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Liquid War

 

Welcome to Pipelineistan

 

By Pepe Escobar

 

March 25, 2009 -- -- What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of

Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new,

polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

 

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the Pentagon has

slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a

global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is

the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put

another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the

whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

 

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been

hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the

$4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its

acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is

chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)

 

I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk

Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my

own do-it-yourself routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the

adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased

Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the

immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

 

In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to Astana, in the

middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled when I expressed an

overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's

nothing there.") Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy

giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow - which digitally details every single pipeline

in Eurasia - or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran,

with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering

Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same

sentence is still a source of endless amusement for me.

 

Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled.

Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone

wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a

long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the

maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what

else muscles into the headlines this week.

 

Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin

Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that "war on terror", whatever name it

goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical

game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

 

Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?

 

Calling Dr Zbig In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew

Brzezinski - realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor

to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the US on its modern energy wars - laid

out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy". Later, his

master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr No's congregated at Bill

Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the

acronym since its website and its followers went down).

 

For Dr Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia - from, that is, thinking big - it all

boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible

partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so

politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian

security system".

 

By now, Dr Zbig - among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama - must

have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been

slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.

 

Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an

inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control

Pipelineistan - and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's

unlikely to be Washington - will have the upper hand in whatever is to come, and

there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a "long war", that can change that.

 

Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key vectors in

the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over Pipelineistan. These range from the

increasing scarcity (and difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the

painfully slow development of energy alternatives". Though you may not have

noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in

the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the relentless

competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian

theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.

 

In these early skirmishes of the 21st century, China reacted swiftly indeed. Even

before the attacks of September 11, 2001, its leaders were formulating a response to

what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of

Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its

leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's

known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be

around for a while.

 

Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans, the energy-

rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union - Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and

Tajikistan - which the Bill Clinton administration and then the new George W Bush

administration, run by those former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The

organization was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation

society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of

security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.

 

Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that country's leaders, too,

would prove no slouches when it came to the New Great Game. It needs at least

$200 billion in foreign investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves

- and thus sell much more to the West than US-imposed sanctions now allow.

 

No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on

that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as former

vice president Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neo-conservative chamberlains and

comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and

Moscow, such a US attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would

be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian

integration that the SCO is coming to represent.

 

Global BRIC-a-brac

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian, Afghan, and

Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy

version of the old Silk Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans

plus Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang province, its Far West.

 

The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and

Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control

and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction.

This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO) to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China

expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are

inevitable.

 

Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and he

will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a historically unique alliance of five

non-Western civilizations - Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist - and,

because of that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in

Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway global

strategists like Dr Zbig and president George H W Bush's national security advisor

Brent Scowcroft.

 

According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the 21st century will be

significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries - for those of you by now

collecting New Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China

- plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Add in a unified

South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus.

On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high-octane dream.

 

The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.

 

Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand into the

distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it was: a developing energy

war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas reserves of what Americans would

soon be calling the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North

Africa to the Chinese border.

 

No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing the energy

buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built, the countries they

would cross, would determine much in the world to come. And this was where the

empire of US military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met

Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).

 

AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity registered

in the US, is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the Trans-Balkan", slated to be

finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either

Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a

US-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by president Bill Clinton's

energy secretary Bill Richardson and later by Cheney.

 

Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy corridor

that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a series of now

independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the

Balkans (from thence onto Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy

plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to

a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by

tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline

would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.

 

As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington gained

from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest overseas base

the US had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown &

Root would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland

near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo.

 

Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those

stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the

Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising

surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region

(considered in the neo-con-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the

"Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").

 

How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion

of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and

encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines),

followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the

recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as

straightforward wars for Pipelineistan?

 

Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and

Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's

humanitarian imperialism to Bush's "global war on terror". Blowback, as then Russian

President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable - but that's another

magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another time.

 

Rainy night in Georgia

If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to start

with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war with

Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has

become a genuine arc of instability - in part because of a continuing obsession with

cutting Iran out of the energy flow.

 

It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my book

Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into

Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant", less than four years after Azerbaijan became

independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the

Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the

Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

 

Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no

less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian

enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia),

South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and

Turkish Kurdistan.

 

>From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline,

running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for,

relatively speaking, next to nothing - and it would have had the added advantage of

bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern

Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to

Europe.

 

The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that

decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its

2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank

oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off

the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia

wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians made a

mockery of Zbig's world.

 

For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the US version of

Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near

abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now,

however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again

allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham

Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly

surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at

least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.

 

Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as well.

(We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around

offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of

previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same

deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the

Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black

Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.

 

Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC -

its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe - means the

pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.

 

In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan oil

field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with

reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to

which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013.

This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would

like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump

Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.

 

In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan will

decide whether the BTC - once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western escape

route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil - lives or dies.

 

Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's

a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow.

Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those US bases

across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and

do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and

fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.

 

And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from our tour of

Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from Terminator). Think of this

as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn

out to be the most important question on the planet.

 

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times Online and an analyst for

the Real News. This article draws from his new book, Obama Does Globalistan. He is

also the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War

(Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge.

Pepe may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

 

(Copyright 2009 Pepe Escobar.)

 

 

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