UNOCAL Vice-President, Chris Taggart, reportedly termed it a
‘positive development’ (Reuters, 1 October 1996). UNOCAL put
Robert Oakley on its board, and Delta employed Charles Santos to
advance its interests. Neither was to benefit from the connection.
For both UNOCAL and the Taliban, the relationship proved
frustrating. For the Taliban, the relationship with UNOCAL deliv-
ered neither a stream of income nor wider American support. Their
expectations were hopelessly unrealistic: according to Rashid, they
expected ‘the company which wins the contract to provide elec-
tricity, gas, telephones, roads – in fact, virtually a new infrastruc-
ture for a destroyed country’. The Taliban’s negotiating team with
the oil companies was made up of ‘half a dozen mullahs with a
madrassa education and one engineering student who has never
practiced engineering’, and the Taliban’s Minister for Mines and
Energy ‘was a carpet dealer in Saudi Arabia before joining the
movement’ (Rashid, 1997b: 10). From UNOCAL’s point of view,
the Taliban proved unable to deliver the level of security which
would be required to permit such a project to go ahead – and given
the vulnerability not only of the pipeline itself, but also the ex-
patriate staff who would inevitably have been involved in its con-
struction, that level of security was extremely high. As a result,
according to another UNOCAL Vice-President, Marty Miller,
‘lenders have said the project at this moment is just not finance-
able’ (Reuters, 11 March 1998); and in August 1998, the company
suspended its involvement in the project. In the face of these prob-
lems, the Taliban sought to maintain lines of communication with
one of UNOCAL’s competitors, the Argentinian company Bridas,
but ultimately that avenue proved unrewarding as well, and the
Taliban’s hopes of securing a free revenue stream through bargain-
ing with major multinational consortia simply slipped away
(Rashid, 2000: 157–82).
The UN and the Taliban
The UN as an organisation found the Taliban extraordinarily diffi-
cult to handle, not least because of its own character. The ‘United
The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 245