Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan signed an agreement on Friday to build a multi-billion dollar natural gas pipeline connecting their states, dismissing fears that regional security could threaten the project.
The 875-mile line, costed at $2.5 billion, is designed to link the vast gas reserves of Turkmenistan with Pakistan and, eventually, India, and has been a pet project of Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov since the mid-1990s.
But the only way to open the South Asian market to Turkmenistan's reserves, the world's third largest, is across Afghanistan, and decades of instability there kept the project on the drawing board.
Asked after the signing ceremony if the security situation in Afghanistan meant that the pipeline was now a realistic option, Afghan President Hamid Karzai replied: "Very much so -- I believe it can be considered among the best in the region. Sure."
Following the signing, a feasibility study will be drawn up, with $1.5 million in funding provided by the Asian Development Bank, and due to be presented in June 2003.
Niyazov on Friday invited Karzai and Pakistan's Prime Minister, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who also signed the accord, to return to Ashgabat next September to review the feasibility study and decide how to proceed.
If the line goes ahead -- and the issues of funding it and drawing up a consortium to develop it are far from resolved -- it will run from the Davletbad gas field in southern Turkmenistan and Herat in western Afghanistan before swinging across the country to Kandahar in the south.
From there it will run to Multan in Pakistan, with one potential future spur leading to the port of Gwadar, where a gas liquefaction plant could be built, and another to New Delhi.
MORE THAN JUST A PIPELINE
With Turkmenistan profiting from a new market and Pakistan from a new source of supply, Afghanistan stands to gain from transit fees. But Karzai said on Friday he saw far more than that coming out of the line.
"It will also facilitate the construction of highways, it will improve communications, it will eventually lead to the construction of railways in the region...It's a major undertaking for our region."
Most Turkmen gas exports now go to Russia, with much of the volume onsold to Ukraine, although there is also a small line running to Iran. Ashgabat has long wanted to develop new markets.
But instability in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion of 1979, followed by civil war and the advent of the hard-line Taliban regime, made the project untenable.
The Taliban's fall in late 2001 and the arrival of the Karzai administration swiftly put the plan back on the agenda, and Niyazov, Karzai and Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf have held several meetings to push the pipeline forward.
Despite widespread cynicism over security in Afghanistan and the plausibility of nuclear rivals India and Pakistan agreeing to allow reliable gas flows across their heavily-armed border, all parties were upbeat on Friday.
"This will increase our economic cooperation in the region and help the security situation," Niyazov told his fellow signatories.
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