uletabad gas field, the proposed route for the pipeline (about 1060 miles) provides for its passing through Herat and Kandahar (Afghanistan), Quetta (capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province) and Multan (Pakistan) to connect to the Fazilka region (India) on the Indian-Pakistani border.
As reported, the agreements do not deal with security and funding issues. Nevertheless, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is known to have undertaken its financing, which is by no means a guarantee. Funding for constructing the TAPI can only begin when the pipeline’s route is secured. This is the December agreements’ major weakness, acknowledged by all concerned parties including the Afghan government. The day after the signing ceremony, Wahidullah Shahrani, Afghanistan’s Minister of Mines and Industries, announced his government’s plan to deploy up to 7,000 troops to secure the pipeline. Revealing the recognition of the security challenge facing the pipeline’s construction and its normal operation, the announcement cannot possibly be equated to settling the security problem for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the Afghan military’s numerous weaknesses arising from various factors. Despite about a decade of training, the Afghan military has proven to be no match for the Taliban and its allies, leaving the army incapable of carrying out its major missions without the NATO-led military forces’ support.
Another observation has been the difficulty of protecting pipelines, the white-elephants of the infrastructure world, through conflict-affected regions. The well-known examples include the Turkish military’s failure to end frequent attacks by the Kurdish separatist armed group (PKK) on a section of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline (BTC) passing through southern Turkey, resulting in numerous closures of the pipeline since its launch in 2006. It is noteworthy that Turkey’s military enjoys NATO status as the Alliance’s second largest military force. To the south of Turkey, the US-led coalition forces and the Iraqi military, in what is a far better military-preparedness situation than their Afghan counterpart, have also failed to end attacks on the Iraqi oil and gas pipelines—a constant target of the Iraqi insurgent groups. Therefore, it is a sound assertion that the Afghan military’s record, even if it is fully supported by the NATO-led forces, will not be any better than its Turkish, Iraqi and American counterparts.
The BTC pipeline, which passes through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey—each having security problems of their own—evinces that pipelines can be built even in territories under the worst security situations. For this reason, the TAPI can be built at a high cost, both in financial terms and in terms measured by the potential loss of human life, if its proponents are prepared to pay these costs. This example also demonstrates that a pipeline can be kept operational, albeit at unjustifiable costs as measured by the loss of human life, debilitation or destruction of physical infrastructure, or even environmental damage and destruction, if the owner/operators are willing to burden these costs. Hence, the TAPI, which will surely become a major target for the Taliban and its allies, could be kept operational to some extent depending on the repair of damage to it following each attack. However, given the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, the TAPI’s realization and operation will be a herculean task surely unachievable without the direct involvement of the NATO-led forces, although even then a better result than that of the Iraqi case cannot be guaranteed. In fact, the reluctance of the NATO countries to significantly expand their presence in Afghanistan and their efforts to decrease their direct engagement in combat missions suggest that the TAPI’s realization and operation will be far more challenging than those of BTC.
Given the TAPI’s presumed high price tag and the predictable uncertainty about its uninterrupted operation once constructed, one wonders why the TAPI is being promoted when an alternative project lackin