Intervention Magazine, December 7, 2003
by Lawrence McNamee
In the 1980s I worked for a semi-retired Texas businessman. His
education reflected the values and discipline of an earlier America.
At age 73, Al McGehee could still recite Rudyard Kipling’s
long poem “Gunga Din” from memory. This unique ability
may seem irrelevant in the computerized, globalized, post-9/11
reality that most of us live in today, but in many parts of the
world the geopolitical clock is running backwards. Conditions
of the late nineteenth century have returned and are effecting
foreign policy in Central Asia. This being the case,the value
of Kipling’s literary works, the lessons of British Imperialism,
and even the merits of the earlier American education system deserve
fresh examination in the new century. Kipling’s novel Kim
introduced the phrase “The Great Game of Empire,”
which referred to the military and diplomatic conflict over India
between the British Colonial and Czarist Russian Empires of the
late Victorian era. German journalist, Lutz Kleveman, illuminates
the current-day practice of the Great Game as a geopolitical term
of art, by reviewing its contemporary application to the political
and economic aspirations of the United States, the new Russia,
China, and Iran toward the petroleum resources of Afghanistan
and the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia
The Great Game today is about access to the region’s substantial
and largely underdeveloped reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
The former Soviet Republics of the Caucasus region are also players
in this story. Before the United States occupied Iraq and before
Osama bin-Laden became a household dirty word, American foreign
policy favored an economic plan to build an oil pipeline from
post-Soviet Azerbaijan, through post-Soviet Georgia, to an Eastern
Mediterranean port in Turkey. This pipeline, if built, might also
transport oil from other friendly former Soviet Republics in Central
Asia. The neighboring Russian Federal Republic, People’s
Republic of China, and Islamic Republic of Iran have not been
consulted in the formulation of this plan. All three nations have
since expressed muted hostility at American involvement in the
region. The pipeline’s purpose would be to reduce or eliminate
American/Western dependence on oil produced by the Arab states
in the Persian Gulf. Most of the Caucasian and Central Asian nations
do not have a history of hostility toward Israel and none of them
are, or have been, members of OPEC. Both conditions are concentric
to current American foreign policy.
U.S. support for Israel’s continued existence in the Mideast
remains a mainstay of American foreign policy, but an energy policy
linked to finding a reliable source of reasonably cheap fossil
fuel is relatively new. OPEC’s boycott of the sale of oil
to the United States after the 1972 Yom Kippur War has made filling
the gas tanks of American cars at agreeable prices a goal of American
foreign policy and an achievement which any political party in
the U.S. wanting to successfully run a presidential candidate
would want to take credit for. Our current Chief Executive can
offer his impression of Woodrow Wilson in preaching the expansion
of American-style democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere
all he wants to, but Lutz Kleveman’s interviews with Afghan,
Russian, Uzbek, and other regional leaders indicate that something
else is the primary motivation for American presence in the region.
Such people believe that U.S.involvement in Afghanistan is neither
about promoting democracy or stopping Al Queda. The Americans
are believed to be in Central Asia for oil and, with respect to
Afghanistan, the right of way for an oil pipeline. The United
States’ supposed “democratic reconstruction”
of the national government of Afghanistan appears shallow in Kleveman’s
reporting. Local warlords lack the systematic brutality of the
Taliban, but remain very much in charge of their regions. With
one group of Islamic fundamentalist thugs gone, another group
of political muscle men now seem to be in charge. These local
bosses refer to Afghanistan’s President Karzai as the “Mayor
of Kabul.”
East of Kabul, many of the Taliban and Al Queda fighters that
our forces battled in the caves of the Hindu Kush are now welcomed
and glorified in neighboring Pakistan. Much of Pakistan along
the Afghan border is not controlled by Pervez Musharraf’s
government in Islamabad. Pakistan’s Khyber Agency is in
much the same situation as was Northern Mexico in the early twentieth
century. Just as the national government in Mexico City was unable
to offer the United States the head of Pancho Villa on a platter
in 1916, Islamabad does not have the necessary power in the frontier
region to offer up Osama bin-Laden to the American justice system.
Elsewhere in Central Asia, the prospects for pro-American ideas
and institutions are shown as not particularly bright. On the
economic front, visions of a new American source of petrodollars
range in the author’s estimation from hard-choice deals
to improbable fantasies in this part of the world.
It is generally thought that our current foreign policy is guided
by our successes and mistakes from the Cold War. The New Great
Game’s presentation of the situation in Central Asia suggests
to the reader that we are fighting a transnational force of enemy
religious fanatics in the same way we fought ideological enemy
nations in the 1950s and 1960s. Kleveman is not particularly anti-American.
He has seen enough of conflicts in the non-developed world to
be a realist on the subject of this region’s present and
likely future. The author is knowledgeable about the international
petroleum industry without being allied with it or adversarial
to it. He mentions current developments in Iraq without constantly
connecting them in the reader’s mind with similar, earlier
ones in Afghanistan. The exception to this being that both nations
might be key to the United States developing oil resources outside
of the Gulf States. While lessening the increasingly risky American
dependence on nations like Saudi Arabia might be a good thing,
forming new relationships with Central Asian strong-man regimes
is shown to be a less-than-satisfactory alternative. Also, the
U.S.-backed plan to pipe Baku oil through Georgia to Turkey is
viewed by Kleveman as equally risky, given the smoldering ethnic
conflicts in the Caucasus region. Finally, the region’s
external “players” in the Great Game are many and
formidable. The new Russia sees the United States as a geopolitical
rival. China sees us as an economic competitor. Iran fears they
are already targeted as America’s next target for “regime
change.” Each of the former Soviet Republics have their
own agendas and intrigues to advance their own governments’
selfish interests. A question strongly implied for the American
reader is, “is this a neighborhood we really want to move
into?”
Central Asian and Caucasian oil resources seem to present exciting
opportunities to realign U.S.foreign/energy policies away from
oil dependence upon the Persian Gulf. In reality, drilling Central
Asia’s oil patch may prove as frustrating as accessing the
elusive “China market.” If the price of doing business
in the region casts the United States in the role of Kipling’s
British Empire, with respect to Russia, China, and Iran, it just
might not be worth it. In Afghanistan and much of Central Asia
the social structure is more tribal than political. This results
in the sort of strong-man regime seen in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Willingness to work with such governments makes our call for greater
democracy in the Mideast and elsewhere fruitless at best and hypocritical
at worst. The price of playing the Great Game may be too high
for most
Americans. Still the deals continue to be made. Lutz Kleveman
closes the book with an ironic observation of some CNN footage
he was watching on TV. It showed the bombing of Baghdad interspersed
with commercials for SUVs and painkillers. Are these images symbolic
of America’s foreseeable future?
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