Review: Afghanistan, Bin Laden, and Oil

Third Quarter 2002

Early last November, the New York Times published a story about a French book, published before 9/11, that quoted former FBI official John O'Neill as complaining that oil politics kept the U.S. from confronting Saudi Arabia over its support of Osama bin Laden. In early February, Thomas Spencer, writing for the History News Network's web site, went into more detail about the book, Bin Laden: La verite interdite (Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth), and its interviews with O'Neill, who died in the World Trade Center collapse. Two years ago in the Public Justice Report, Alice Catherine Carls wrote an article on the oil politics of the Caucasus region around the Caspian Sea—the old "silk road"—where there is so much competition over the building of oil pipelines. Here, Dr. Carls takes her own look at the Bin Laden book written by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie.—Ed.

At the root of Osama bin Laden's designs, according to the authors of "The Forbidden Truth," lies a traditionalism constituted by the alliance of Islam, banking, and oil. For decades, say Brisard and Dasquie, the Saudis used their banking and oil powers to support the expansion of radical Islamic movements, particularly Wahhabism, today perhaps the most proselytizing branch of Sunni Islam. The Saudi royal family, the bin Laden family's construction business, and the Mahfouz family's international banking network combined to build the modern Saudi Arabia powerhouse. Thus, Osama bin Laden was not an outsider or counter-cultural renegade. He was born into this elite circle. He was an insider to this success story and continued to benefit from the business and financial networks even after the Saudi regime stripped him of his citizenship in 1991.

To explain how Afghanistan got caught in its crisis one must consider three factors, write Brisard and Dasquie. First, the path of Wahhabism stretches from Saudi Arabia through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Philippines, opposing Sunni to Shi'ite Islam in a feud between fundamentalisms that intensified after the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Second, bin Laden was welcomed into Afghanistan by the Taliban in 1998 after he had been expelled from the Sudan. And third, the center of the oil-rich Middle Eastern region shifted eastward after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, opening vast oil and natural gas reserves in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to competitive world markets. Afghanistan quickly became prime real estate for an oil-pipeline highway. The newly exploitable oil reserves were sought by more than the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Chinese and Russians favored transporting the energy resources on an east-west path that would link Berlin and Beijing. The Americans, Australians, and Filipinos wanted a north-south path that would move the oil through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Persian Gulf. The European Union preferred a path through Georgia and Turkey into the Mediterranean Sea. The common factor in all of these plans was the avoidance of Iran.

In the 1990s, both Saudi Arabia and the U.S. rushed into Central Asia, eager to forge alliances and snap up energy contracts in order to beat the competition. Oil cemented U.S.-Saudi cooperation. The capitalistic commercialism of both is what helped bin Laden turn anti-western Muslims against the American Satan and against the "secular" elite of Saudi Arabia and some other Muslim countries. Before 9/11, American, Saudi, Egyptian, and other Middle Eastern leaders were well aware of the danger of radical opposition movements. After 1998, bin Laden was being hunted. But terrorism of the magnitude experienced on 9/11 was not yet imaginable. Consequently, Americans were willing to give tacit support to the Taliban as long as the Taliban made room for U.S. oil interests, and the Saudis found no difficulty in supporting the Taliban's version of the practice of Islam.

One of the most striking charges made in the book, based on the authors' interviews with O'Neill, is that the U.S. government was thwarting FBI and CIA attempts to apprehend bin Laden in order to appease the Taliban. Brisard and Dasquie also said, in an interview after their book was published, that according to O'Neill a U.S. negotiating official threatened the Taliban with war if they refused to cooperate in allowing the pipeline to be built. A few months later, came 9/11. Did bin Laden authorize the attack because he feared that the Taliban might withdraw their support of Al Qaeda? We may never know.

We should not be reluctant, however, to recognize that much of what lies behind post-9/11 U.S. diplomacy with Russia, Georgia, Pakistan, India, and the Saudis as well as American antagonism toward Iraq and Iran has to do with oil as much as terrorism. Watch for the building of the pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan as soon as the region's volatility can be sufficiently reduced.

—Dr. Carls is Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin.