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152 TALIBANtwo chapters, sucked in the Taliban and the other Afghan warlords. ThusAfghanistan became the fulcrum of the first battle of the new GreatGame.Weak and impoverished and with no military force to defend its longborders with Iran, Afghanistan and its rival Uzbekistan, Turkmenistanopted for a foreign policy of neutrality. This gave the Turkmens the justificationto keep their distance from Russia and avoid being sucked intothe economic and military pacts that arose out of the break up of theSoviet Union. Neutrality also allowed Ashkhabad to avoid taking sidesin the Afghan conflict, which angered Moscow and Tashkent as Turkmenistanrefused to join the anti-Taliban alliance. Ashkhabad had providedthe communist regime in Afghanistan with diesel fuel until Kabulfell in 1992. It proceeded to do the same for Ismael Khan who controlledHerat until 1995 and later the Taliban. While the Turkmen Consulatein Herat maintained good relations with the Taliban, its Consulate inMazar did the same with the anti-Taliban alliance. Turkmenistan was theonly CAR that wooed the Taliban rather than confronted them.Like his Central Asian counterparts, Niyazov was a severe autocraticruler, allowing no political opposition, censoring the media and maintainingstate control over the economy. He developed a crude personalitycult in the Stalinist mode, with his portraits and statues on display everywhere.An entire government department was set up to disseminate thePresident's pictures. Niyazov, like his rival Karimov, was an orphan. Bothwere bought up in communist orphanages and joined their respectiveCommunist Parties at an early age, rising to become Secretary Generalwell before independence. Their education, upbringing and loyalties laywith the defunct communist system but they both learned to play thenew Great Game with skill.No country in the region has benefited more from the break up of theSoviet Union than Turkey. Russia has been Turkey's most potent enemyfor centuries. From the late seventeenth century to World War One,Turkey and Russia fought over a dozen wars and this rivalry had promptedTurkey to join NATO and try and become a member of the EU. However,the independence of the CARs suddenly awakened Turkey to itsmuch older historical legacy.Until 1991 Pan-Turkism - the idea of a Turkic homeland stretchingfrom the Mediterranean to China — was a romantic dream espoused by afew Turkish scholars and barely figured in Turkey's foreign policy agenda.Suddenly, after 1991, Pan-Turkism became an achievable reality and anintegral part of Turkey's foreign policy. Turkish dialects were now spokenby an accessible and vast contiguous belt that stretched from Istanbulacross the Caucasus and Central Asia to Xinjiang in China. The Gsaw Turkey as a model for their economic development — MuslimDICTATORS AND OIL BARONS ~ 153secular - while Turkey desired to expand its influence in the region andbecome a major player on the world stage.Turkey began to send massive aid to the CARs and the Caucasus -starting direct flights to their capitals, beaming TV programmes via satellite,offering thousands of scholarships to students, training their diplomats,soldiers and bankers and initiating an annual Pan-Turkic summit.Between 1992 and 1998 Turkish companies invested more than US$1.5billion in the region, becoming the single largest state investor. Turkeyalso realised that to be effective in Central Asia it had to placate Russiawhich it did by buying Russian gas and expanding trade with Russia,which rose from US$1.9 billion in 1990 to US$4.1 billion in 1997- 14 In1997, the EU's rejection of Turkey's membership angered the Turks, butalso pushed them into forging closer ties with the USA, Russia, Israel andCentral Asia.Turkey has become a major player in the new Great Game. Its needfor energy and desire to expand its influence prompted successive Turkishgovernments to push for becoming the principal route for Central Asianenergy exports. In the summer of 1997 the USA and Turkey jointly sponsoredthe idea of a 'transportation corridor' for a main oil pipeline fromBaku in Azerbaijan through Georgia and the Caucasus to Turkey'sCeyhan port on the Mediterranean. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan wouldbe encouraged to feed their oil into this pipeline. This, the USA argued,would give the expensive and lengthy Baku-Ceyhan route the necessaryoil volumes to make the project financially viable. 15 The USA wantedTurkmenistan to build a gas pipeline under the Caspian Sea which wouldthen run along the Baku-Ceyhan corridor to Europe.The USA also urged Kazakhstan to commit to building a similar underthe-seaCaspian oil pipeline, so that Kazakh oil could be pumped alongthe Baku-Ceyhan corridor. Kazakhstan's vast oil reserves were beingexploited by two major Western oil consortiums in Tenghiz and Karachagnak,while China was developing a third oil-bearing region aroundUzen. 16 Kazakhstan already had one planned oil pipeline route fromTenghiz to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, which wasbeing developed by Chevron, but the Baku-Ceyhan route would offer analternative that avoided Russia.The Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), made upof nearly a dozen of the world's oil companies and which dominated Azerbaijan'soil development, was averse to the Baku-Ceyhan route becauseit was too expensive, too long and would cross Turkey's volatile Kurdishregion. 17 By 1998 it was clear that US plans to develop the Afghanistanroute would be delayed and so the Baku-Ceyhan corridor became theniain plank of Washington's policy towards the Caspian region.The controversy over Baku-Ceyhan raged on for two years until late