Turkmenistan Oil Prize

There are 30 billion barrels of oil remaining under Saudi sands. There are 50 billion barrels of oil sitting under Turkmenistan’s soil. Its most realistic chance for a pipeline to deliver that oil to the West? Through Afghanistan.

Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid laid it all out bluntly 18 months ago. The US wants to run a pipeline from Turkmenistan to a war,-water port.

To accomplish this it could use either Iran or Afghanistan, both rivals for control of opposing, loony fringes of Islamic fundamentalism. But Iran is a former enemy, and too close to Iraq for comfort. So the US made a choice to use Pakistan to promote the Taliban as an expedient way to unify Afghanistan and deliver the social control necessary to run the pipeline safely.

It isn’t just the current oilmen running the White House that have bought into this current manifestation of the centuries-old Great Game. Under the Clinton White House, as Rashid points out, as recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a-gallon gas.

I always knew those ugly SUVs were going to cause more problems than just culling their owners through opccasional rollovers. But then this article says all this above stuff is just crap. Who to believe?