Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline Still a Dream

[unhappycamper]

Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline Still a Dream
by Ted Rall
Published on Monday, September 20, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

KARA-TEPE, AFGHANISTAN - There is no pipeline. There probably won't be one. Yet the pipeline-that-will-never-exist is one of the main reasons that hundreds of thousands of Afghans and two thousand American soldiers are dead.

Among my goals during my late-summer trip to Afghanistan was to find the construction site for the Trans-Afghanistan oil and gas pipeline (TAP). Also known as Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan, TAP would carry the world's biggest new energy reserves, which are in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan's sections of the landlocked Caspian Sea, across Afghanistan to a deep-sea port in Pakistan. (A modified version of the plan, TAPI, would add an extension to India.)

Some background:

The idea dates to the mid-1990s. Unocal, owner of the Union 76 gas station chain, led a consortium of oil companies that negotiated with the Taliban government. Among their consultants was Zalmay Khalilzad, who later served as Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations. (While in Kabul, Khalilzad engineered the U.S.-backed coup that installed Hamid Karzai-also a former Unocal consultant-over the wishes of the loya jirga.

As you'd expect, political instability has been the primary obstacle preventing a "New Silk Road" of oil and gas to flow across Central and South Asia. The planned route for TAP follows Afghanistan's "ring road" from the northwestern city of Herat across soaring mountains and bleak deserts through Kandahar province, the heart of Taliban territory. Hundreds of warlords and regional commanders would have to be paid protection money.