Excavating hope from beneath the quagmire

Dire energy needs have made Pakistan, which is increasingly at odds with the United States over Washington’s disrespect for the civilian casualties of its so-called war on the al-Qaeda, accelerate construction and expedition of a 1,300-mile pipeline to carry natural gas from Iran.
Iran would provide Pakistan with 750 million cubic feet of gas a day from its massive offshore South Pars field in the Persian Gulf for the next 25 years, greatly alleviating Pakistan’s worsening energy deficit.
Despite strong pressure from Washington to abandon the plan, Pakistan recently put out tenders for the project, said officials of state-run Inter State Gas Systems, which will oversee development of the pipeline inside Pakistan.
They said ISGS hopes to start work on the $1.6 billion project by late 2012, with gas flowing by December 2014. Pakistan is having major problems securing financing for the segment of the line on its territory, which runs through violence-plagued Baluchistan province, to reach Pakistan’s power-short industrial North.
Pakistani officials led by Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, insisted that alternative financing would be forthcoming, says a report by FARS news agency.
And there once again, Iran extended its hand of aid and assistance to the Muslim nation of the neighboring Pakistan and offered to finance the Pakistani segment of the project. Iran has already built its 560-mile section of the pipeline up to the Pakistani border. The moves by Tehran and Islamabad to get the pipeline up and running and both sides have urgent economic as well as geostrategic reasons for wanting to get the pipeline built, is sure to intensify the growing strains between Washington and Islamabad.
The Americans have invested a lot of time and effort, and probably treasure as well, in trying to torpedo the pipeline plan, to pressure Iranian economy in a bid to force the country to give up its nuclear rights. “Predictably … Islamabad is convinced that the CIA, India’s intelligence agency RAW, the Israeli Mossad and Britain’s MI6 have been actively conspiring to get some sort of Greater Baluchistan to secede from the central government … and balkanize Pakistan,” the Asia Times observed. But as the anti-American mood in Pakistan darkens amid continued and increasing civilian casualties of the US drone attacks on the al-Qaeda and other militants, Islamabad is under immense domestic pressure to defy Washington. The pipeline project, first mooted in 1996, was originally intended to run 1,620 miles from Iran, which has the world’s second largest gas reserves after Russia, through Pakistan to India. It was known as IPI. But India, reportedly under intense pressure from Washington, gave up the project in 2009.
However, Indians have recently voiced enthusiasm to rejoin the project.
The bottom line is that Pakistan’s in dire need of Iran’s natural gas and, as relations with Washington sink lower by the day, Islamabad could stick with the Islamic Republic just to thumb its nose at the Americans. Pakistan only produces 30 percent of the gas it needs. It desperately needs the Iranian gas for power generation – at least 5,000 megawatts, equivalent to the current peak power shortage. Islamabad’s Petroleum Minister Asim Hussein has warned Pakistan’s entire energy system could collapse because the demand-supply gap has reached 2.2 billion cubic feet unless there’s a massive infusion of gas.