Could TAPI Bring Peace to Afghanistan?

As expected, on December 13, leaders from Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India attended the groundbreaking for the TAPI pipeline project in Mary, Turkmenistan. The 1,814 kilometer pipeline project is expected to cost at least $10 billion and will route through some of the most unstable parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The groundbreaking on Sunday was attended by Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov,  Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and Indian Vice President Mohammad Hamid Ansari.

Beyond concerns of political support and financing for the project, security looms as the biggest challenge.

The gas for the pipeline is to be sourced from the massive Galkynysh field in southeastern Turkmenistan. The pipeline is to run across the border into Afghanistan’s Herat province, and then traverse southeast through Farah and Helmand provinces following the Herat-Kandahar highway and enter Kandahar province. At the Pakistani border, the pipeline will enter Balochistan near the provincial capital of Quetta and route due east until it enters India and ends in the town of Fazilka. This route could change, but there are only so many ways to get from Turkmenistan to India.

Afghanistan poses the biggest, though far from the only, security challenge. In Herat in December, fighting between Taliban factions drove people from their homes. In October, Taliban overran the district through which the Herat-Kandahar highway runs in Farah province (though the Afghan government denied it). Helmand has seen heavy fighting in the last year as well. In October, the Taliban put pressure on Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital (through which the highway runs), and in mid-December it was reported that the Taliban had seized control of Khan Neshin, in the province’s south. In Kandahar, the Taliban attacked the international airport on December 8 killing at least 50 people.

This isn’t to say that over the life of the TAPI project, the security situation in Afghanistan won’t stabilize. But if recent history serves as a preview, there is little room to hope for vast improvements.

Still, the project’s groundbreaking was nonetheless rife with hopeful statements.

“TAPI is designed to become a new effective step towards the formation of the modern architecture of global energy security, a powerful driver of economic and social stability in the Asian region,” Berdimuhamedov said. Sharif commented that the project “will usher in a new era,” while Ansari said it was “the first step to the unification of the region.” Ghani highlighted the political will behind the project.

According to several Afghan and Pakistani news outlets, Pakistani Minister of Defense Khawaja Asif (who is also the minister of water and power) made some interesting comments during an interview with BBC Urdu. Asif reportedly said that Pakistan could use its influence with Taliban leaders to keep the pipeline safe. Per Pakistan’s The Nation, Asif said, “We will wield all our positive influence to ensure our interests… the project is also important for Afghanistan and that is why no Afghan stakeholder will oppose it.”

The Nation also says that Asif made reference to “the case of American oil company Unicol [sic] whose own Afghanistan pipeline was protected by the Taliban when the group was in power between 1996 and 2001.”

There’s plenty to unpack in that line.

Unocal, a California-based oil company (now a subsidiary of Chevron), did head up a consortium intent on building a pipeline across Afghanistan in the late 1990s. The project, however, failed miserably. In late 1997, Unocal was negotiating with the Taliban to build the pipeline and even launched a program with the University of Nebraska at Omaha to train Afghans to construct it. The Washington Post reported in January 1998 that “The Taliban stands to collect $50 million to $100 million a year in transit fees if the pipeline is built, according to Marty F. Miller, a Unocal vice president.”

But through 1998, the arrangements deteriorated, ultimately collapsing entirely, eclipsed by events. In February, Gazprom pulled out of the project. By August, the United States was launching cruise missile strikes at al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At that point, Unocal stopped planning, saying that a stable government in Afghanistan was a necessity to see the project through.

“We don’t have an agreement. We aren’t even sure who to negotiate an agreement with,” a Unocal spokesman said, according to a Wall Street Journal article at the time.

Needless to say, the same circumstances that doomed Unocal’s dream pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan remain in play today. Complicating the idea of negotiating protection of the pipeline with the Taliban is that the group isn’t even the unified front it once was. The strains of a 15-year insurgency, the death of its leader (and the two-year cover up of that death), infighting over a successor (plus the possible death of that successor), and the appearance of other movements (such as ISIS) in the theater have made such a nuanced negotiation nearly impossible. Who would those backing TAPI talk to? And what kind of guarantee could they get that a different faction wouldn’t be hostile to the project?