 11-07-02 MET DST