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The Shebargan gas pipeline after a night-time attack and with carcasses of Soviet APCs. The pipeline also bears witness to how children experience and depict decades of war. Between Mazar-e-Sharif and Balkh, Afghanistan. 17 October, 2001...Exploitation of Afghanistan's fossil resources began in 1967 on the Khowaja gas field east of Shebergan...It was there that the former Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, who still holds power in Kabul and has a long history of siding with winners during every phase of Afghanistan's long-drawn-out war, started his political and military career. The pipeline to Mazar-e-Sharif would serve Dostum as one of several lifelines. ..In the mid-1990s, when the “New Great Game” for oil was being played out in Afghanistan, among the many pipedreams being dreamt were those of the Argentinian company Bridas and the California-based Unocal (with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—architect of the covert bombing of Cambodia—as consultant). They saw Afghanistan as the key that would unlock the oil and gas fields of Central Asia and as a transit corridor for pipelines connecting these to the Indian Ocean in Pakistan...Once the Taliban had unified the country (with the exception of the Tajik Panjshir) and routed the warlords responsible for its fragmentation, they resumed the negotiations the two companies from beyond the Atlantic had initiated with Ismael Khan, Dostum, Rabbani, Masud and Niyazov, the communist-style dictator of Turkmenistan...Little was known about the Islamist organization and its reclusive leadership in those days, but there was no doubt that its expansion had geostrategic implications. From an American perspective, “a gas pipeline through Afghanistan was not only attractive because it avoided Iran, but it would signal support to Turkmenistan, Pakistan and the Taliban while clearly snubbing Russia and Iran.” (Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, 2000)..What the foreign managers had tried euphemistically to sell as a “peace-making b (KEYSTONE/VII Photo/Daniel Schwartz)