Northampton, Mass.

I'm glad Peter Bergen ["Waltzing With Warlords," Jan. 1] found things to approve of in my book Kabul in Winter. But I'm dumbfounded that he charges me with "sometimes" displaying "a tendency to see sinister conspiracies where they don't exist"--because I give a brief account of the influence of US oil interests on our Afghanistan policy. Surely this is old news.

The prospect of US oilmen building a pipeline from the Caspian fields to Pakistan by way of Afghanistan (thus circumventing Iran) was one reason the Clinton Administration tried to do business with the Taliban. Twice in 1997 Taliban leaders traveled to Washington (and Texas) to discuss the pipeline with officials of the State Department and the US oil conglomerate Unocal. Unocal itself disclosed that it spent between $15 million and $20 million on the initial stages of the project, including the salaries of two consultants hired to negotiate the deal: Hamid Karzai, now President of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalilzad, then a Pentagon planner, later Ambassador to Afghanistan and currently Ambassador to Iraq. Khalilzad's predecessor in Afghanistan, George W. Bush's first ambassador there, was Robert Finn, well-known Caspian oil expert. These facts, well documented by others, apparently suggest a "sinister conspiracy"--Bergen's term, not mine.

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