Zalmay Khalilzad Maulavi Younus Khalis & Ronald Reagan

Zalmay Khalilzad Maulavi Younus Khalis & Ronald Reagan - Trans-Afghan pipeline woes - The US is also very much implicated in the resuscitation of the Trans-Afghan gas pipeline, TAP - despite the endless political mess in Afghanistan. Halliburton - after making a killing in Iraq - would be expected to be on board in Afghanistan. The Japanese-dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB) is also very much interested. Unocal still officially maintains that it has lost interest in the Trans-Afghan gas pipeline it abandoned in 1998. But it wouldn't say no to an oil pipeline following the same route. In a predictable move, the Bush administration appointed its pet Afghan, oil man Zalmay Khalilzad, as Washington's ambassador to Kabul. Khalilzad, born in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan but also pure University of Chicago right-wing material, has already worked with grand chess board master Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US national security advisor, and under Pentagon number two Paul Wolfowitz. It was Khalilzad - when he was a huge Taliban fan - who conducted the risk analysis for Unocal (Union Oil Company of California) for the infamous proposed $2 billion, 1,500 kilometer-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan,TAP, gas pipeline. While Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated keen interest in an Eurasian gas alliance, Turkmenistan's main concern is to free itself from dependence on the Center Trunkline which connects the whole Central Asian gas network to the Russian system. Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, for his part, needs money from gas transit, and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf needs to keep strategic ties with Afghanistan. Once again, this is Pipelineistan as power politics. But TAP may reveal itself to be a hugely impractical proposition - basically because Afghanistan remains a country at war. Nobody for the moment wants to invest in TAP. Niyazov, Turkmenistan's unpredictable president, even had to court Russian gas giant Gazprom, which showed no interest. To top it all, nobody trusts Niyazov. Gazprom calculated that importing Turkmen gas is cheaper than developing remote Arctic and Siberian fields. So it looks for the moment that Russia's gas OPEC may be emerging as the winner

Dec. 15, 1997 A Taliban delegation has visited Washington and was received by some State Department officials. The Talib delegation's meeting with U.S. Undersecretary of State for South Asia Karl Inderforth was arranged by the Unocal, which is eager to build a pipeline to pump gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghan territory. "We made our position clear, namely that the pipeline could be useful for Afghanistan's rehabilitation, but only if the situation was settled there by political means", a State Department official said on condition of anonymity. He stated that the Taliban representatives were told that they should form "a broadly-based government together with their rivals before the ambitious project to build an oil and gas pipeline is launched". According to Taliban assessments, only one pipeline could yield almost $ 300 mm for rehabilitating the war-ravaged Afghanistan. The Taliban delegation included Acting Minister for Mines and Industry Ahmed Jan, Acting Minister for Culture and Information Amir Muttaqi, Acting Minister for Planning Din Muhammad, and recently appointed Taliban Permanent Delegate on the United Nations Mujahid. A State Department official described the talks as "open and useful". He said that they also touched on the production of opium and open poppy on the Taliban-controlled territory, human rights, treatment of women, and on America's attitude to the projected pipeline. Asked whether there could be problems for the U.S. government if it backed the commercial investments into a country, which is ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, who, according to western standards, are oppressing women, the State Department official said that any real "political settlement" would resolve this problem. In the meantime, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the Talib government only a month ago as something quite disgusting due to its policy of oppressing women