Turkmenistan agrees on gasline to India

Avaza, Turkmenistan: Turkmenistan has agreed to supply natural gas to Pakistan and India in deals that offer major economic benefits but depend on building and defending a US-backed pipeline across unstable Afghanistan.

The route, particularly the 735km leg through the Afghan provinces of Herat and Kandahar, will need billions of dollars in funding. It faces significant security problems as the Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) alliance plans to hand control of Afghanistan to Kabul's own security forces by the middle of next year.

Turkmenistan's state gas company Turkmengaz signed gas sales and purchase agreements with Pakistan's Inter State Gas Systems and Indian state-run utility Gail (Gas |Authority of India Ltd).

"The implementation of this project will give a powerful impetus to the social and economic development of all the participant countries," Turkmen Deputy Prime Minister Baimurad Hojamukhamedov said before the signing ceremony in Avaza.

Hunger for gas supplies

India and Pakistan are both hungry for gas supplies and Turkmenistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union, is keen to free itself from reliance on gas exports to Russia.

Lilit Gevorgyan, analyst at IHS Global Insight, said that while the pipeline could be a lucrative commercial project, it would run through more than one high-security risk country, "which puts the actual construction under a big question mark". The idea of the Tapi pipeline, an acronym formed from the initials of the four countries through which it would pass, was first raised in the mid-1990s but construction has yet to begin.

Turkmen officials have said the proposed 1,735km pipeline could carry one trillion cubic metres of gas over a 30-year period, or 33 billion cubic metres a year.

Turkmenistan, a desert country of 5.5 million which borders Iran, is viewed by human rights bodies as one of the world's most secretive and repressive countries.

But Turkmen President Kurbanguly BerdyMukhamedov has moved in recent years to warm ties with the West, whose political support and investment he needs to lay alternative gas export routes.

Security and costs

The major obstacle to the project is the stretch of pipeline that will run through Afghanistan. Nato set an "irreversible" course out of Afghanistan on Monday but US President Barack Obama admitted its plan to end the unpopular war in 2014 was fraught with dangers.

A Nato summit in Chicago endorsed an exit strategy that calls for handing control of Afghanistan to its security forces next year but left questions unanswered about how to prevent a slide into chaos and a resurgence of the Taliban after allied troops are gone. "We believe all the challenges the project faces can be managed or overcome," Daniel Stein, senior adviser to the US State Department's special envoy for Eurasian energy, said in Avaza yesterday.

But IHS Global Insight's Gevorgyan wrote in comments that "the project had a slim fighting chance in the past decade as Nato was still in Afghanistan".