Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2001

With the war in Afghanistan winding down and the chance of the Taliban waging sustained guerrilla warfare greatly diminished by the astounding capabilities of America's military, it's time to ask just where do we go from here.

That's not to say that everything's fine and dandy in Afghanistan now that the Taliban have been vanquished. Despite President Bush's wishes, the Northern Alliance has taken over in Kabul and other warlords have established themselves in other cities. And that's not good news.

None of these people are the sort you want running a nation – or, for that matter, anything else.

The Northern Alliance, according to the Toronto Sun's syndicated columnist Eric Margolis, far and away the best and most well-informed foreign correspondent around today, is "a proxy for Russia."

"Its two military leaders are Gen. Rashid Dostam, a brutal communist warlord who slaughtered 30,000 civilians in the 1990s, and Gen. Faheem, a senior officer of Khad, the former Afghan communist secret police, an arm of the Soviet KGB. Khad tortured and murdered thousands of Afghans."

The rest of the forces now vying for control in Afghanistan are no better. This is a nation of competing tribes, where the Afghans' favorite sport is killing and maiming each other.

Attempts to make these people behave themselves in a civilized manner are doomed to failure. And anyone rash enough to try had better keep in mind Kipling's advice to British troops going there in the 19th century that they "save the last bullet for yourselves."

Given that kind of situation, wouldn't it be a good idea to give this Stone Age society a ton of money to rebuild its shattered cities and then get the hell out of there?

Of course, but that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because of two things a half dozen major powers including the U.S. lust after: gas and oil, lots of it.

"U.S. influence and military presence in Afghanistan and the Central Asian states, not unlike that over the oil-rich Gulf states, would be a major strategic gain," V.R. Raghavan, a strategic analyst and former general in the Indian army, told the Asia Times last October.

He explained that the prospect of a Western military presence in a region extending from Turkey to Tajikistan could not have escaped strategists who were then planning the military campaign aimed at driving out the Taliban and changing the political order in Afghanistan.

What matters today is the prospect of laying of oil and gas pipelines to the untapped petroleum reserves of Central Asia, especially that ocean of oil under the Caspian Sea. In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in March 1999, the Heritage Foundation revealed that Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan together have 15 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

According to the Times, these same countries also have proven gas deposits totaling not less than 9 trillion cubic meters. Another study by the Institute for Afghan Studies placed the total worth of oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian republics at around $3 trillion at last year's prices.

But that's not all. Afghanistan can not only play a role in hosting pipelines connecting Central Asia to international markets, but itself has significant oil and gas deposits.

"During the Soviets' decade-long occupation of Afghanistan, Moscow estimated Afghanistan's proven and probable natural gas reserves at around five trillion cubic feet and production reached 275 million cubic feet per day in the mid-1970s," the Times reported.

"But sabotage by anti-Soviet mujahideen (freedom fighters) and by rival groups in the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 virtually closed down gas production and ended deals for the supply of gas to several European countries."

So it's obvious we're not about to cut and run. Nor is Russia or Britain or anybody else. And since nobody can allow Afghan's primitive warlords to mess up the game, we are going to once again get involved in nation building, something we vowed never again to do.

That means we'll be around there for a long time to come. We have to be, thanks to all those wonderful environmentalists who won't let us get free of our dependence on foreign oil by drilling in the frozen wastes of Alaska or under the offshore continental shelf.

So what's next? Well there are a lot of people who want to take on Saddam Hussein's personal satrapy, Iraq. Washington is full of people who can't wait until the bombs start falling on Baghdad, and they will probably get their way thanks to Saddam's inability to understand that we can easily wipe him and his regime off the face of the earth whenever we choose to do so.

He simply does everything he can to bring about a holocaust that will incinerate him. He will probably be accommodated.

There are those who want to do the same thing to Syria, Iran and Libya, but once we've obliterated Iraq, that probably won't be necessary. They'll cave and turn sweetly reasonable. So what we're talking about here is Pax Americana triumphant. Manifest destiny reborn, but now garbed in humanitarian robes. The new world order presided over by a beneficent Uncle Sam.

We've been told that Black Tuesday changed everything – that nothing will ever be the same again. I think that's true, and never more true than when it involves the world's future structure.

It would be useless to waste time thinking about a return to the old order of things if for no other reason than that there is an absolute need for a revamped international system that will allow the world's economy to grow and prosper with a minimum of bureaucratic hindrance.

That, however, does not mean that America must surrender any part of our national sovereignty to guarantee us our rightful share of the benefits of international commerce. Preserving that sovereignty will not be simple – there are too many would-be oligarchs in this nation who are wedded to the ideal of a new world order embracing the doctrines of Karl Marx.

That's the battle we'll be waging here at home, providing that al-Qaeda doesn't interfere and destroy our economy with something like nuclear weapons or biological warfare directed against us within our borders. If they do, all bets are off.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska.

He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.

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