Big powers and the great energy game in Central Asia

A century ago, the British Empire and Tsarist Russia used spies, gold and proxy armies to control the emirate of Afghanistan in the fabled “Great Game” of the Raj. With the collapse of the USSR, Afghanistan and Central Asia are now new epicentre of incendiary ethnic wars, great power intrigues and despotic warlords. The Great Game is now about gas fields and oil pipelines, not just warm water ports and imperial diplomatic treaties.

China, Russia, the US, Turkey, Iran, India and Pakistan and the agents of the world’s most powerful oil and gas superpowers are now mere pawns on the chessboard of Central Asian geopolitics. With an estimated 200 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Central Asia has the biggest fossil fuel reserves outside the Arab world, the new battlefield for the oil wars. Centuries ago, Zoroastrian priests prayed to the “holy fire”, the gas-fed flames that arose from the soil on the Caspian Sea.

Khaleej Times