by Mark Curtis
The Telegraph also reported in October 2001 that ‘when peace and a stable government eventually comes to Kabul, US oil companies will be looking closely at Afghanistan because it offers the shortest route to the Gulf for Central Asia’s vast quantities of untapped oil and gas’. Western companies have invested $30 billion in developing oil and gas fields in Central Asia. Washington is currently proposing a $3 billion pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. But the Telegraph notes that ‘US companies could build a similar pipeline from central Asia through Afghanistan to Karachi at half the cost, if the next Afghan government can guarantee its security. Russia fears that is exactly what the Americans want.’48
There is major British interest in Central Asian oil, too, with government and companies recently exceedingly active in securing a slice of this very large cake.
The British government estimates there are fifty billion barrels of oil reserves in the Caspian. It expects the Caspian to be producing around three million barrels a day by 2010, which would meet around 15 per cent of projected additional world oil demand. There are also proven gas reserves of up to 9.2 trillion cubic metres, ranking third in the world after the Middle East and Russia. BP notes that ‘the hydrocarbon reserves contained in the Caspian Sea are probably on a par with those in the UK North Sea and thus of significant global interest’.
British foreign policy in the region is basically dictated by oil company interests in securing major contracts from the local governments, many of whom are repressive with abysmal human rights records. The Foreign Office has gradually increased its presence in this key region, saying ‘our posts actively promote and protect the interests of British companies already working in the region and lobby the authorities to improve the environment for business and foreign investment’. British companies have secured a major stake in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, mainly as part of international consortia. BP notes that the government ‘have been most helpful to BP (Amoco) not only in securing commercial positions in these countries, but also in managing the path forward’.49
The Monument Oil and Gas company notes that ‘BP-Amoco’s predominant position in Azerbaijan or Monument’s position in Turkmenistan would have been impossible to achieve without active and committed support from successive governments.’ Especially helpful were visits by Foreign Office ministers John Battle and Derek Fatchett to Azerbaijan, which ‘led to the signing of a major exploration contract in No. 10 Downing Street, where the Prime Minister played the major role’.50
Foreign Office minister Keith Vaz has noted that British interests are not just in winning contracts in individual countries ‘but there is more than that. The South Caucasus is the gateway to Central Asia. A revival of the old Silk Road trading route would be of benefit to all of Europe and Asia.’51
Again, the pipeline route is critical. One oil company representative told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee that there are undoubtedly large oil and gas reserves but that ‘the constraining factor … is the pipeline routes and the ability to export … The key issue over the next decade is going to be generating efficient oil and gas evacuation routes and having Foreign Office help in doing that’. Washington is lobbying for pipeline routes based on its strategic interests, mainly to counter Russia and Iran. London, by contrast, says that the decisions on the pipelines are for companies, based solely on commercial considerations.52
These are clearly major interests which, together with the demonstration of US power and the need to control Saudi Arabia, provide more plausible reasons for bombing Afghanistan than notions of defending civilisation. Yet these issues continue to receive little attention, the media generally preferring to play along with the Official Story of our wondrous benevolence.
3
EXPLAINING THE ‘WAR AGAINST TERRORISM’
The sources of instability that affect our fundamental interests … are often driven more by how we, our allies and partners choose to react to particular crises, rather than the crises themselves.
House of Commons Defence Committee
The new cold war
PRESENTING DARK THREATS to our way of life has long been a key way for elites to secure their goals. Stephen Dorril notes in his huge, comprehensive history of MI6 that ‘the modern intelligence service’s prime purpose appears to be to generate fears’. We might say the same of the world’s leading governments more generally. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld describes the current official fear: ‘the single greatest threat to peace and freedom in our time is terrorism’. He continues:
Today, the world does face a new threat to peace and freedom. It’s not an Adolf Hitler, fascism. It’s not communism. But it’s one that can be as destructive as any – or all, for that matter – and one that has implications for the future that are every bit as momentous as those that we have faced in the past.1
The previous major official threat was from the Soviet Union during the cold war. While this threat was real in some cases, it was hugely exaggerated, and in some instances deliberately fabricated. The ‘Soviet threat’ served four main purposes: it provided a pretext for Western military intervention and covert action abroad as ‘defence’ against Soviet expansion; it allowed repressive governments to be supported on the excuse that they were bulwarks against communism; it allowed clampdowns on domestic dissent to take place by referring to infiltration by the enemy; and it allowed huge profits to be made by military industry, which produced the weapons demanded by a permanent arms race.
The Soviets used the Western threat for similar purposes. They justified their grip on Eastern Europe by saying they were protecting those countries from Western invasion and locked up political opponents by saying they were imperialist agents.
