- ASHGABAT (Reuters) - 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- MORE THAN JUST A PIPELINE
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "This will increase our economic cooperation in
the region and help the security situation," Niyazov told his fellow
signatories.
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