Poles Accused of Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan
Staff journalist | 11th March 2010

karlnaylor 14th March 2010

As John Foster puts it in Pipeline through a Troubled Land,

The proposed TAPI pipeline follows an ancient trading route from Central to South Asia. It will run from the Dauletabad gas field in Turkmenistan along the main highway through Herat, Helmand and Kandahar in Afghanistan; through Quetta and Multan in Pakistan; to Fazilka in India, near the border between Pakistan and India. Helmand and Kandahar are the provinces where safety and security are problemsand where British and Canadian forces, under the NATO umbrella, are involved in combat alongside U.S. forces.

Afghanistan’s new National Development Strategy (2009-2013) – presented at a donors’ conference on June 12,2008, in Paris – refers briefly to ongoing planning for the TAPI gas pipeline and to Afghanistan’s central role as a landbridge connecting land-locked, energy-rich Central Asia to energy-deficient South Asia.

“Afghanistan is also participating in ongoing planning for a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI)natural gas pipeline. A number of regional energy trade and import arrangements have commenced and will contribute to long-term energy security.”

“Enhanced regional cooperation provides Afghanistan an opportunity to connect land locked energy rich Central Asia with warm water ports and energy deficient South Asia. As a result of this expanded trade Afghanistan would be able to meet part of its energy demand.

As a transit country, Afghanistan will realize increased revenue and enhanced economic activity, enabling it to bettermeet its main development challenges.” (page 143).

Guarding the pipelines is now an explicit NATO aim,

"Energy has become an issue of strategic discussions atNATO, and the issue was reviewed at the 2008 NATO Summitin Bucharest. The Summit Declaration affirmed that NATO will support the protection of critical energy infrastructure,and stipulated that a progress report on energy security be prepared for the 2009 Summit"

Two years earlier, the 2006 Summit Declaration avowed support for a coordinated effort to promote energy infrastructure security.

One proposal at the 2006 Summit called for NATO to guard pipelines and sea lanes. Would that apply to the Afghan pipeline? If so, NATO troops could be in Afghanistan for a very long time. Pipelines last until they’re decommissioned– that may be 50 years or more".

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National_Office_Pubs/2008/A_Pipeline_Through_a_Troubled_Land.pdf

This will be a long war. how long is the liberal political and media elite going to be in denial about the pipeline and those three letter words 'oil' and 'gas' which seem to play a role a bit like 'sex' did in Victorian times as regards it's unmentionability ?

karlnaylor 14th March 2010

Well, civilian deaths are a necessary form of collateral damage in a war being fought for hard headed realpolitik and the construction of the TAPI pipeline which is the only reason troops from Poland are still there and increasing.

Poland faces an energy crisis and want to wrest as much control from Russia over oil and gas as possible by diverting it south and incorporating Afghanistan as a clent state.

Again the Polish public are never given access to the hidden agenda of the Afghanistan War as Klich and Tusk repeat robotic sentences and clipped Orwellian statement about "credibility" i.e (power )and perverting the word 'solidarity'.

The enhanced role of Poland in Afghanistan in Ghazni province is to secure the area between Kabul and Kandahar where most of the fighting going on against Taliban insurgents are killing British troops.

This is the exact route for the TAPI pipeline to go through. This is not a conspiracy theory it is documented by the petro-economist of BP and other oil eperts sich as John Foster in Pipeline Through a Troubled Land.

Afghanistan has been rationalised by reference to all manner of shifting pretexts, -liberating womem, defeating the heroin trade, protecting the West from Islamist terror-but the reality is that the West has a stake in making Afghanistan a pipeline state.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is candid about this, though like most 'democratic geopoliticians'he dresses it up in arcane terminology, as if geopolitics was an science. "Think tank experts" regularly deebate it.

Yet the Polish public, that is the children or the animals on Animal Farm, are never told being regarded, as the founder of journalism in the USA as PR, Walter Lippeman called, a "bewildered herd"

The facts pertaining to why Polish troops are dying in a futile war and Afghan children being incinarted by bombs dropped from US aircraft, especially at the beginning of the war when "force protection" was paramount.

It needs to have Turkmeninstani gas go through Afghanistan via the TAPI pipeline to retain the chance at gaining hegemony in Eurasia, preventing collusion between China, Russia and Iran with regards the oil and gas of the Caspian.

Once this is detailed and admitted to be the driving force behind NATO's quest for energy security then the discussion might move on from trivial outrage about what Western liberal elites are doing to a real consideration about it's overdependance of fossil fuels lying in dangerous regions of the world.

For the simple reason that we have built a consumer economy and illusions of continued economic growth and 'progress' around controlling a resource destined to diminish and that will inaugurate an epoch of pathological struggle over them.

It is of no use pretending that resource conflicts and geopolitical calculations are somehow detached from the energy intensive lifestyles a great majority of people in the West have taken for granted and believe is theirs by right. They are not.

Wars in far off nations will become far more prevalent in future years because of the reliance on the car, the belief that democratic legitimacy is based on giving the masses what they "really want" through cheap air travel, the right to buy out of season fruit and so on.

If people are not prepared to make the link between their lifestyles and what the politicians and statesmen have to do to allow business as usual then it had better get used to Afghanistan and Iraq.

As well as the threat of Al Qaida terror within the West.

The terrorist threat was actually partly caused by those like Brzezinski who came up with the idea of destabilising the Soviet Union by funding Central Asian Islamists in the 70s.

These facts are confined to the memory hole in Poland where the main architect of transtlanticism in this now wholly pliant satellite state venerate him as participating to Poland's liberation whilst "stirred up Muslims"don't matter.

That their deaths are rationalised according to doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" were often well intended but naive in believing that Bush and Cheney were fighting a "war on terror" to advance human rights that is for their reason not the actual hard facts-geopolitics and resouces.