Taliban by Ahmed Rashid

Author:Ahmed Rashid [Rashid, Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16484-8
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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ROMANCING THE TALIBAN 1:

THE BATTLE

FOR PIPELINES 1994-96

Carlos Bulgheroni was the Taliban’s first introduction to the outside world of high finance, oil politics and the new Great Game. An Argentinian and Chairman of Bridas, he visualized connecting his company’s gas fields in Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India – thereby creating a swathe of infrastructure connections that could allow peace to break out in Afghanistan and even between India and Pakistan.

Like American and British oil magnates in the early part of the century, who saw the oil business as an extension of global politics and thereby demanded the right to influence foreign policy, Bulgheroni was a man possessed by an idea. Between 1995 and 1996 he left his business in South America and spent nine months in his executive jet flying from warlord to warlord in Afghanistan and to Islamabad, Ashkhabad, Moscow and Washington, to convince leaders that his pipeline was a realistic possibility. Those around him were equally driven, if not by the same dream, than by the workaholic Bulgheroni.

Bulgheroni is descended from a close-knit family of Italian immigrants to Argentina. Charming, erudite, a philosopher captain of industry, he could talk for hours about the collapse of Russia, the future of the oil industry or Islamic fundamentalism. His father Alejandro Angel had set up Bridas in 1948 as a small service company for Argentina’s new oil industry. Carlos and his brother Alejandro Bulgheroni, who was Vice Chairman of Bridas, took the company international in 1978 and Bridas became the third largest independent oil and gas company in Latin America. But until Turkmenistan, Bridas had no experience of operating in Asia.

What had brought these Argentinians halfway across the world to ride around Afghanistan? After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bridas had first ventured into Western Siberia, ‘But there were too many problems there with pipelines and taxes so we arrived in Turkmenistan when it opened up,’ Bulgheroni told me in the only interview he has given on Bridas’s role in Afghanistan.1 In 1991, Bridas took a huge risk when it became the first Western company to bid for leases in Turkmenistan. At the time, Western oil companies called the decision crazy. Turkmenistan was distant, landlocked and had passed no legislation to protect foreign investors. ‘Other oil companies shied away from Turkmenistan because they thought it a gas place and had no idea where to market it,’ said Bulgheroni. ‘Our experience in discovering gas and transporting it through cross-border pipelines to multiple markets in Latin America convinced me that the same could be done in Turkenistan.’ President Niyazov was flattered by the attention Bulgheroni paid him, when no other Western oil executive even appeared at his door, and the two men struck up a warm friendship.

In January 1992, Bridas was awarded the Yashlar block in eastern Turkmenistan close to the Afghan border and north-east of the massive Daulatabad gas field discovered by the Soviets. A year later, in February 1993, Bridas was awarded the Keimir block in the west of the country near the Caspian Sea.

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