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For his part, Obama continues to insist plaintively that he does see an eventual exit, at least an exit of sorts.
"The President has been also very clear from the beginning that we do not seek any permanent bases in Afghanistan -- that we don't seek to have a presence that any other country in the region would see as a threat," said Michele Flournoy, his Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, at a March 15 congressional hearing.
However, Flournoy also indicated that the U.S. plans to conduct what she described as "joint counter-terrorism operations" with the Afghan military after 2014.
Natural Gas Reserves
With all this confusion over whether and why the United States is staying in Afghanistan, one might look at other possible explanations for the determination to stick around. Think for a minute about Central Asia's vast energy potential.
One of Afghanistan's neighbors to the northwest, Turkmenistan, has some of the world's largest fields of natural gas. A respected Western oil advisory firm has identified one such field in southeast Turkmenistan as the world's fifth largest gas field, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And that interest in Central Asia's energy potential predated the 9/11 attacks.
For instance, in 1997, representatives of the Taliban government were wined and dined in Texas amid hopes that the huge U.S. energy company UNOCAL could conclude a multi-billion dollar contract to build a natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph.
The route for delivering the gas would come out of Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and eventually to the warm-water Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean (nullifying the need to transit Russia or the Strait of Hormuz).
In 1998, Dick Cheney, then CEO of pipeline services vendor Halliburton, gushed:
"I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. "The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is."
Apparently, the good Lord wanted Halliburton to grab a Caspian Sea drilling contract, and so it did. And after a CIA briefing on the natural resource treasures up for grabs, President Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was quoted as saying that shaping that region's policies was "one of the most exciting things we can do."
A decade later, at a RAND conference on Afghanistan in October 2009, I asked Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, why no one speaks or writes about the status of what came to be known as the TAPI (for Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India) pipeline project, and what was its status. The question was unwelcome; the answer curt: The pipeline could not be built with widespread violence reigning in Afghanistan.
I was cut short before I could ask if that was the reason U.S. troops remained there, to bring that violence under control.
Last December, the leaders of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India met in Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat, to sign an agreement to move forward with the project. But its proposed route crosses Afghanistan's Kandahar province, the scene of fierce fighting, as well as some of Pakistan's unruly tribal areas.
Concern about security for the pipeline and its workers casts doubt on the project's near-term feasibility. But dreams of trillion-dollar energy reserves die harder than an energizer bunny.
The project also continues to have well-placed advocates. During the 1990s, Khalilzad did consulting work for a firm conducting risk analysis for UNOCAL (now part of Chevron) for the proposed $2-billion pipeline project.
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