Major projects between Turkmenistan and Afghanistan have entered the implementation stage. What should we think about?
Just a week ago, several significant events took place at once on the border between Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, at the Islim-Cheshme border checkpoint near the city of Serkhetabad (formerly the city of Kushka).
The program was opened by the Chairman of the People's Council of Turkmenistan G. Berdumuhamedov and the acting head of the Cabinet of Ministers of Afghanistan M. Akhund.
For this event, the border checkpoint was even rebuilt into a conference hall of sorts, and it must be said that there really was a reason for such a large-scale event. To assess this, let's look at the list of related projects.
Firstly, this is the opening of the railway bridge across the Kushka River, which connects the section of the railway from the Afghan city of Turgundi to the Turkmen city of Serkhetabad. In the city of Turgundi itself, the construction of a logistics complex and the next section of the railway - to the city of Herat - has begun.
Secondly, it was announced that the substation, which will receive electricity from Turkmenistan, is ready to be put into operation. This is part of the TAP-500 energy system project (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan). It provides for the continuation of the construction of power transmission lines to the Afghan provinces of Herat, Faryab and further south.
TAP-500 is the second project to supply electricity to Afghanistan from Central Asia, the first is CASA-1000 from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Currently, in addition to these routes, Afghanistan also receives electricity from Iran and Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan is only in fourth place in terms of revenue.
The development of TAP-500 will give Ashgabat at least a double increase in income - up to 95-100 million dollars per year, transit to Pakistan can increase this value by another 1,5 times. For Ashgabat, these are significant amounts of export.
Thirdly, simultaneously with the power lines and substations, the laying of fiber-optic communication lines from Turkmenistan to the same city of Herat begins, but in addition to communications, Afghanistan here gets the opportunity to enter into potential electrification of railway communication to Pakistan, stretching the route along the western route, bypassing the inconvenient and expensive to lay through the central Afghan highlands and Paropamiz.
Well, fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, the construction of the Shatlyk-1 gas compressor station and the beginning of the construction of the Serkhetabad-Herat gas line were launched. This is the same TAPI gas project that had been discussed for fifteen years and could not get to the implementation stage - the situation in Afghanistan did not allow for attracting investment funds to it.
It turns out that in September of this year, a start was given to the practical implementation of large projects in the Afghan direction, which for a long time could not move beyond the stage of examinations and calculations. The beginning of such practical interaction of the parties was laid in the second half of last year and was consolidated in the spring of this year.
It should be noted that this concerns not only energy related to Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. There have already been many materials on VO devoted to logistics and raw materials projects of China (Wakhan route), investment agreements of Afghanistan and Iran.
All this is connected with the processes of consolidation of various Taliban structures (banned in the Russian Federation), distribution of powers and areas of responsibility between them, formation of a more or less working horizontal line in areas of income and provinces and vertical power.
These processes were associated (and this continues to this day) with the activation of both the anti-Taliban opposition (especially in recent months), and we can see what this is connected with, as well as military actions of a third force in Afghanistan - cells and structures associated with ISIS (banned in the Russian Federation).
The former need to get their piece of the Afghan pie, and for obvious reasons it is becoming smaller and smaller for them (and since 2021 the prospects have been, to put it mildly, modest). The latter are acting against both the Taliban and the opposition to them, preventing any development in Afghanistan at all, it is simply chaos for the sake of chaos.
In fact, the banned ISIS exists there for this chaos. The anti-Taliban opposition is trying to act both through military operations and through international negotiations, and they are doing better on the international track than inside Afghanistan.
In this regard, the launch of the designated projects is very important for the Taliban not so much in terms of the specific economic effect - this will only become apparent in a few years, but in the context of the issue of self-recognition as a stage of transition from de facto recognition to de jure recognition.
Within the framework of UN resolutions, the Taliban still has the characteristics of a terrorist organization, but this is already being abandoned at the country level. Moreover, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, China and Iran have done so.
The Taliban have already practically given the Pakistani government the “green light” to put pressure on the Pakistani Taliban itself, although they cannot and will not be able to completely refuse to interact with its structures (and this is impossible in principle).
In opposition to the Taliban, for obvious reasons, Tajikistan is working (although the CASA-1000 project has worked and will continue to work), there is uncertainty and outright lack of specificity in Moscow’s positions.
The US is against the official recognition of the Taliban, although in Afghanistan they themselves do not work purposefully for either side, having somewhat distanced themselves from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The European Union does not have a clear position, and will not have one until the US does.
On the other hand, since Europe is forced to compete with China for Central Asia, it is not in Brussels’ interests to counteract the ties between Afghanistan and Central Asia, and projects such as CASA-1000 or TAPI involve funds from supranational funds.
