Switch "natural gas" for "oil" then. I agree with your point that the politics of post-2001 Afghanistan are about FAR more than pipelines. But there are credible reports to suggest that in the 1990s US policy toward Afghanistan was based on energy and on keeping the Russians out, and that the CIA and some in the State Department saw the Taliban as a potentially stabilizing force that the US could live with. After 1998 that view dissipated, but it was there long enough to help direct actual aid to the Taliban, especially as they neared Kabul in '97.

And the world will live as one