In reality, as many of the chapters in this book show, the real threat to the US and Britain in the postwar period came not from communism or the Soviet Union but from nationalist forces within developing countries. The principal ‘threat’ they posed was to Western control over their economic resources – the fear that a country’s resources might be primarily used to benefit its people. Nationalist movements and governments were invariably labelled as communist to justify action against them. All US interventions until the invasion of Panama in 1989, and many British interventions, were justified as defending the free world from Soviet expansion.
Many features of the ‘war against terrorism’ mirror those of the cold war. Principally, it provides a convenient pretext for a new phase of US global intervention, backed by Britain. Almost anyone can be labelled a sponsor of terrorism and subject to US attack or other forms of US involvement in the country’s internal affairs. As in the cold war, the US has divided the world into those who are with it, and those against, offering rewards and punishments as appropriate. ‘Against such an enemy’ as global terrorism, President Bush says, ‘there can be no neutrality’.2
The message to Western publics is, as in the cold war, unless we do what our leaders say, we will all be incinerated: unless we confront global terrorism ‘the gathering storm of terrorism will unleash its fury on us all’, Donald Rumsfeld explains. ‘We now know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us’, Bush has told Americans. Blair tells the British public the same thing, as the number of threat stories increases. As noted in chapter 1, some are apparent fabrications such as the story of an imminent gas attack on the London underground. These stories of impending doom are intended to frighten the public into giving our leaders a free hand in doing whatever it takes to destroy the ruthless enemy that seeks to kill us.3
The new war also gives repressive regimes (especially those allied to the West) a major pretext for clamping down on opposition groups and general dissent. It is being used by Western states themselves to counter their own domestic enemies, like asylum seekers, and to curb civil liberties. Also, like the cold war, the new war has promising consequences for arms manufacturers who will gain from increases in military spending.
> The new war conveniently serves a specific purpose for the presidency of George Bush. Floundering before, with a more than shaky domestic mandate, the Bush administration seized on the new threat to pursue its conservative domestic and foreign agenda. Soon after the September 11th attacks the Wall Street Journal called on Bush to take advantage quickly of the ‘unique political climate’ to ‘assert his leadership not just on security and foreign policy but across the board’. As the political scientist Thorstein Veblen wrote nearly a century ago:
Sensational appeals to patriotic pride and animosity made by victories and defeats … [help] direct the popular interest to other, nobler institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of other creature comforts. Warlike and patriotic preoccupations fortify the barbarian virtues of subordination and prescriptive authority.4
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been no obvious global threat against which the US can be seen to be ‘defending’ itself. US planners have done their best to deem a few rogue regimes, a few drug traffickers and, before Al Qaida, a few terrorists, as new threats. But these threats have been isolated, more easily containable, and have lacked a global presence that can be presented as a systematic threat to the West as a whole. But Al Qaida, like the Russian hordes, can surely be presented as threatening everything we hold dear, which is precisely its utility. This threat is enhanced by having an Islamic cause since, in much Western discourse, Islam and terrorism are virtually interchangeable anyway.
The list of target countries in the new war is global. ‘Afghanistan is just the beginning’, Bush roared to an audience of soldiers in November 2001. US Vice President Richard Cheney said at the same time that forty to fifty countries could be targeted for diplomatic, financial or military action. Secretary of State Colin Powell says that ‘every nation is threatened by terrorism’. Cuba was accused by senior State Department official John Bolton of developing biological weapons, in propaganda so obvious as to be comical. He said Cuba should understand that states that fail to renounce terror and weapons of mass destruction ‘can expect to become our target’. Iran also fits the bill; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that Iran is ‘sheltering Al Qaida fighters who fled Afghanistan’.5
Richard Perle, a key Bush foreign policy advisor, has said that:
This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there … If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.6
The message we are meant to receive is that the ‘war against terrorism’ is worldwide and long-lasting. ‘The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration’, the White House’s National Security Strategy states. Bush warns that ‘they may strike anywhere, and therefore we have got to be prepared to use our military and all the other assets at our disposal to keep the peace’.
NATO Secretary General, George Robertson, adds, helpfully: ‘there is a common enemy out there’. This is while cosying up to a Russian president guilty of more terror (in Chechnya) than Al Qaida could dream of.7
Following the Afghanistan war the US can present the terrorist threat as having increased, since Al Qaida was dispersed rather than destroyed. One US official has said that ‘what we’re seeing now is a radical international jihad that will be a potent force for many years to come’. This is quite possibly true and was entirely predictable. Thus the predictable outcome of the immoral and devastating onslaught in Afghanistan is providing the pretext for the US to continue the same policies elsewhere.8 It is obvious who benefits from this cycle and who therefore has interests in wheeling its spokes.
