portage, can you imagine what it was like to try and negotiate a contract with the Taliban?
Rashid reported that an Argentinean company, Bridas, "actually began to negotiate a contract
with the Taliban. It took weeks of painstaking work through the summer for three Bridas executives
to negotiate the 150-page document with 12 Taliban mullahs, who had no technical experts
amongst them apart from an engineering graduate who had never
practiced engineering.
The Taliban had no oil and gas experts and few
who spoke adequate English, so the contract was translated into Dari.
'We are going through it line by line so that nobody can accuse us of
trying to dupe the Taliban. We will get the same contract approved by
the opposition groups so it will be an all-Afghan agreement,' a senior
Bridas agent told me. Unocal had declined to negotiate a contract until
There was a recognized government in Kabul.
P170-171
The story has many twists and turns.
It took Rashid:
"seven months of traveling, over 100 interviews and total
Immersion in the literature of the oil business - of which I knew
Nothing-to eventually write the cover story for The Far Eastern
Economic Review in which appeared in April 1997."
P164
Earlier in the book Rashid points out that:
"The scramble for oil and influence by the big powers in the Caspian
has been linked to the Middle East in the 1920s. But Central Asia
today is an even larger complex quagmire of competing interests. Big powers such as Russia,
China and the USA, the neighbors Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey, the Central Asian states
themselves and the most powerful players of all, the oil companies, compete in what
I called in a 1997seminal magazine article, 'The New Company Great Game'.
The name seemed to stick and was taken up by governments, experts and the oil companies."
p. 145
The above are excerpts from the book, The above is an excerpt from the book:
Taliban Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
by Ahmed Rashid, published in the United States by Yale
University Press. Copyright 2000 by Ahmed Rashid. |
