Turkmen gas. Turkmenistan managed to stay afloat economically—just barely—by selling cotton and its limited output of oil.
TAP AND CAOP
Turkmenistan’s entire existing pipeline system, built for the integrated Soviet economy, flowed north into Russia. An alternative export route looked like a very good idea. But given the geography and the neighbors, it was just very hard to see what the alternative route might be. As one Western oil man put it at the time, “Certainly there is no easy way out of Central Asia.” The U.S. government lent support to a project to ship gas from Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and on to Europe, but that never eventuated.
There was one possibility that recommended itself, but, along with all the other normal inputs of money and engineering capabilities and diplomatic skills, this particular transit route would require something else—very substantial amounts of political imagination. For the envisioned track would take the gas south through Afghanistan and into Pakistan, where some of it would be used domestically and some exported as liquefied natural gas (LNG). The rest would be exported farther south by pipeline into India. Moreover, the proposed 1,040-mile oil pipeline could help move the landlocked petroleum resources of Central Asia south to global markets, closer to Asia, but without having to go through Iran and the Persian Gulf. “Only about 440 miles of the pipeline would be in Afghanistan,” one oil man optimistically said in congressional testimony. And the route had one more decided advantage: it looked to be “the cheapest in terms of transporting oil.”
It was a very big idea that appealed to a company called Unocal, one of the smaller of the U.S. majors. Started as a California company, it had already developed a significant position as a natural gas producer in Southeast Asia, and had also been one of the pioneers of the AIOC, of which it owned about 10 percent. Once the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline project got going, recalled John Imle, Unocal’s president, “We asked ourselves, What’s the next project? Turkmenistan had a lot of gas, but all the pipelines were going north, and the Russians were not taking the gas. Our premise was that Central Asia needed an outlet to the Indian Ocean.” So convinced was Unocal of the potential of additional transport routes that it embraced what became a famous slogan, “Happiness Is Multiple Pipelines.”
For Unocal, a project with Turkmenistan could be the game changer, an enormous opportunity that could leapfrog Unocal into the front ranks of international companies. Marty Miller, the Unocal executive with the responsibility for the project, described it as the “moon shot” in the company’s portfolio of possible future projects. It was an $8 billion idea, for it would also be a “twofer”—twin natural gas and oil pipelines. The natural gas line was dubbed the Trans-Afghan Pipeline; and the oil, the Central Asian Oil Pipeline.
Together TAP and CAOP (the latter pronounced as “cap”) would open global markets to Turkmen resources; they would provide significant transit revenues to Afghanistan, an alternative to the revenues that the nation derived from opium cultivation. TAP would deliver natural gas to the growing economies of Pakistan and India, where, the economics indicated, it would be cheaper than imported LNG. CAOP would move a million barrels per day of oil south from Turkmenistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, perhaps even Russia.11
Unocal could already clearly see that the great growth markets of the twenty-first century would be in that region. Yet reflecting the perspectives of the times, the main markets for Turkmen oil were thought to be Japan and Korea. China, as a market at that point, was still little more than a footnote. After all, it was only two years earlier that China had stopped exporting oil and become an importer. The gas project was particularly compelling to some policymakers in India, who hoped that a natural gas link would tie India and Pakistan together with common interests that would help to offset decades of conflict and rivalry. They called it a “peace pipeline.”
To say the project was “challenging” was an understatement.
TURMOIL EN ROUTE
The main transit country for TAP and CAOP was Afghanistan, but Afghanistan in the mid-1990s was hardly a functioning country. For ten years the country had been torn apart by a war between Soviet troops, which had invaded in 1979, and Afghan mujahedeen, supported by Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, among others. “The greatest mistake [of the Soviet intervention] was failing to understand Afghanistan’s complexity—its patchwork of ethnic groups, clans