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32 I Afghanistan falls to the Taliban bne September 2021
Route of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline
international conference “Central and South Asia: Regional connectivity. Chal- lenges and opportunities”, which took place in the Uzbek capital Tashkent,
he expressed the hope that a united Central Asia and South Asia, together with the whole Eurasian continent, could become a stable, economically developed and prosperous space.
Mirziyoyev talked of a vision in which a Termez-Mazar i Sharif-Kabul-Peshawar railway, running from Uzbekistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan, would become a key element of the architecture of interconnectedness between Central and South Asia. Uzbekistan is also ambitious to develop routes through Afghanistan that would give it access to the oceanic ports of Gwadar in Pakistan and Chaba- har in Iran for export-import purposes (a related cargo truck pilot run took place in June), but, even before the fall of Kabul, the Uzbek leadership was on record as acknowledging the ascendancy of the Taliban and appeared prepared to
Afghanistan has a treasure of minerals in the ground worth up to $1 trillion. China will be well positioned to develop the deposits for the cash-strapped new Taliban government.
Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Tali- ban’s Qatar-based negotiation team, told reporters in Ashgabat that his movement was offering “full support for the imple- mentation and security of TAPI and other developmental projects in our country.”
“We are trying to contribute to pros- perity of our people and development of our country by providing protec- tion to all projects,” Shaheen added.
The fortunes of Turkmenistan’s battered economy almost entirely hinge on gas sales to China. The other customer, Rus- sia, buys just small amounts. Thus, TAPI is a crucial element of the Turkmens’ search for badly needed additional revenues. The Taliban have also made encouraging noises as regards proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) high-voltage power transmis- sion lines and railways that would run from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, given the huge risk factor caused by investors’ lack of trust in a fundamentalist group like the Taliban (whose financial fortunes are built on producing opium and heroin), running a regime that has essentially emerged out of a military coup, Turkmenistan will have its work cut out securing
the financing for TAPI, TAP and other Afghanistan-dependent projects.
Portents of this difficulty were seen in June when Pakistan started intimat-
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ing that it would be unwilling to agree on a pricing mechanism for TAPI gas until the project was complete. The News, an English-language Pakistani newspaper, cited Tabish Gauhar, a special advisor to the prime minister,
“We are trying to contribute to prosperity
of our people and development of our country by providing protection to all projects”
as saying that Islamabad would not commit to paying for gas until it had crossed safely through Afghanistan.
“In case of a halt of gas supply to Pakistan in the wake of any subver- sive activity in Afghanistan, Pakistan will never take the risk at any cost,” Gauhar was quoted as having said.
Uzbekistan
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev is the point man for those ambitious to see the landlocked economies of Central Asia properly linked in trade and investment to those of South Asia, such as Pakistan and India. Of course, without stability in and cooperation from Afghanistan, the idea will remain a pipe dream.
But Mirziyoyev is nothing if not per- sistent and in mid-July, addressing the
envision a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan that would include the group prominently. That much emerged from an interview granted last month
by Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov to US journalist Dennis Wholey.
“We must know about Afghanistan that there is no ... military solution,” Komilov said in the English-language interview. “We think that this prob- lem must be solved on the base of mutual compromise between the existing government and the military opposition, the Taliban and others.”
After the conference that Mirziyoyev addressed, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, together with the US, which make up the C5+1 coun- tries, adopted a joint statement.