THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN is a sham. The Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks but took no action, using the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an excuse to topple the Taliban regime and legitimize the takeover of Afghanistan. Well-placed government insiders, knowing of the impending attacks, made fortunes by betting on a huge fall in airline stocks. The war is not about terrorism, but about America’s desire to control energy in Central Asia and promote corporate plans to plunder the region’s reserves. The chief US concern all along has been to help Unocal Corporation build a pipeline across Afghanistan, which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.

By now all of this is obvious — that is, it’s obvious if you get your information from the Internet or from certain far-right or left-wing circles, where conspiracy theories about the war run rampant. A classic example was a story by Patrick Martin on Rense.com, a Web site whose great popularity suggests that much of the US population is terminally paranoid. "The American media has conducted a systematic cover-up of the real economic and strategic interests that underlie the war against Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the war emerged overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11," Martin wrote.

These sorts of conspiracy theories, especially the ones concerning oil supplies, aren’t just circulating in fringe circles; they’ve found their way into mainstream outlets, too. In England, John Pilger of the New Statesman wrote that President George W. Bush’s "concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin ... [which could] meet America’s voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it." Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, a former French intelligence analyst and a journalist, respectively, who co-authored the international bestseller Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth (Editions Denoël, 2001), claim that the Clinton administration and then the Bush team heavily pressured the Taliban to allow the Unocal pipeline. When the Taliban refused, the administration threatened it with military reprisals, which may in turn have led to the September 11 strikes.

On this side of the Atlantic, a March 18 op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by Salim Muwakkil (PIPELINE POLITICS TAINT U.S. WAR) treated such theories with measured respect and said it was no wonder that so many foreigners were skeptical about the Bush administration’s expressed war aims. Even the New York Times dipped its toes in the conspiracy waters, in a story last December that discussed the Caspian’s potential role as an energy supplier and the possibility that the Unocal pipeline would now be revived.

What’s common to all these theories, from the most delusional to the more sophisticated, is that their authors display little understanding of the Caspian or of energy markets. Many of the heavy-breathing conspiracy theorists don’t even realize that the major Unocal pipeline would have moved natural gas, not oil. Like Pilger, some also seem to believe that the Caspian’s energy reserves are going to be shipped to America, presumably to warm our homes and fuel our SUVs, when in fact most of the oil and gas from the Caspian is destined for markets in Russia, Europe, and Central Asia itself.

THE CASPIAN region is home to huge energy resources — by some estimates, it may produce five percent of the world’s oil within a decade — but Afghanistan is almost entirely irrelevant to their exploitation. In fact, the country is today less likely to be a player in the Caspian sweepstakes than it was before the fall of the Taliban. "The idea of Afghanistan re-emerging as a transit corridor for Caspian oil and gas is not remotely realistic in today’s circumstances — even in a best-case scenario in which Afghanistan were to emerge from the present conflict with a vigorous, broadly based and stable government with strong international support," says Laurent Ruseckas, a Caspian expert at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Afghanistan itself has very small reserves of natural gas and virtually no oil. The country’s only importance, at least in theory, is that it could serve as a transit point for energy from neighboring countries.

Yet oddly enough, this isn’t the first time that conspiracy theorists have sought to portray Afghanistan as the energy linchpin of Western civilization. Back in 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when the Cold War was raging, the Carter administration and the press argued that the occupation had dramatically altered the world balance of power. To take but one example, Newsweek said at the time that control of Afghanistan had "put the Russians within 350 miles of the Arabian Sea, the oil lifeline of the West and Japan. Soviet warplanes based in Afghanistan could cut the lifeline at will."

This was pure rubbish. Seven years earlier, when detente was near its zenith, the Wall Street Journal ran a rare story on Afghanistan headlined, DO THE RUSSIANS COVET AFGHANISTAN? IF SO, IT’S HARD TO FIGURE WHY. Reporter Peter Kann, later the Journal’s chair and publisher, wrote that "great power strategists tend to think of Afghanistan as a kind of fulcrum upon which the world balance of power tips. But from close up, Afghanistan tends to look less like a fulcrum or a domino or a stepping-stone than like a vast expanse of desert waste with a few fly-ridden bazaars, a fair number of feuding tribes and a lot of miserably poor people."

