Big powers and the great energy game in Central Asia
BY MATEIN KHALID
11 May 2006
A CENTURY ago, the British Empire and Tsarist Russia used spies, gold and proxy armies to control the emirate of Afghanistan in the fabled "Great Game" of the Raj. With the collapse of the USSR, Afghanistan and Central Asia are now new epicentre of incendiary ethnic wars, great power intrigues and despotic warlords. The Great Game is now about gas fields and oil pipelines, not just warm water ports and imperial diplomatic treaties.
China, Russia, the US, Turkey, Iran, India and Pakistan and the agents of the world’s most powerful oil and gas superpowers are now mere pawns on the chessboard of Central Asian geopolitics. With an estimated 200 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Central Asia has the biggest fossil fuel reserves outside the Arab world, the new battlefield for the oil wars. Centuries ago, Zoroastrian priests prayed to the "holy fire", the gas-fed flames that arose from the soil on the Caspian Sea.
The priesthood of Big Oil now scrambles for its own holy prize, oil and gas reserves in a world where low reserve replacement ratios mean financial death on Wall Street.
The US overtures to Central Asian hard asset dictators are clearly designed to neutralise the Russian Gazprom’s chokehold on European gas imports. George Bush welcomes Ilham, son of the former Azerbaijani member of the Soviet Politburo Haider Aliyev, who succeeded his father as President. Dick Cheney will deliver an identical message to Kazakhstan. The nightmare scenario for the White House and increasingly the Pentagon is an alliance between Russia and Iran, who own half the world’s gas reserves. Iran, finding its gas pipeline access to India and Europe blocked by the US, is increasingly cooperating with the Kremlin to find substitute markets in the Caucasus. The Central Asian gas satrapies are taking advantage of the bidding wars between Russia, China, India and the West over their black gold and blue vapour.
The Turkmens have signed huge gas deals in China and the Kazakhs have doubled oil pipeline capacity from the elephant Kashagar field to Russia despite Washington’s preference for a Georgian route to the EU. In fact, even as the US opposes Gazprom’s deals in Central Asia, it is doing its best to buy LNG and win equity stakes in the huge Sthokman gas field in the Barents Sea, the last great gasfield in the Russian Arctic. As in the Gulf, the Pacific Rim and West Africa, oil has led to conflicts and even war between states in Central Asia. In June 2001, Azerbaijan and Iran almost went to war when a BP Amoco exploration boat ventured into the Southern Caspian Sea to test drill for oil when Iranian warplanes and Revolutionary Guard gunboats appeared. The five Caspian Sea littoral states could well see their competing territorial claims ignite in future cassus belli.
Oil politics and international relations are linked in Central Asia. The US acquiesced in regime change in Georgia when the corrupt government of Eduard Shevardnadze was replaced by the reformer Mikhail Saakashvili. Georgia’s President made the fatal mistake of allowing Russian oil and gas companies to buy strategic energy assets and Washington needed to remind Moscow that the Georgian "rose revolution" would also secure American control over its pipelines.
Just as the US and the Soviet Union competed during the Cold War via proxy armies on the battlefields of Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, so Washington bankrolled the Georgian government and Moscow the Ajarian, Abkhazian and South Ossetian rebels. As in Iraq, Algeria and Indonesia, oil wealth and realpolitik meant civil war in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhistan.
Terrorism in Central Asian has direct linkages with the oil states of the Middle East. Petrodollars from the Gulf have funded secessionist movements from Georgia to Chechnya. The West ignored Uzbek President Karimov’s brutalities as long as the Pentagon used his air bases during the attack on the Taleban in Afghanistan. Oil and gas have only spawned despotic regimes in Central Asia, as elsewhere in the Third World.
Turkmenistan, for instance, is a neo-Stalinist nightmare. Its President is a megalomaniac ex Soviet apparatchik who has promoted a ghastly personality cult whose models are vintage Chairman Mao and Comrade Kim Il Sung. Turkmenbashi, the self styled father of the Turkmen people, echoes the classic boast of Louis XIV that l’etat ,c’ est moi or I am the state. He is courted by Russia and the West since his thuggish, totalitarian regime happens to own some of the most valuable gas fields in Central Asia.
Stalin’s ghost haunts the chancelleries of Central Asia and its multiple ethnic conflicts. Oil and the Afghan war have forced the US to embrace its despots and warlords. As US interests collide with those of the Kremlin, China and Iran, the oil and gas Great Game in Central Asia will only end in tears.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker
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