Afghan Oil

The oil in which the late King Nadir Khan of Afghanistan boiled an opposing general and all his staff (TIME, Sept. 2, 1929) was castor oil, a primitive product of the country. Mineral oil is too rare in Afghanistan to be used as an ointment of royal justice. Last week in Berlin, how ever, handsome Foreign Minister Faiz Mohammed Khan signed an agreement which may eventually make pastoral, wild Afghanistan one of the major oil producing regions of the East. To Inland Exploration Co., controlled by Seaboard Oil of Delaware, Faiz granted exploration rights for 75 years to every foot of Afghanistan's 270,000 square miles.

Still subject to the approval of the Afghan National Assembly, which normally meets in May, Inland s concession was greeted by oilmen from New Jersey to the Dutch East Indies as a provisional triumph for U. S. oil. It would have been less provisional were Afghanistan better recognized as a potential oil source. Until a few years ago neither oil prospectors nor anyone else traveled freely among the rifle-bearing Afghan hillmen. The potentiality of Afghan oil fields is something presumably best known to Inland. In Manhattan last week Seaboard's President John Meston Lovejoy, who is also president of Inland Exploration Co., remarked with restraint that the concession was an opportunity to spend a lot of money. Said cautious President Lovejoy: "This is a concession for exploration as well as for exploitation. . . . No oil testings have ever been made. ... If the agreement goes through it will take years to lay out the territory and test for oil.'' This temperate talk notwithstanding, two facts remained clear, 1) A country famed since the dawn of history for resist ance to imperial exploitation or more recently high-powered corporate enterprise had accepted an arrangement which in other countries of the Near East has gen erally meant both. 2) Beneficiary of the deal was neither Britain, whose Near East oil holdings are richest in Iraq and Persia, nor Russia, which has shared Britain's interest in Afghanistan as a buffer state northwest of India, but a first-string U. S.

oil company. And whether or not Afghanistan suddenly disclosed "probably the greatest untapped oil reserves in the world," as the Associated Press reported from London, Seaboard had agreed to try to build up production in ten years to the considerable flow of 40,000,000 bbl.

Seaboard's cellar door into the Middle East opened only after nearly two years of patient palaver in Afghanistan's moun tain capital of Kabul, in Geneva and in Berlin. Able diplomat in these negotiations was Charles Calmer Hart, oldtime Washington correspondent of the Portland Oregonian, U. S. Minister to Albania un der President Coolidge, Minister to Persia under President Hoover. Then the only trained newsman in the diplomatic service, subtle, cheerful Charlie Hart provided the State Department with some of its best official reading in his reports on such mat ters as the development started by Stand ard Oil of California in 1931 on Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf, the Persian Government's cancellation of Anglo-Iran ian's great 500,000 sq. mi. concession in 1932. In making Seaboard's deal with Afghanistan he was assisted by a U. S.

geologist named Frederick Gardner Clapp who was at one time "oil adviser" to the Persian Government.

Significant in the agreement signed last week by Messrs. Hart & Clapp and Faiz Mohammed Khan was a proviso that the concession company must be entirely American. U. S. engineers have been well regarded in the East ever since they helped complete Iraq Petroleum's 1,200 mi. pipe line across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean in 1935. More important than that, and perhaps most important for the concession to Seaboard, is the fact that Afghans are still skittish about British interference. European-minded King Amanullah was chased out in 1929 partly because he tried to force pants on his tribesmen. His successor, Nadir Khan, was assassinated in 1933 after he had agreed to let Britain extend the Khyber Railway to Kabul.

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