In this regard, the EU rather takes a neutral position on Afghanistan and will continue to do so until the “senior partner” decides on it.
It should be noted that the Afghan projects not described in this material are developments of the past ten to twelve years. Some of them, like the CASA-1000, were partially implemented earlier, the problem was that, as they say today, "there was no system."
The governments of H. Karzai and A. Ghani were more concerned with plans and calculations, discussions, under international financial aid, but in terms of implementation they usually referred to "threats". Later, in the last year and a half to two years of pro-American governance, the threats were already really significant.
The Taliban have simply taken most of the developments and are bringing them to fruition, using the tactic of water wearing away stone - with each new stage of infrastructure projects, their actual legitimacy grows. It also grows with each new international forum they try to attend. As we can see, this brings results.
It should be noted that in parallel with such "project legitimization" of the Taliban, other players are beginning to receive dividends (still small, but nevertheless) from a kind of "nests" that were previously left in the plan for work on the future market of Afghanistan. In addition to Iran and China, the role of Turkey should be noted here.
In particular, Turkish companies are involved in the extraction of Turkmen gas, which is intended for Afghanistan and will later go within the framework of TAPI; Turkish companies are involved in fiber optics and the TAP-500 project.
It would seem that the Turks themselves are not a gas power, not everything is great with energy and electricity, but there is (as usual) a nuance. Part of the Taliban movement are representatives of the political wing that has been solving issues in Qatar's Doha for many years, and Qatar for Ankara is, if not a brother, then a political and economic great friend. Similar political and economic preparations are used by other players.
For Russia, the launch of the projects in Turkmenistan and Afghanistan is a significant event, because, whatever one may say, we are not only “Eurocentric” by inertia, but also, as one aptly put it, “gas-centric.” Despite Turkmenistan’s real neutrality and its policy of “active non-alignment,” this state is one of the leaders in terms of natural gas reserves.
In this regard, the TAPI project will rather work in favor of the Russian inertial raw materials policy than in the negative. The estimated volume of TAPI is 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year, and Ashgabat has been targeting these volumes and this revenue for several years now. The logic there is quite transparent, because the fourth line to China is 15 billion cubic meters, "swap contracts" to Iran and further to the EU through Turkey sound very loud politically, but the real potential there is still ±10 billion cubic meters per year, and this still needs to be tested in practice, since there are too many participants in this process.
TAPI is very important for Ashgabat and at the same time will allow Turkmenistan to set a higher bar in trades in other directions. Here TAPI is more of a competitor to the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, which the Iranian side has long since completed, while the Pakistani side is dragging its feet with implementation. Things have already reached the point that Tehran has announced that it is giving Islamabad some time "to think about it," and then will file a case in international arbitration. If the volumes are not allocated to Pakistan, Iran will offer them to Iraq and Turkey, but in this case it will buy less from Turkmenistan. Of course, not everything is so straightforward there, but the general principle is exactly this - everything is interconnected.
So, Turkmen gas projects in this direction are quite neutral for us. The problem for Russia here is of a slightly different nature. Since the EU and China are now entering the stage of practical competition for Central Asia (O. Scholz's visit here is significant, but this is the subject of a separate article), then this competition will not even go along the lines of loans as such, but along the lines of creating technological production.
Thus, sooner or later, Afghanistan's raw materials problems will be solved by its neighbors, but the neighbors will also take over this new market, although in Russia the words Afghanistan and sales market usually have little connection with each other in expert assessments.
For now, we are supplying significant volumes of fuel there. The CSTO program to strengthen the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan is also being revived. This certainly cannot be called a senseless waste of money, this is the right direction of work, but on the scale of the overall processes that are happening around Afghanistan, this is only a small part, only indirectly related to the future economic development of the region.
There is no doubt that Afghanistan still needs us for insurance. No one knows yet what the US strategic pause in this region will mean in the future. For now, this is so, but after next January, American international policy will also be reassembled from different elements and different periods into something common and integral.
Even the US itself is not trying to guess what it will be like. Accordingly, Afghanistan will also strive to maintain fairly close ties with us in terms of politics. However, politics is politics, but what will we be able to offer to this market in some time? Afghanistan and Pakistan are a large consumer, it is undesirable to miss them, but what will we work with?
Here Russia needs to somehow decide, while there is such a political reserve and synergy of interests. We can work on this as Turkey did, for example, or we may not work on it. We need to understand whether we want to have a market share there or not.
At least this, otherwise we will be thinking about why Turkmenistan earns money there on electricity, the Chinese use this electricity and gas to pump oil and collect lithium, Uzbekistan sells conditional televisions there, the Iranians transport goods through ports where there are Afghan berths, etc. Just so that after some time, in response to the question “where is our share here?” we do not see that our share is “to strengthen the border” and “to provide political assistance.”
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