Viewspapers Will not Report the Truth on Afghanistan.

I have not yet heard anything yet on an article being commissioned by the Guardian on the centrality of the TAPI pipeline to Western geopolitical strategy in Central Asia and one of the key objectives that explains why the Afghanistan War is being still being fought.

Yet news is coming out constantly about it in every other media outlet-apart from those "mainstream" in Western nations. Since Conor Foley dismissed it a few years ago in an article entitled Pipe Dreamers ( February 2008 ) that claimed that "conspiracy theorists" only posited "oil" as the reason for intervention, nothing more has appeared.

To be fair, Foley kept his mind open for more evidence and now much more evidence has emerged. Yet there has been no attempt to set these developments in context. Where news emerges it is filed away in the business section. Central Asia Newswire reported,

Monday, September 27, 2010 - The construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline took another step towards implementation on Monday when partner nations announced they would hold tenders for the inclusion of an international oil company to oversee the project, India’s Economic Times reported on Monday.

Nobody in the mainstream media seems able or willing to talk about this at all. Indian news outlets habitually mention it, though they do not link it directly to the Afghanistan War. The Indian Economic Times reports,

NEW DELHI: Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and have agreed to rope in a global energy major to execute and manage a $7.6-billion running their land, brightening the prospect of a steady flow of gas from central Asia to energy-hungry South Asia.The decision was taken after assured to secure the pipeline through the Taliban heartland and Pakistan in-principle agreed to do so in its territory, two senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The private partner will be inducted through an international bidding by the four countries, jointly referred to as TAPI.

British troops have died in recent months in Helmland to try to secure a key province through which the TAPI pipeline will run. Still threadbare excuses or rationalisations are produced to justify Afghanistan-Women's Lib, the "War on Terror" but none of them add up to a real reason why NATO is going to "stay the course".

Foley wrote this in February 2008

But where is this pipeline? Fahrenheit 9/11 ( Michael Moore's film-ed ) shows footage of a pipeline being laid, but this certainly is not the pipeline in question since, to date, no western company has shown any interest in building one. Unocal shut down its office in Turkmenistan in 1998 and says it has no plans to return to the region.There is, in fact, nothing to suggest that oil formed any significant part of US policy towards Afghanistan.

John Foster, an energy economist formely of the World Bank, has written of the TAPI's importance as a natural gas pipeline, one that is set to be built. It was never "all about the oil". It was about geopolitics and gas from Turkmenistan, as well as an ideology of "Enlightened Self Interest".

Within the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, that includes plans for a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India (TAPI). This pipeline has been promoted by the U.S. since the mid-1990s.Pipelines are more than commercial ventures. They are geopolitically important because they connect trading partners, and influence the regional balance of power.

This is at least worth talking about. Not as some "conspiracy theory" but in terms of geopolitics and understanding the reality about Afghanistan instead of vapid musings on what Obama could, ought, might or should do from the siren voices of establishment liberal opinion. It's time to face facts.