WHAT ABOUT TODAY? Given the friendly regime of Hamid Karzai now installed in Kabul, might Afghanistan come to emerge as a bustling thoroughfare for Caspian energy resources?

Don’t bet on it. Afghanistan never made much sense as a transit point for energy, and today less than ever. In the mid 1990s, when the Unocal project arose, Turkmenistan was desperate to find new export markets for its gas. Russia, which had traditionally bought almost all Turkmen gas, was in a prolonged post-communist recession, and its purchases had plummeted from 88 billion cubic meters in 1992 to about 15 billion cubic meters in 1996. Furthermore, Moscow was refusing to allow Turkmenistan to use its vast pipeline network to send gas to non-Russian customers — despite the fact that Pakistan and India faced gas shortages and were eager to buy from Turkmenistan. Hence there was at least a commercial logic to the Unocal proposal.

Today the situation has completely changed. In 2000 the Russian economy emerged from its deep slump, prompting the country to sign a special arrangement with Turkmenistan for gas imports. Since then, Turkmen exports to Russia have climbed steadily and now stand at around 31 billion cubic meters. As part of the deal, the Russians have become more generous in allowing Turkmen exporters to utilize their pipeline system.

At the same time, the customers that Unocal had foreseen for Turkmen gas have disappeared. Turkey has lined up sufficient future supplies from Russia and Azerbaijan, while Pakistan has discovered domestic supplies and no longer needs to import gas. That leaves only India, which has cheaper alternatives than buying Turkmen gas that’s been shipped across three countries. It’s also highly unlikely that India would buy gas from a pipeline that runs through its archenemy Pakistan — which in addition to collecting transit fees could cut the flow at any time.

A final obstacle to a Unocal-style pipeline is that Turkmen President Niyazov is an unstable megalomaniac. An old Communist Party hack, Niyazov has built a cult of personality that rivals Stalin’s. His portraits are ubiquitous in Turkmenistan, the country’s currency bears his image, and cities, towns and businesses have been renamed after him. In his spare time, Niyazov makes grandiose plans such as building an artificial lake in the middle of the desert, issues presidential decrees on issues such as the title of a women’s magazine, and erects monumental palaces. He has reportedly contacted embassies of Islamic countries and asked how they would react if he called himself a prophet. Niyazov’s madness, combined with his total control of the economy, has left few Western companies willing to invest in Turkmenistan, much less put up billions for a gas pipeline.

Brisard, co-author of Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, makes much of the fact that the leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan decided in late May to revive the old Unocal pipeline project. In an article he penned for Salon on June 5, Brisard wrote that this basically proved his thesis about the critical importance of the Unocal pipeline to American war policy, claiming that "[i]n the end ... the U.S. got its way."

Yet no major energy firm has expressed any interest in working with the three countries. Even Unocal has stated forthrightly that it has abandoned its old project and that its priorities have shifted outside of Central Asia. "The fact that Karzai, Niyazov, and the Pakistanis have agreed to build a pipeline is meaningless," says Robin Bhatty, an independent energy analyst whose focus is the Caspian region. "None of them have the money or skills to build the thing, and no international firm will be involved given the availability of already-built pipelines and alternative routes."

Ruseckas shares that opinion, saying that all the new opportunities for Turkmen and other Central Asian gas to move north — to and through Russia — have removed pressure that could have pushed the gas to South Asian markets via Afghanistan. "A revival of the old Unocal project is unlikely for at least a decade, and then it could become only one of many alternatives," he says. "The economics don’t make sense on the supply or the demand side."

The Trans-Afghan oil route of the mid 1990s is also dead in the water, and for virtually identical reasons. At the time, Kazakhstan had problems getting its oil to market. But in the past three years, Moscow has allowed Kazakh exporters to quadruple the flow of oil through Russia’s existing pipelines to about 300,000 barrels per day. Last year, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and others began operating the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which links the giant Tengiz Field in Western Kazakhstan to a new Russian port on the Black Sea. The consortium won’t reach its initial capacity of 600,000 barrels per day until about 2005, at which point it can more than double its capacity if necessary.

In other words, just as Turkmenistan has surplus export capacity for gas, Kazakhstan has surplus capacity to export oil. (That could change if the country’s undeveloped Kashagan Field turns out to be a blockbuster, but that development, if it occurs, is at least a decade away.) Meanwhile, several other Caspian-oil-pipeline projects are moving forward — most notably the old Baku-Ceyhan route favored by the United States — and they all bypass Afghanistan.

Market factors aside, an Afghan pipeline route remains highly unattractive for a number of reasons. Few people would bet on a long-term settlement to the fighting there, and if peace does take hold, it won’t be for a long time. Throwing a pipeline into the mix will only make matters worse. "When you talk about pipelines, you create an atmosphere of expectation of money," says Julia Nanay, a Caspian expert at the Petroleum Finance Company. "All the warlords are going to want a piece of the action."

CONTRARY TO the views of many hand-wringing conspiracy theorists, the Taliban regime never posed a threat to America’s position in the Caspian. The region’s oil reserves are mostly distant from Afghanistan, located in countries such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, where the threat of radical Islam is quite small. (The governments there sometimes claim otherwise as a means of justifying their oppressive rule.)

In some ways, the fall of the Taliban has been bad for American business interests. Nanay points out that the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan and were trying to establish a strong central government. Today the warlords are back, and the Karzai regime controls a far smaller slice of the country. "If bin Laden hadn’t come along, we would have dealt with the Taliban," Nanay says. "Now there’s a lot more insecurity and lawlessness." She adds that neither Caspian energy reserves nor control of Afghanistan were goals of the war, saying, "We didn’t care about Afghanistan, we cared about bin Laden."

During a January 2002 visit to Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that US companies should now consider investing in Afghanistan. "This country needs everything," he told reporters. "It needs a banking system. It needs a health-care system. It needs a sanitation system. It needs a phone system. It needs road construction. Everything you can imagine." To aid the reconstruction effort, the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain, and other donors have pledged $1.3 billion.

But the war in Afghanistan is unlikely to bring on a wave of corporate profiteering by American firms. Much of the international aid will go toward the repatriation and resettlement of refugees, counternarcotics efforts, and the rehabilitation of the agricultural sector, and the country is simply too poor, undeveloped, and chaotic to become an attractive site for private investment. Thus far the Overseas Private Investment Corporation has issued a paltry $50 million line of credit to support American investment in Afghanistan. A January 2002 Associated Press story quoted New York business analyst Jeffrey Rogers as saying he couldn’t imagine any major corporation making a significant investment in Afghanistan. "It’s just not the kind of risk anyone is prepared to take right now," he said. "I can’t imagine they will take a risk like that for some time."

There are plenty of grounds on which to criticize the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, from its alliance with despots in Asia to its threats to attack a host of other states to its crackdown on civil liberties at home. But anyone dumb enough to believe that the war is all about oil and that Afghanistan holds the key to America’s energy security should go back and read Peter Kann.

This article was originally published in the August 12 issue of the American Prospect (volume 13, issue 14). Ken Silverstein can be reached at the American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston.