Nobody ever speaks about Turkmenistan. And most people probably couldn’t point it out on a map. But guess what it has lots of? Natural gas. Huge reserves (the third largest in the world, after Russia and Iran). And as you probably know, gas only travels one way – by pipeline.

You might remember the nation as Turkmenistan Soviet Socialist Republic. Prior to its breakup in 1991, Turkmenistan was one of the 15 Soviet republics that made up the USSR. And prior to that breakup, all the natural gas in Turkmenistan flowed only one way – north.

Eager Western nations are anxious to get their claws into all that natural gas, but that requires a pipeline flowing south. And that means passing through Iran to get to the sea. Or – and here’s the important bit – through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the ocean.

This, and only this, is what keeps NATO (read: United States) in Afghanistan. There is no way that such a pipeline is going to travel through Iran. That pipeline must flow through Afghanistan, which means the Afghans must be subdued. It is presumed that Pakistan is friendly enough to allow the gas to traverse their borders, but Afghanistan is another matter.

It’s no secret that petroleum and gas have motivated US involvement in the Middle East for half a century, and Washington has been vigorously promoting a pipeline through Afghanistan’s Kandahar province since the 1990s.

Pipeline rivalry is rampant in the area, with Russia planning a new pipeline north from Turkmenistan, and China already building new lines eastward. But Turkmenistan is still not a name that pops up in the news every day. It is, however, the primary reason that troops from NATO countries, and many Afghans, are dying in the streets. There has been pretence upon pretence for NATO’s presence in Afghanistan, but the simple reason is one of clearing the road so a pipeline can be built.

Governments and media pundits provide a cowed public with a wide range of reasons for military involvement in Afghanistan. We are assured that it was necessary to defeat the Taliban, because they are evil people. We are assured that Afghanistan was the hiding place of so many of the terrorists who plotted the events of September 11, 2001. We are assured that Afghanistan needs democracy, as though any of the Western nations fighting there has the credentials for teaching democracy to anyone else.

So what is the upside for a country like Canada to be involved in Afghanistan? Canada has lots of its own natural gas; Canada wasn’t attacked by Afghan-protected terrorists; Canada is generally quite tolerant of other nations’ political and social systems; Canada doesn’t have any spare democracy to export. But the United States is quite eager to secure those pipelines, and they managed to arm-wrestle the government of Canada into participating in Afghanistan. It was Canada’s way of sucking up to its neighbour after refusing to participate in Iraq.

Ironically, toward the end of the Bush administration, the outcome was becoming more obvious. What many predicted before the first bomb fell in Afghanistan was beginning to occur – the West was going to lose. History has given abundant evidence that military victory in Afghanistan is as close to impossible as can be imagined. Yet time and again, foolish nations who think they know better give it a try anyway: the British, the Soviets, and now the Americans. The Obama administration seems eager to raise the stakes, apparently unable to assess the fallout of the last 7 years of failure.

You’d think they might learn, but apparently greed overwhelms common sense quite easily. And it is clear where that lust for acquisition lies – not in Afghanistan, about whom the West really doesn’t care a fig – but in Turkmenistan, with all that lovely natural gas.

Think about that the next time you see a car with one of those mindless jingoistic ‘We Support Our Troops’ ribbons. I don’t want the soldiers to die either; even less do I want innocent Afghans to die. But I wouldn’t shed a tear for the bastards who are willing to devastate Afghanistan just so they can get at the Turkmen gas fields.

Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada.  He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com

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