Afghanistan - A Pipeline, Peace And Many Spoilers

Peace negotiations in Afghanistan had long stalled. But that recently changed in a surprising way. Secret negotiations between many parties must have taken place to suddenly achieve these two results:

• Taliban Vows to Protect TAPI Gas Pipeline Project - VOA, February 24
• Afghanistan's Ghani offers talks with Taliban 'without preconditions' - Reuters, February 28

Both, the Taliban support for TAPI as well as President Ghani's offer are new. Just two weeks ago Ghani still rejected unconditional talks.

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The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline has been negotiated about since the early 1990s. It is supposed to bring gas from Central Asia to Pakistan and India. 

Only Russian pipelines are currently connecting Turkmenistan and its large gas reserves to its export markets. This is one reason why the U.S. always pushed for the project. The U.S. company Unocal was heavily involved. One of its consultants was Zalmay Khalilzad who later became U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and then Iraq.

The pipeline project has a long unruly history. It was a major reason why the U.S. wanted to topple the Taliban. 9/11 gave it a pretext to invade Afghanistan and by late 2001 the Taliban government had ended.

But the $10 billion TAPI project took another 14 years before the first pipes were laid. After its Taliban client government in Afghanistan had been toppled Pakistan became hostile to the project. There were also disputes about prices and Indian-Pakistani hostilities. Pakistan then negotiated over gas supplies from Iran. But the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline was never finished. The U.S. had pressed on India to not commit to buying from Iran. Pakistan is now back at supporting TAPI. It is probably the reason why the Taliban have agreed to protect the project within the areas they control. But I suspect that there is more behind the move. Some wider agreement must have been found about future of Afghanistan. How many cabinet seats can the Taliban claim? How much influence is Pakistan allowed to have?

Construction for the TAPI pipeline in Turkmenistan began in 2015. Construction in Afghanistan started this year on February 24. The U.S. is in control of the financing of the whole project.

One should not bet on any date for the final commissioning of the pipeline. The U.S. support for the pipeline is aimed at diminishing Russian and Chinese influence in Central Asia. An analysis of the larger markets points at additional potential spoilers of the project:

TAPI is in direct competition not only to the Iranian IPI project, but also to LNG exporters, among which are such countries as Qatar, Australia, USA, Canada and Russia, together they export an estimated 30bn m³/yr to India.

By pursuing the TAPI pipeline the U.S. is trying to dominate in an area that is far from its shores and where it has little control. More than 25 years after the project was first envisioned it will still require tons of money, years of work and a lot of luck to succeed. There are many parties who might want to interfere with the project and who know the area much better than the U.S. ever will.

The biggest risk though is the aggressive militant approach the U.S. is still taking towards the Taliban. The intense U.S. air campaign against their interests and operations continues with little gain. Meanwhile the Taliban control nearly half of the country. A series of attacks against the central government in Kabul has undermined the public confidence in the Ghani government. Just today another suicide bomb hit the capital.

The recent announcements show that the peace negotiations and the pipeline are intimately connected. If the talks fail, the Taliban support for the pipeline will end too. If the pipeline does not become operable, the U.S. may finally leave. Many people may want to achieve that.

Posted by b on March 2, 2018 at 03:22 PM | Permalink

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