Opinion | Columnists
Not all roads lead to Washington
Ahmadinejad uses energy to reinforce relations with south Asian neighbours during his visit to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
- By Francis Matthew, Editor at Large
- Published: 00:30 May 1, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has just been on a quick and very friendly visit to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India. In all three countries, Iran's supply of energy and gas were the central topics of discussion.
This practical agenda for Ahmadinejad's trip meant that he was very welcome in all the three energy-hungry countries, although the Bush Administration was outraged to find Iran once again ignoring the agenda defined for it by America.
Iran has frequently shown that it is able to make its own way in the world and build its own foreign policy, despite intense pressure exerted by the United States.
Bush would love Iran to lose its allies across the Middle East and to be contained inside its borders, and for it to scale back its nuclear programme to become less ambitious, but Iran refuses to allow its priorities to be set by Bush.
For years Iran has pursued its own brand of regional relationships, helped greatly by the Unites States toppling two of its most implacable opponents: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussain in Iraq.
By now, Iran's support for its allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine have given it a far greater reach than it has ever had before.
But in trying to contain Iran over this trip, the United States managed to offend India by having a State Department deputy spokesman say at a daily press briefing that the USA "hoped that India" would call on Iran to "suspend their uranium enrichment", and asked India to "encourage" Iran to "end its unhelpful activities with respect to Iraq, with respect to support for terrorism," and to urge Iran to become more responsible.
All this statement did was to irritate India, which retorted that India did not need "any guidance" on how to manage its relationship with Iran, commenting that "both countries believe engagement and dialogue alone lead to peace."
In fact, as an example of how balanced India is, despite its good relationship with Iran, it voted against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) board meetings in September 2005 and March 2006.
This week in Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh insisted that Iran has to cooperate fully and openly with the IAEA, but agreed with Ahmadinejad that the IAEA is the only body it needs to talk to about its nuclear plans.
But the main topic between the two leaders was the apparently successful talks on restarting the project to build a 2,600 kilometre pipeline running from Iran through Pakistan to India, the IPI pipeline.
India imports more than 70 per cent of its energy needs and it needs a steady supply of gas and the pipeline as badly as Iran wants to have a steady market for its gas, and India is one of the world's largest markets for gas.
Previously in the trip, Ahmadinejad visited Pakistan and got agreement on several outstanding issues stopping the IPI pipeline, most of which were related to prices and transit fees. In Sri Lanka he launched a $1.2 billion upgrade of Sri Lanka's sole oil refinery, for which Iran will fund just over half the cost; and he also marked the start of a substantial hydro-electric irrigation project, also funded by Iran.
Product of the end-users
The idea of the Iran-Pakistan-India, IPI, pipeline has been around since 1994, but was halted thanks to the inability of all three countries to agree on how they would price the product for the end-users in Pakistan and India, and on transit fees.
Clearly many such international pipelines exist around the world, and the pricing issue should not have been difficult to sort out if there were political agreement that the project should go ahead.
Much more difficult than the technical issue of pricing was the implicit admission in building such a pipeline that the three states were binding themselves together in a long-term strategic link. The IPI pipeline means that secular and democratic India will be closely tied to Islamic Iran and its long-term enemy Pakistan.
For the pipeline to work, it needs all three states to recognise that their need to move gas is more important than their obvious and deep political divides, and part of the pipeline agreement will be clauses requiring the pipeline to continue regardless of any political disruption to any of their relations.
This trip of Ahmadinejad's appears to have brought the political agreement back on track, and now the IPI pipeline looks as through it may happen. Iran needs a long term and accessible market into which to sell its gas, and India looks set to continue decades of record economic growth, fuelling strong demand for energy.
These two requirements are made for each other, and Pakistan has the good fortune to be in the middle. And this is all happening without Washington's involvement, as Asian countries get on with their own affairs and do what they need to do.
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