On July 18th, prominent British lawmaker Tobias Ellwood posted a highly controversial video to Twitter, in which he praised the Taliban’s stewardship of Afghanistan.

Describing the country as “transformed” following the Taliban’s unopposed return to power in August 2021, Ellwood enthusiastically declared, “security has vastly improved, corruption is down and the opium trade has all but disappeared,” while awkwardly traipsing round Kabul. He went on to observe “a calm to the country that local elders say they’ve not experienced since the 1970s”:

“After NATO’s dramatic departure, should the West now engage with the Taliban? You quickly appreciate this war-weary nation is for the moment accepting a more authoritarian leadership in exchange for stability…Our current strategy of shouting from afar…is not working.”

The clip elicited outrage and ridicule in equal measure from a wide variety of sources on and offline. Such was the backlash, Ellwood promptly deleted the video, and issued a toadying mea culpa - although the damage is done, and some of his fellow MPs are now moving to remove him from his influential parliamentary defence committee post as a result.

Evidently, the Western world is nowhere near ready to accept the Taliban as anything other than the enemy. Nonetheless, Ellwood’s comments surely represent a widespread, albeit as yet unarticulated, perspective in Western centers of power. It is typically forgotten that in the weeks before NATO’s chaotic withdrawal, British Army chief General Nick Carter urged “the world” to “wait and see” how the Taliban - who he dubbed “country boys with a code of honour” - would rule Afghanistan the second time round:

“We have to be patient, we have to hold our nerve and we have to give them the space to form a government and we have to give them the space to show their credentials. It may be this Taliban is a different Taliban to the one that people remember from the 1990s. We may well discover, if we give them the space, that this Taliban is of course more reasonable.”

Carter was, like Ellwood, pilloried for his intervention, branded a Taliban apologist and worse. From the perspective of Washington, London, and Brussels though, such a position makes perfect sense. After all, Afghanistan did not cease being one of the most geopolitically significant pieces of real estate on Earth when the US and its international vassals fled the country with their tails between their legs. 

Ironically, that the West cares not who or what rules Afghanistan, as long as its interests are furthered along the way, was amply demonstrated by the Taliban’s first attempt at governing the country. It was precisely for this reason that the US assisted the group into power in the first place.

‘Lots of Sharia Law’

The Soviet Union’s collapse in December 1991 opened up Central Asia’s vast oil and gas wealth, long-looked upon lustily by the West, to foreign exploitation. As future Vice President Donald Rumsfeld, then-chief executive of energy giant and notorious Iraq war profiteer Halliburton, observed in 1998:

“I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant.” 

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Yet, extracting these vast riches was troublesome. Moving oil and gas across Russia would be expensive, due to high transit fees imposed by Moscow. US sanctions on Iran criminalized the transport of resources through its borders outright. Neither barrier existed in nearby Afghanistan - as did little else. The country was a barren wilderness bereft of infrastructure, barely governed by a constellation of feuding warlords and armed extremist groups.

Undeterred, representatives of US oil major Unocal jetted to Central Asia in 1995 to conduct feasibility studies. They concluded Afghanistan would be the best, cheapest option for pillaging the region’s ample energy riches, if an at least relatively stable governing force was installed in Kabul. Then, a 1,000-mile-long pipeline, capable of carrying a million barrels daily, could be constructed.

Unocal executives provided information gleaned on these visits to the CIA, and opened an office in Kandahar the next year. Questions can only abound about the role played by the company, and US spying agencies, in the Taliban’s concomitant seizure of control. A US Defense Intelligence Agency whistleblower, who visited Kabul at the time, was told by numerous well-informed sources that the group’s success was dependent on external assistance.

Once the Taliban was safely embedded, Unocal’s in-house security forces and the CIA gave the group weapons and instructors to maintain its grip on power. Unocal moreover lobbied the US government to recognize the group as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, hiring numerous high-profile former government officials for the purpose. This included Henry Kissinger, and Zalmay Khalilzad, a State Department veteran pivotal to increasing the Reagan administration’s support for the Mujahideen’s war against the Red Army in the 1980s. 

In October 1996, Khalilzad authored a tubthumping op-ed for the Washington Post, demanding the US “reengage” with Afghanistan, and dismissing any suggestion the Taliban were an extremist force, due to “common interest” between Washington and the group. His Unocal role was unmentioned. This clear conflict of interest also didn’t factor into media coverage of his appointment as US special envoy to Afghanistan in January 2002. 

In the meantime, members of the Taliban were flown to Texas to meet Unocal executives in late 1997. Mainstream accounts of the visit are rather surreal. The group traveled to a zoo, NASA’s space centre, and a titanic Target outlet for a shopping spree, before retiring to the palatial homes of company chiefs. There they played golf and frolicked in private swimming pools, feasting on halal meat and rice, washed down with Coca-Cola.

The Taliban returned to Afghanistan bearing a number of gifts from Unocal, including a pledge to invest a million dollars in training Afghans how to construct the pipeline. Washington was amenable to recognizing the group, despite ever-mounting international outrage over its treatment of women, and extremely harsh interpretation of Sharia law. As a senior US diplomat explained at the time:

“The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

A tectonic shift

This lackadaisical attitude shifted seismically in August 1998, when US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were simultaneously suicide bombed by Al-Qaeda operatives, killing over 200 people. Washington responded with cruise missile strikes against Afghanistan, accusing the Taliban of sheltering the terror group’s leadership. Seeing the unambiguous writing on the wall, by December that year Unocal fully withdrew from the pipeline project, and ended its operations in Kabul outright. 

Come 2005 though, the pipeline was back on the table, in the form of the Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Pipeline (TAPI) pipeline. US officials were reportedly strongly supportive, because as before it would allow Central Asia to export energy to Western markets “without relying on Russian routes.” However, the project again eventually stalled, due to an ever-volatile security situation.

The aforementioned Zalmay Khalilzad, in September 2018, became US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, leading the Trump administration’s talks with the Taliban. He was condemned for the group’s rapid reseizure of power in 2021 – but no reference to his time as a Unocal lobbyist, let alone discussion of how energy interests so intimately intersect with US foreign policy, could be detected among the criticism.

It could well be that Khalilzad explicitly laid the foundations for the Taliban’s lightning-quick recapture of Kabul. The rationale for such a capitulation was amply spelled out by Graham Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, in 1999: 

“The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter Chinese influence in Central Asia.”