Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Beyond Iran, Real Target Is Afghan & Central Asia

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s eloquence in Israel was a reminder that Atal Behari Vajpayee’s description of India and the United States as natural allies was no surprise. His colleagues were in favour of closer ties with the West, but none more deeply than Ram Jethmalani, the former law minister, who wrote to Vajpayee before US President Bill Clinton’s 2000 visit, suggesting a mutual defence treaty that would make New Delhi a stop on what he called the Washington-London-Jerusalem-Tokyo democratic axis.

If strategy and commerce are two factors that shape US foreign policy, Terror Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dramatically highlighted that oil is the third. In eliminating Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda outfit and “the evil one” as George W. Bush, the born-again Christian President, called Bin Laden, he indicated a way of keeping the Lone Superpower in vigorous health. He understood oil. It made his father, the first President Bush, a millionaire. He himself had gone straight into the dust and dry oil wells of Texas after leaving Harvard Business School in 1975 and launched Arbusto (Spanish for bush) Energy, whose dry drillings prompted wits to call it “El Busto”. He renamed the company Bush Exploration and sold it to Spectrum 7, which, in turn, was bought by Dallas-based Harken Energy, in which he had a stake. Those deals made him a fortune. They also brought him into contact with money manager George Soros and oil sheikhs in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Vice-President Dick Cheney, his father’s former defence secretary, had headed the Texas-based energy firm, Halliburton. With this oil expertise, “Dubya” Bush would have recognised Bin Laden’s hiding place as a piece in the modern Great Game. Landlocked in barren mountains, Afghanistan is a desperately poor country. It had been ravaged by ten years of Soviet occupation, seven years of civil war and five under grim Taliban fanatics. It is again up for grabs: Afghanistan commands the entrée to Central Asia’s huge deposits of oil and gas.

Iran is only the secondary prize. The real battle is for Afghanistan and, through it, for Central Asia. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World,” wrote Halford Mackinder, the early twentieth century British geographer who articulated the concept of geopolitics and used World-Island to mean Eurasia. A later American analyst adapted that to read: “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” India, Pakistan and Afghanistan constitute the Rimland: the Great Game is for the bigger prize.

Lord Wavell, India’s second-last British Viceroy, saw it coming. Describing Asia’s fossil fuel reserves, he warned the Royal Central Asian Society in 1949 that “the next great struggle for world power, if it takes place, may well be for the control of these oil reserves”.

He reckoned that the coming war might focus on West Asia, the Persian Gulf and the approaches to India, both in the north-west and the north-east.

Regime change in Iran has been on the minds of American administrations for decades. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency helped orchestrate a coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government and reinstated the pro-Western Shah. And ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution that in turn overthrew the Shah and established an anti-American theocracy with nuclear ambitions, Tehran has been in Washington’s sights. “Oil is our civilisation,” James A. Baker III, Bush Senior’s secretary of state, had rasped to Inder Kumar Gujral, India’s former Prime Minister, in August 1991 while war clouds darkened over the Persian Gulf. “We will never permit any demon to sit on it!” Adm. William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chuckled that the US would not have bothered defending Kuwait if it had exported bananas.

Three years after Muhammad Mossadeq, who nationalised British Petroleum in 1951, was overthrown, the CIA sabotaged Saudi plans for a national tanker fleet that would have struck at the monopoly right to “transport, deal with, carry away and export petroleum” enjoyed by Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company. In 1969, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser (later secretary of state), tried to activate the sinister 40 Committee, the US inter-agency authority for covert operations, against Muammar Gaddafi when he toppled Libya’s pro-Western King Idris to become ruler of the world's eighth largest oil exporting country and succeeded with nationalisations where Mossadeq had failed.

According to John J. Maresca, Unocal’s vice-president for international relations, Central Asia has more than 236 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves and more than 60 billion barrels of crude. Mr Maresca told the Bereuter subcommittee that some estimates place the latter at more than 200 billion barrels. American experts hold that these vast deposits are vital to the West’s geostrategic and economic survival. Central Asian fuel can create “tens of thousands of US and Western jobs”. Lower prices would secure prosperity and economic growth throughout Europe and America.

Within hours of it breaking out, Britain backed the war with Iran by giving the US permission to use Royal Air Force bases to strike Tehran’s infrastructure. Just hours later, one of these British bases was attacked by drones. This new war spread overnight as Israel hit Lebanon and, in the past two hours, there have been reports of explosions in several cities, including Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Doha and Bahrain’s capital, Manama.

India’s visionary first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, saw a federal solution as the answer to the region’s political aspirations and economic demands. “Confederation remains our ultimate goal,” he told a Washington Post journalist. “Look at Europe, at the Common Market. This is the urge everywhere. There are no two peoples anywhere nearer than those of India and Pakistan, though if we say it, they are alarmed and think we want to swallow them.”

Nehru was of course speaking before the era of Brexit and Donald Trump. If the US had then laid the ghost of that fear, the outer parapets of the Rimland would no longer be hostage to national complexes. Only a benign subcontinental equilibrium based on geopolitical logic, while also enshrining mutual respect for each other’s integrity, would allow India to live up to Washington’s expectations. A model already existed in the Americas — Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean and Latin American republics vis-à-vis the US. The challenge of Mr Trump’s unknown ambitions now poses a formidable obstacle to any coherent plan for a logical transatlantic solution.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author