Pipelineistan Goes Af-Pak

[Peter Presland]

Cracking stuff from one of my favourite Geo-Political commentators, Pepe Escobar. Nothing really new in it but it does a superb job of integrating and explaning the seething cauldron of disparate interests that comprise the rapidly developing 'Great Game' in Central and South Asia. It's too long to post here in full but is published in Toms Dispatches and Asia Times and well worth the time to read and digest - IMHO.

Here's a brief snippet:

The Real Afghan War

In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question -- why Afghanistan matters -- is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.

And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.

Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of U.S. foreign policy since President Richard Nixon's era in the early 1970s has been to split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused on this since the U.S. Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. That act clearly identified American geo-strategic interests from the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy corridor.

And to think, we virtually NEVER hear the words 'Gas', 'Oil' or 'pipeline' from Western politicians and the MSM in the context of NATO/UK/US involvements and wars in the region. It is a forceful illustration of just how crass the world view of the bulk of US/Western populations is that they continue to lap up the patriotic jingoistic 'War on Terror' crap that passes for serious analysis of what is actually going on.