There's oodles of information on the pipeline out there John.
Try this link, this guy wrote a book on it:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q7.htmlSeymour Hersh wrote a book on it, too, called The Price of Oil.
To give you more details, between 1991-1997, major U.S. oil companies including ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco, Shell and Enron directly invested billions in cash bribing heads of state in Kazakhstan to secure equity rights in the huge oil reserves in these regions. The oil companies further commited to future direct investments in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. Not being willing to pay exorbitant prices to Russia to use Russian pipelines, the major oil companies had no way to recoup their investments. [Source: "The Price of Oil" by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, July 9, 2001 - The Asia Times, "The Roving Eye Part I Jan. 26, 2002.]
On December 4, 1997 representatives of the Taliban were invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Subsequent reports indicated that the negotiations failed, allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4, 1997]
On February 12, 1998 Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca -- later to become a special ambassador to Afghanistan -- testified before the House that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan, the trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee:
http://www.house.gov/international_relations/105th/ap/wsap212982.htm