That’s pretty much what Afghanistan looks like today, yet to the conspiracy theorists the country is every bit as important as Newsweek claimed two decades back. To understand the fallacy of their argument requires a bit of background on the Caspian and a trip back in time to the early 1990s, when the Caspian’s potential importance as a source of global energy was first recognized.

At that time, everyone recognized that Iran offered the cheapest and most practical transport route for the Caspian’s reserves. But the Clinton administration was obsessed with preventing that outcome, as it (like the current Bush team) sought to isolate the regime in Tehran. The United States also opposed plans to run oil and gas pipelines across Russian territory, fearing that Moscow would assume control of the region’s energy supplies.

One potential alternative, at least for gas, emerged in October of 1995 when Turkmenistan’s president, Saparmurat Niyazov, signed an agreement with Unocal to build a $3 billion pipeline. It was a significant deal because Turkmenistan has significant proven gas reserves of almost three trillion cubic meters. (Still, that’s small next to Russia, Iran, and Qatar, which have reserves of 48 trillion, 23 trillion, and 14 trillion cubic meters, respectively.)

The Unocal pipeline would have transported gas from the Dauletabad Field in Southeastern Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, and on to Multan in Central Pakistan, with a possible onward link to India. The Clinton administration backed the plan and in 1996, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphael traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to lobby for the pipeline.

Despite the official US support, many within the energy industry looked upon Unocal’s project as utterly ridiculous. Using Afghanistan as a pipeline route made sense only if one completely ignored the political risks. Pipelines are highly vulnerable installations; building and maintaining one requires a good deal of stability. Afghanistan was a country in complete chaos after nearly two decades of continuous warfare. The Taliban rolled into Kabul in September of 1996, several months after Raphael’s visit, and controlled most of the country, but dozens of warlords and factions — some backed by Iran, Russia, and other outside powers — continued to undermine the Taliban’s rule.

The Clinton administration and Unocal kept touting the pipeline, but the project never moved beyond the planning stages. In October of 1997, Ahmed Rashid — who later became known for his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press, 2000) — authored a paper on the Unocal project for the Petroleum Finance Company, a private energy-consulting firm. He wrote: "The future prospects of constructing the pipeline and mitigating the high risks involved depend almost entirely on relative stability in Afghanistan, which does not appear likely any time soon.... Although the Taliban say they will guarantee security for foreign construction workers, nobody can actually guarantee security at this time in a country like Afghanistan. Thus, winning the Taliban’s support or signing a contract with them would not be the end of the problems for any company, but just the beginning."

By the following year, the United States had largely dumped Unocal’s plan and had shifted its backing to a competing project. This one, called the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline, has greatly excited the conspiracy theorists as well, because Enron did the feasibility study and was closely involved with the planning. Thus it has been portrayed in some accounts as reflective of the United States’ long-standing need to control Afghanistan. This is a particularly stupid assertion because the Trans-Caspian pipeline’s route wouldn’t even have crossed Afghanistan. Rather, it would have moved Turkmen gas across Azerbaijan and Georgia into Turkey. Furthermore, though Enron had been expected to lead a consortium of energy companies behind the project, a joint venture between Amoco, Bechtel, and GE capital was selected in the end.

After Al Qaeda bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Clinton administration focused its Afghanistan policy almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden, not on winning support for a pipeline project that by then was effectively dead. The Trans-Caspian project that Enron was involved in, meanwhile, died just as it was picking up steam. The reason was that Azerbaijan discovered large gas fields of its own. The Azeri government was no longer interested in furnishing a transit route for Turkmen gas to Turkey, where Azerbaijan could now could sell its own reserves.

The conspiracy theorist’s notion that Afghanistan provides a critical throughway for Caspian oil is even more dubious. In the late 1990s, after its gas project had fallen apart, Unocal developed plans to run an oil pipeline from Central Asian sources, primarily Kazakhstan, via Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean port of Gwadar. The pipeline would have moved only a modest amount of oil, estimated at about 700,000 barrels per day.

The oil project never received any serious backing from the United States. The Clinton administration lobbied hard for a competing British Petroleum plan in which Afghanistan had no role. Instead, BP called for constructing a pipeline between Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey, a NATO ally.