Barreling Around in Central Asia.(The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia)(Book Review)

The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia , by Lutz Kleveman (Atlantic Monthly, 288 pp., $24)

This ambitious book is an account of the international competition for oil and influence in one of history's most turbulent regions. Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase "the Great Game" for the 19th-century rivalry between Russia and Britain for empire in Asia; today, the players and the stakes are different, but the game continues -- perhaps deadlier than ever. The author, veteran German reporter Lutz Kleveman, explores the link between the quest for Caspian oil and the war on terror.

On the whole, the book impresses. Kleveman risked his neck traveling across Central Asia to interview a diverse cast of characters: diplomats and mullahs, businessmen and border guards. A compact style and a sharp eye for detail -- we learn how the dictator of Turkmenistan shuts down his capital for an annual all-you-can-eat "Day of the Melon" -- help the reader digest a huge and complex subject.

The world is interested in Central Asia because of oil. Vast reserves of petroleum -- up to 200 billion barrels -- lie beneath the Caspian Sea. These supplies easily rival OPEC's, making them a strategic and economic prize sought by three great powers: Russia, China, and the United States. Each has a preferred pipeline route and is determined to win the region's wily (and frequently corrupt) leaders to its side.

Moscow wants the oil pumped north so that Russia can profit from the economic domination of its former empire. (Most countries in the region have precious little else to export.) Beijing wants the oil pumped east into Xinjiang to power China's industrialization. Yet another player -- Tehran -- is offering to pump or swap the Caspian crude southward to tanker terminals on the Persian Gulf. Washington certainly does not want Central Asia's oil producers to be economically -- and politically -- dependent on Russia or China, and much less on Iran. U.S. policymakers favor a complicated route that would stretch from Azerbaijan's Baku oil fields, through Georgia, and then on to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Competition among these plans makes for rough diplomacy, and sometimes even war.

Kleveman's account of the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia offers just one example of the obscure but ruthless power struggles of the new great game. In the early 1990s, Moscow encouraged the Abkhaz ethnic minority to rebel against the central government. The war threatened to make the country too unstable for Western pipeline investors, and furnished the Kremlin with a pretext for marching Russian troops back into Georgia, this time as "peacekeepers." Fighting continues to this day under the drooping gaze of a U.N. observation force.

Russia does not officially recognize the Abkhaz separatists, but Kleveman says Moscow remains intimately involved with them. The rebels' self-styled foreign minister (whose office, Kleveman observes, contains seven framed pornographic pictures) is open about the Kremlin's support: "Moscow is an important ally for us . . . so what? Georgia is getting arms from America, is it not?" The response from a Georgian representative is also blunt: "We need the big oil pipeline so that we will continue to have the United States on our side against ...