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| India-Pakistan |
| How can TAPI and IPI save Pakistan? |
| 2008-04-30 |
| Pakistan, Afghanistan and India have signed a “Government Framework Agreement” in Islamabad to initiate the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project to supply gas to the three “downstream” countries. India has formally joined a project that was earlier called TAP without India. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is pushing the project whose feasibility was already approved in 2003. Later, it was discovered that the project would be profitable to Turkmenistan only if India joined to take 60 percent of the supply. India wanted to join the project but was sitting on a see-saw about actually formalising its entry into the deal. Are we out of the wilderness on a plan that was set on foot in the early 1990s and got snagged in global politics? The Taliban decided to take on the world instead of taking the American bait on the Turkmen pipeline, and the project was laid off after a “hopeful” American company left Kabul. An alternative emerged in the shape of the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, but once again got snagged in international politics. Iran decided to take on the world on its nuclear programme, which scared India off and left Pakistan alone carrying the bag while Tehran played tough on price-fixing. Fear of American sanctions scared off prospective financiers like the ADB and suddenly IPI began to slip and TAP came on line again as TAPI. The TAPI pipeline will run from the Daulatabad gasfield to Afghanistan, from there it will go alongside the highway running from Herat to Kandahar, and then via Quetta and Multan in Pakistan to India. The final destination will be the Indian town of Fazilka. It will supply 33 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas annually, its major customer being India. There will be six compressor stations along the entire length of the pipeline and it will have to be guarded by the states they pass through, apart from the pipeline. The largest stretch will fall to the share of Pakistan, between Quetta and Multan and the Indian border. The cost of the project was just over $3 billion in 2003; today it is $7.6 billion. The supply is to begin in 2015 if TAPI too is not sabotaged. The Indian press says that IPI is as good as dead and that TAPI is on. Most officials get riled at the idea that the states have backed off because of the American threat to apply sanctions to whosoever helps in building the IPI, but the ADB is clear in its mind that the IPI is not feasible in the current circumstances. And it is feasible only if India joins it. This applies to TAPI as well. After India dilly-dallied, Pakistan tried to revive the IPI by getting China in on the pipeline at the cost of creating an eighth wonder of the world in the shape of a high-altitude pipeline into Sinkiang, once called High Asia. India and Pakistan need gas to survive. India is actually more desperate because of its steady high growth rate but its efforts to get gas from the east from Bangladesh and Burma have not brought fruit. When it glanced towards the West it saw Pakistan sitting athwart a geo-strategic terrain demanding a solution to Kashmir as a pre-condition. So it decided to build a fleet of carrier ships for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from Iran and Central Asia via Iran. But developments inside Pakistan have damaged Pakistan’s geopolitical importance. And both Iran (on price) and India (on transit fee) have pointedly negated Pakistan’s geopolitical advantage of being in the middle. The military textbooks on geopolitics therefore need to be revised. The IPI has also become subject to non-credibility because of the depredations of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) which blows up pipelines that already exist in the province. The last time the federal government talked to the political parties in Balochistan through two senate committees, the consensus was that there should be no new cantonments built in the province, a prospect without which the IPI would have been jeopardised. Now the new chief minister of Balochistan wants his province to be given sovereignty under the 1940 Lahore Resolution which means he wants the “sovereign” right to decide the IPI and the not the federation. This is easier said than done. The TAPI pipeline too will come from Kandahar and enter Balochistan to reach Quetta from where it will proceed towards Multan. So once again the BLA will target it, and without proper military supervision, the pipeline will not be safe. The fact to be kept in mind is that both Afghanistan and Pakistan are domains of disorder lying between two economically upward-mobile regions. Both are “proud”, which means inclined to isolationism and deaf to pragmatic advice from outside. Afghanistan is only reluctantly better controlled because of foreign occupation, but Pakistan is fractured in opinion and the writ of the state. Therefore one conclusion is inescapable: unless both IPI and TAPI become good devices of leverage on, and self-realisation in, Pakistan to set its house in order and become a normal state, the projects are doomed |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #1 Wait till the Bugtis and the Mazaris learn about these planned pipelines through their lands... |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-04-30 07:06 |