What might the wars in Georgia and Afghanistan have in common?

Back in August, Russia invaded the neighboring country of Georgia in support of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were seeking independence from Georgia. Today on truthout, I found this article by Michael T. Klare, which offered the best analysis of that situation that I've seen so far.

As I read Klare's essay, however, I had the eerie feeling that I'd read this same analysis years ago, right after the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001. It's not just that both the war in Georgia and the war in Afghanistan are both wars over oil. Both appear to have connections to efforts by the US and Western oil companies to transport the oil and gas of a particular isolated region to Western markets.

Klare argues that the Georgian war was part of a larger geopolitical conflict between the United States and Russia over the considerable oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian Sea Region. The major oil producers in this area are the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, major Western oil companies such as BP, Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil rushed into the region in an effort to exploit these resources.

They had one major obstacle to overcome. The Caspian Sea is landlocked, and all the existing oil and gas pipelines passed through Russia. According to Klare:

What, then, to do? Looking at the Caspian chessboard in the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton conceived the striking notion of converting the newly independent, energy-poor Republic of Georgia into an "energy corridor" for the export of Caspian basin oil and gas to the West, thereby bypassing Russia altogether. An initial, "early-oil" pipeline was built to carry petroleum from newly-developed fields in Azerbaijan's sector of the Caspian Sea to Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast, where it was loaded onto tankers for delivery to international markets. This would be followed by a far more audacious scheme: the construction of the 1,000-mile BTC pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia and then on to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Again, the idea was to exclude Russia - which had, in the intervening years, been transformed into a struggling, increasingly impoverished former superpower - from the Caspian Sea energy rush.

Klare adds that Clinton understood there were serious risks involved in this course of action. For one thing, Clinton's "energy corridor" passed through several conflict zones, including South Ossetia and Abkhazia. To help counteract this risk, Clinton provided substantial military and economic aid to Georgia.

Klare reports that when Vladimir Putin became Russian president at the end of 1999, he made the decision to reassert Russia's control over the region's energy resources. He re-nationalized many of the oil companies that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had privatized. In December 2007, Putin also signed an agreement with the leaders of Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan "to supply 20 billion cubic meters of gas per year" through a new pipeline that would connect with Russia's existing supply system to Europe.

Meanwhile, Putin moved to undermine international confidence in Georgia as a reliable future corridor for energy delivery. This became a strategic priority for Moscow because the European Union announced plans to build a $10 billion natural-gas pipeline from the Caspian, dubbed "Nabucco" after the opera by Verdi. It would run from Turkey to Austria, while linking up to an expanded South Caucasus gas pipeline that now extends from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Erzurum in Turkey. The Nabucco pipeline was intended as a dramatic move to reduce Europe's reliance on Russian natural gas - and so has enjoyed strong support from the Bush administration.

It is against this backdrop that the recent events in Georgia unfolded.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili apparently thought that his country's new importance to the US would allow him to recapture the two breakaway regions. Some elements of the Bush Administration may have encouraged him in this fantasy. Meanwhile, Putin may have encouraged rebel leaders in those areas to provoke the Georgians with border attacks. When the Georgians attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia on August 7th, they gave Putin

...what he long craved - a seemingly legitimate excuse to invade Georgia and demonstrate the complete vulnerability of Clinton's (and now Bush's) vaunted energy corridor. Today, the Georgian army is in shambles, the BTC and South Caucasus gas pipelines are within range of Russian firepower, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia have declared their independence, quickly receiving Russian recognition.

As the US prepared to invade Afghanistan in 2001, supposedly as retaliation for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC that September, I remembered progressive news sources reporting that the real motivation for the war had much to do with protecting the route for a proposed oil pipeline from Central Asia. A bit of searching the Common Dreams archive showed that my memory served me correctly--and that the pipeline was meant to transport oil from the Caspian basin.

Perhaps you are tempted to dismiss this as merely a conspiracy theory that was circulating along with many others at that time. But as recently as June, the Toronto Sun reported that

Afghanistan just signed a major deal to launch a long-planned, 1,680-km pipeline project expected to cost $8 billion. If completed, the Turkmenistan Afghanistan Pakistan India pipeline (TAPI) will export gas and later oil from the Caspian basin to Pakistan's coast where tankers will transport it to the West.

The Sun specifically ties this pipeline to the conduct of the US war in Afghanistan:

The 9/11 attacks, about which the Taliban knew nothing, supplied the pretext to invade Afghanistan. The initial U.S. operation had the legitimate objective of wiping out Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. But after its 300 members fled to Pakistan, the U.S. stayed on, built bases -- which just happened to be adjacent to the planned pipeline route -- and installed former Unocal "consultant" Hamid Karzai as leader.

Washington disguised its energy geopolitics by claiming the Afghan occupation was to fight "Islamic terrorism," liberate women, build schools and promote democracy. Ironically, the Soviets made exactly the same claims when they occupied Afghanistan from 1979-1989. The Iraq cover story was weapons of mass destruction and democracy.

Work will begin on the TAPI once Taliban forces are cleared from the pipeline route by U.S., Canadian and NATO forces. As American analyst Kevin Phillips writes, the U.S. military and its allies have become an "energy protection force."

Meanwhile, today the BBC reported that the US has offered $1 billion to the Georgians to help rebuild in the aftermath of the Russian attack.