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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Pipelineistan's New Silk Road

Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Pipelineistan's New Silk Road
Posted by Pepe Escobar
at 9:40am, October 12, 2010.


"...Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, has been doing just that for TomDispatch readers as he explores the geography that undergirds our civilization, the pipelines that crisscross Eurasia through which flow energy -- and trouble. This, then, is his fourth "postcard" from what he likes to call Pipelineistan. The first in March 2009 began laying out a great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia and the Great Game of business, diplomacy, and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. that went with it.

In May of that year, he plunged eastward into tumultuous Central and South Asia and the expanding battleground that, in Washington, goes by the neologism Af-Pak (for the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations). Next, in October, he headed west toward Europe and another developing struggle, which he dubbed "Pipelineistan’s Ultimate Opera", over just how natural gas from the Caspian Sea would reach Europe. Now, in his first stop of 2010, he heads where, it seems, anyone interested in energy -- maybe anyone interested in anything at all -- more or less has to head these days: China and the new Silk Road of pipelines that offer the former Middle Kingdom a partial shot at future energy security and Washington future anxieties of all sorts. Tom... "


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