Indeed, the US National Security Strategy conveniently states that ‘today’s security environment’ is ‘more complex and dangerous’ than it was during the cold war. Interestingly, it also states that in the cold war ‘we faced a generally status quo, risk-averse adversary’. This was not exactly the official line at the time, as Western publics were bludgeoned into fearing Soviet control of the world as they paid out billions to maintain ‘defences’ against the Russian hordes. Now that this propaganda is no longer useful, it can be discarded and the reality emerges, while propagandists move on to current official enemies.9
The war against terrorism is real in the sense that some groups do pose challenges to US power. And the threat of terrorism is certainly real to its civilian victims, not just in the US but in Bali, Mombasa and elsewhere as well. But the US ‘response’ to Al Qaida terrorism (not the correct word, given that US, and British, policy has helped to create it) is certainly not the moral one leaders claim, nor aimed principally at eradicating terrorism. It is also obvious that the states leading the new war are among the leading sponsors of terrorism, if we include the state-sponsored variety, which is far more widespread and destructive. This applies not only to the US and Britain – supporters of many of the world’s worst regimes – but also Saudi Arabia, traditionally the great financier of extreme Islamic groups.
My view is that it may not work – the new threat may be easily seen through or just not materialise enough over the longer term to be of use. On the other hand, the same could have been said of the ‘Soviet threat’. The absence of a major Soviet role in many areas where the US intervened (such as Nicaragua or Vietnam) was so obvious that it was truly amazing the US was able to deploy it as a pretext. Clearly, the role of the propaganda system was critical then and will be in the future.
The new interventionism
The US has already used the ‘war against terrorism’ to secure a major new presence in oil-rich Central Asia. In December 2001 the US Assistant Secretary of State, Elizabeth Jones, said that ‘when the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region.’ Since September 11th the US has established new bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan and Georgia and now has thirteen bases in nine countries ringing Afghanistan and the Gulf.10 The US Army War College study, noted in the previous chapter, urging the US to secure a military presence in Central Asia to control oil supplies and counter Russia, has effectively been put into place.
A Kazakh government source has been quoted as saying that ‘it is clear that the continuing war in Afghanistan is no more than a veil for the US to establish political dominance in the region. The war on terrorism is only a pretext for extending influence over our energy resources’.11
US military advisers and forces have been sent to the Philippines, Nepal, Georgia, Djibouti (for use in Yemen), and Sudan (for action in Somalia). By mid 2002, the US had 1,600 troops on a six-month deployment in the Philippines, to train troops in countering the separatist Muslim armed group, Abu Sayyaf. This deployment reintroduces a US military presence in a country from which US forces were expelled a decade ago (it also violates the Philippine constitution, which requires a treaty to be signed to establish foreign military bases). Ever since the Philippines senate refused to extend the US bases agreement in 1991, the US has been seeking to re-establish a permanent presence.12
US advisers have also been sent to Nepal to help the government defeat an insurgency by Maoist guerillas who declared a ‘people’s war’ in 1996. Britain is also providing helicopters, communications equipment and training in setting up a ‘military intelligence support group’ with the Nepalese army. British aid to Nepal has in effect been given covertly, bypassing parliamentary scrutiny and using an obscure government ‘global conflict prevention’ fund.
Britain is aiding Nepal during a massive increase in violence by the army, with widespread torture, ‘disappearances’, the suspension of civil rights, the censorship of newspapers and arrests of hundreds of people without trial. Most of the killings have been perpetrated by those now being aided by Britain. Nepal government figures show that from 1996 to 2002, 3,290 rebels were killed by government forces while 1,360 polic
e and army personnel and civilians were killed by the rebels.13 The root of the insurgency lies in the failure of successive Nepalese governments to alleviate the grinding poverty of the country’s rural population and to introduce land reforms long demanded by the poor. These factors explain the Maoists’ popular support in many rural areas.
The British government argues that the Nepal government’s struggle should be seen as part of the wider ‘war against terrorism’; at the same time, Britain admits there is no evidence linking the Maoists to Al Qaida or any other external terrorist group.14 As in the cold war, no evidence is required to support elite assertions, the mere fact of saying them is sufficient. ‘Al Qaida’ is now blamed for every terror and outrage, even if no evidence is presented of links to the group. It is clear that in Anglo-American official-speak, ‘Al Qaida’ is becoming a semantic construction designating any group that violently opposes elite interests.
The ‘war against terrorism’ is providing the cover for a new phase in US and British military intervention overseas. US leaders now say that ‘our best defence is a good offence’ and speak of ‘destroying the threat before it reaches our borders’. In this, ‘we will not hesitate to act alone … by acting pre-emptively against such terrorists’. The US will therefore continue to develop ‘long-range precision strike capabilities and transformed manoeuvre and expeditionary forces’. US strategy is ‘to project military power over long distances’ with forces ‘capable of insertion far from traditional ports and air bases’. US forces need to be able ‘to impose the will of the United States and its coalition partners on any adversaries’, including by ‘occupation of foreign territory until US strategic objectives are met’. The US ‘targeted killings’ of six ‘Al Qaida suspects’ in Yemen by an unmanned CIA plane and a proposed new NATO rapid response force that would operate without the permission of the host nation, are part of the same new, imperial strategy.15
