Tajikistan, Pakistan ease
closer with power-grid
pact By Mark Vinson
On
May 16-17, members of the Inter-Governmental
Council met in Dubai to sign the financing
agreements for the CASA (Central Asia - South Asia
) 1000 energy project. Delegations from the four
principal countries involved in the project,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan,
as well as representatives from investor
countries, the World Bank, USAID, Islamic
Development Bank, Asian Development Bank,
International Finance Corporation and the Arab
Bank built upon the framework agreed to this March
at the RECCA-V summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
The ambitious plan calls for the
establishment of 750 kilometers of electrical
transmission lines between Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Russia,
the lead investor in the project, has pledged
US$500 million of the estimated $873 million total
cost.
These recent developments come on
the heels of a series of
meetings this March in
which Tajikistani President Emomali Rahmon
discussed bilateral economic cooperation with his
Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari. During
this visit, the two leaders also cut the ribbon at
the grand opening of the first branch of the
National Bank of Pakistan in Tajikistan. The
initial Pakistani investment into the bank is 50
million somoni (US$10.5 million) and is intended
to spur bilateral trade between the two countries.
Since then, other high level commercial
and diplomatic meetings between Tajikistani and
Pakistani officials have taken place. These
include a May 7 visit in Dushanbe between Sharif
Said, head of Tajikistan's Chamber of Commerce and
Industry, and a Pakistan trade delegation; as well
as a May 11 meeting in Karachi between
Tajikistan's Ambassador Dr Zubaydullo N Zubaydov
and Irshad Qasim, Honorary Consul General of
Tajikistan in Karachi, with the Trade Development
Authority of Pakistan.
However,
developments have not been limited to the trade
and energy sectors. This month, Tajikistani and
Pakistani officials announced a new air service
between Dushanbe and Islamabad, scheduled to begin
in June. Initially "Tajik Air" will operate the
flights twice weekly and it is expected that new
routes servicing Dushanbe-Karachi and
Dushanbe-Lahore will be added later, with Pakistan
International Airlines operating the latter.
The new flights will be opening at a time
when the price of airplane tickets in Tajikistan
have risen by as much as 20% due to a spike in the
cost of fuel and allegations of uncompetitive
business practices and market manipulation.
In addition to the new routes, Tajikistan
has been given permission to open a consulate in
Karachi where business and tourist visas will be
issued. According to Ambassador Zubaydov,
Tajikistan is also in the early stages of
establishing consulates in Lahore and Peshawar.
While both countries seem eager to
facilitate the flow of businessmen and tourists
between them, in the past Tajikistan has been wary
of its citizens travelling to Pakistan for
religious education. In 2010, several hundred
Tajik students studying at madrassas in Pakistan
were among the nearly 1,000 religious students
recalled home out of fear that they were being
radicalized. Additionally, several alleged Tajik
fighters have been apprehended on Pakistani soil
and extradited to Tajikistan.
While joint
regional energy projects such as CASA-1000 have
been a long time in the making, the idea of
establishing direct flights between the countries
is quite new. Both sides have hoped for an
overland route to connect their respective
markets. The proposed route is to link the
Chinese-built roads in Badakhshan province in
Tajikistan to the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan
via Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor; however, the
mountainous terrain and poor-quality roads make
this route problematic.
Likewise this
January, Pakistan offered Tajikistan the use of
its deep-water port in Gwadar. However, given the
difficulty of the overland connection and the
dearth of Tajikistan's exports it seems unlikely
that the Central Asian republic's use of the
Pakistani port will have any impact on the
economies of either country in the near future.
While most analysts view Pakistan's recent
courtship of Tajikistan merely through the lens of
hydro-electricity, others maintain that Pakistan's
interests also relate to its attempts to expand
its strategic depth in Central Asia. With US and
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces
scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014,
neighboring countries are preparing for various
post-International Security Assistance Force
contingencies.
Tajikistan's chief fear is
of Islamic radicalism and domestic instability
that could lead to the return of the kind of
violence that plagued the country in the 1990s. In
the event of deteriorating violence in Afghanistan
following a withdrawal of NATO troops, Tajikistan
will most likely look to elements of the former
Northern Alliance (most of them ethnically Tajik)
to serve as a buffer zone between Tajikistan's
border and the Taliban.
Given that
Pakistan will require a degree of stability to
import electricity via the CASA-1000 and the
Central Asia - South Asia Regional Electricity
Market grid, this sort of economic entanglement
may spur Pakistan to leverage what influence it
has over the Taliban into maintaining a degree of
peace in northern Afghanistan.
In the
past, Tajikistan has garnered good will from
Islamabad by rebuffing Indian overtures to install
itself in the Soviet-era Ayni airbase in
Tajikistan even after New Delhi invested $70
million to refurbish it. While Tajikistan's
refusal to lease the airfield is most likely more
attributable to Russian pressure, it had the side
effect of garnering diplomatic capital with
Islamabad and facilitated the increase in
cooperation between the two countries, adding a
new layer of complexity to Tajikistan's
multi-vector foreign policy.
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