There's no oil in Afg as far as I know. At least it wasn't discovered when US launched Op Anaconda.
It isn't about oil in Afg directly.
American Afghanistan policy from 1979 to 1991 was dominated by fear of the Iranian revolution, which Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, feared in part as “a Soviet threat to Persian Gulf oil fields.” Newsweek at the time wrote how “Control of Afghanistan would put the Russians within 350 miles of the Arabian Sea, the oil lifeline of the West and Japan. Soviet warplanes based in Afghanistan could cut the lifeline at will.”
In his argument for a “Eurasian geostrategy,” Brzezinski is quite clear that what makes the region of Central Asia “geopolitically significant” is above all its importance “as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.” Brzezinski noted that these oil and gas reserves will become even more important as world demand increases by an estimated more than 50 percent in twenty years, “with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East."
The following article from the Foreign Military Studies Office of Fort Leavenworth, which was published three months before the World Trade Center attacks:
"The Caspian Sea appears to be sitting on yet another sea-a sea of hydrocarbons. Western oilmen flocking to the area have signed multibillion-dollar deals.
U.S. firms are well-represented in the negotiations, and where U.S. business goes, U.S. national interests follow. . . . The presence of these oil reserves and the possibility of their export raises new strategic concerns for the United States and other Western industrial powers.
As oil companies build oil pipelines from the Caucasus and Central Asia to supply Japan and the West, these strategic concerns gain military implications. . . . The uninterrupted supply of oil to global markets will continue to be a key factor in international stability."
Oil was an underlying U.S. concern in Afghanistan. As NSC energy expert Sheila Heslin told Congress in 1997, U.S. policy in Central Asia was “to in essence break Russia’s monopoly control over the transportation of oil [and gas] from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply.” The same double goal of retrieval and denial was reiterated one year later by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson: “
This is about America’s energy security, which depends on diversifying our sources of oil and gas worldwide. It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values.”
American oil companies have since 1995 been united in a private Foreign Oil Companies group to lobby in Washington for an active U.S. policy to promote their interests in the Caspian basin. The conspicuous influence of petroleum money in the administration of oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was hardly less under their predecessors. A former CIA officer complained about the influence of the oil lobby in the Clinton administration:
"Heslin’s sole job, it seemed, was to carry water for an exclusive club known as the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . Another thing I learned was that Heslin wasn’t soloing.
Her boss, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, headed the interagency committee on Caspian oil policy, which made him in effect the government’s ambassador to the cartel, and Berger wasn’t a disinterested player.
He held $90,000 worth of stock in Amoco, probably the most influential member of the cartel. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington DC."
