Hello Reader
What does 9/11 look like 25 years later?
Not just war memorials and history books, but a Taliban government attracting billions...
An old pipeline dream returning under the name CentGas, and Zalmay Khalilzad appearing at the table.
The sequel may already be underway.
_CentGas - 9/11 - CentGas 2.0_ |
As someone born the same year the Twin Towers fell, I have no anecdote from that morning; instead, I remember growing up inside everything it caused (and, of course, the conspiracy theories that outlasted it over the years).
Ten years later, the realization actually hit harder when Osama Bin Laden was shot during a targeted raid carried out by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, and a few years later we got to see the imagery from that night. No, not the raid and the killing, rather the control room itself; the President and others in the situation room, monitoring the operation in real time.
It actually did look like a movie scene… but the climax was missing!
Nevertheless, 25 years later, in hindsight, I view this 2.5-decade-long timeline of unfolding events as full circle for the Taliban, and for the US the verdict is: boots on the ground is never a good idea… at least not in the case of Iran!
When I say full circle, one can fathom the position of the Taliban from being bashed by the whole world and sanctioned to being crowned again, and now at the silver jubilee of 9/11, there are signs that the world is opening up geoeconomically for the Taliban government, and this time it's not just Russia and China.
The most recent sign, unveiled just a few days ago before this anniversary: a Saudi company, Delta International Energy, signed a $200 million oil and gas deal with the Taliban's own Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, for a stretch of desert in Herat and Badghis called the Kushk-Tirpul basin.
This new push, part of a proposed almost $50 billion energy framework, is already being called CentGas in market circles. If this name does not bother you, there is a detail worth looking into…
Alongside Taliban Minister of Mines and Petroleum Hedayatullah Badri and Delta CEO Shaher Al-Taqi stood Zalmay Khalilzad, the same American diplomat who in 2020 negotiated the Doha Agreement. The State Department was quick to say he attended in a "personal capacity," not representing the US government.
Now that answer explains what he wasn't doing there. It does not explain what he was.
Before he became America's peace negotiator, Khalilzad worked as a consultant and risk analyst for Unocal, the American company that partnered with Delta Oil, Al-Aiban's firm, in 1997, on a pipeline called CentGas too. It collapsed in December 1998, killed off by the Taliban's decision to shelter a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden.
In 1997, Khalilzad hosted Taliban representatives on Unocal's behalf and wrote publicly in their defense. Then came September 11, and the next two decades of his career were spent negotiating with, and eventually against, the very government he had once helped court.
This implies his presence in Kabul tacitly signaled American openness to doing business with the Taliban again, handing the regime something it has wanted since 2021: the appearance of American validation.
For Pakistan, this legitimacy is not some far-off diplomacy; it is the TTP fighters across its own border getting a richer, more confident neighbor to hide behind. Pakistan buried its part of the story once in Abbottabad, and now it is being asked to watch the rest of the world fund the sequel while it is still at war.
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