The July meetings were the third in a series of U.N.-sponsored discussions about Afghanistan; the other two took place in November and March. According to Brisard and Dasquie, their objective was "to convince the Taliban that once a broad-based government of national unity was installed and the pipeline project was in the works, there would be billions of dollars in commission -- of which the Taliban, with their own resources, would get a cut."

But all the participants in the meetings that I was able to reach, including Naik, insist the long-discussed Afghanistan oil pipeline project had nothing to do with their agenda. Yes, throughout much of the 1990s Unocal had worked with various Afghan governments and officials to try to build a pipeline. And yes, former Unocal consultants and oil experts were party to the U.N. meetings. All of them insist, however, that the pipeline project was dead when their U.N. discussions began -- Unocal had abandoned it when the U.S. began making its case that the Taliban was harboring bin Laden after the August 1998 embassy bombings -- and never came up there.

Robert Oakley, a former Unocal consultant who was also the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan under the first President Bush, has been cast as the central figure in many accounts of the discussions, largely because of his ties to Unocal. But Oakley, who teaches at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, insists he only attended the first U.N. meeting, and that the pipeline was never discussed.

"I didn't go to the other meetings because I didn't think it was worthwhile," says Oakley. "The first meeting produced nothing; I knew the others wouldn't either." Oakley, who served as the State Department's coordinator for counter-terrorism during the 1980s, and as an ambassador to Somalia and Zaire as well as Pakistan, insists the pipeline project was dead before the discussions, and no one at the meeting he attended was trying to revive it.

The three Americans at the July meeting -- former ambassador Tom Simons, Karl "Rick" Inderfurth, former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, and Lee Coldren, a former State Department official in charge of Afghanistan -- all back Oakley. After Unocal stopped pushing for the pipeline project in 1998, no other energy firm stepped forward to invest, they insist. And even if another company expressed interest, says Inderfurth, who admits to pushing for the pipeline in the early '90s, no bank would back them. "They [Unocal] pulled out entirely after Clinton launched missiles into those camps," he says. "Pipelines and proposals for pipelines were dead as a doornail during that period -- and the Taliban never raised the issue in meetings I had with them."

It's true that the Americans who were party to the Track 2 Afghanistan discussions backed the pipeline project -- but so did most Clinton administration officials in the region. In June, Salon ran an article by Brisard documenting al-Qaida's interest in the Unocal pipeline project, and tracing the ties between the Bush administration's Afghanistan advisors and Unocal through to today. Clearly oil interests continue to play a role in the administration's diplomatic relationship with Hamid Karzai's government: President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was, like Oakley, a member of Unocal's pipeline advisory board. But Oakley insists none of the parties to last year's meetings had any illusions that overtures to the Taliban, or even a reconstituted Afghan government, could revive the pipeline project. "You couldn't do business with the Taliban for political and economic reasons," he says, and even a post-Taliban Afghanistan would prove too risky an environment to invest in massively.

"These companies do not have the money, the billions of dollars that are needed to put in a pipeline," Coldren said. "They have to borrow that money. And no one in their right mind is going to loan them that money when you have a state of eternal warfare."

On that point, Niaz Naik backs his American counterparts. Speaking from his home in Islamabad, Naik says the pipeline was never discussed during the July meetings. When asked if the pipeline came up at any point in the Track 2 discussions, his answer was quick and clear: "No, absolutely not."

But on the question of whether the American diplomats issued threats to the Taliban, there's no such accord.

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