Taliban Assures Tapi Safety

The Taliban has said that its recent gains in western Afghanistan does not threaten the safety of the Tapi gas pipeline that will cross through the war-ravaged country, according to a Voice of America (VOA) report published May 19.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told VOA that his group has already pledged to co-operate to protect the Tapi pipeline, noting that it is a "national project" that will ultimately benefit the Afghan people.

"We have an idea of places in Farah through which the pipeline is to pass and we will always try to keep the fighting from those areas," Mujahid said. The total length of Tapi will be 1,814 km, of which 214 km run through Turkmenistan; 774 km through Afghanistan; and 826 km through Pakistan to the border with India.

Work on the Afghan section of the Tapi pipeline started late-February with the groundbreaking ceremony taking place in Herat city. The ceremony was attended by Afghan and Turkmen presidents, Ashraf Ghani and Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, along with Pakistan's prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and India's junior foreign affairs minister MJ Akbar.

Turkmenistan, which will supply gas to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India with an 85% stake in the $10bn project, started work on its territory in 2015. The pipeline is projected to transfer 33bn m³/yr of gas from Turkmenistan’s giant Galkynysh gas field to participating countries by 2020, but has been repeatedly delayed by civil war in Afghanistan. The economics are also now threatened by the availability of LNG in India and Pakistan, not considered a possibility when Tapi was first considered.