Editor's note: This article was published before United States President
Barack Obama's speech from Cairo on June 4.
The high probability is that United States President Barack Obama's Muslim
speech on June 4 from Cairo will not contain specifics. Most wise men
underscore that the charismatic statesman should stick to values rather than
waste breath on substance.
True, that is a safe route for a great orator like Obama. Values resonate in
Obama's magnificent voice. Grand speeches, after all, can hardly be a good
platform for policy-making.
However, substance, fresh substance, and lots of it - that's what Middle
Easterners impatiently seek to hear from the youthful president. With native
Levantine wisdom dipped in wit, prominent
columnist Rami Khouri wrote, "No offense, but nobody in the Middle East really
cares about Obama's ancestors or youth years, or his views on other religions.
What we care about - and what the US president should explain on this trip - is
whether the US government believes that habeas corpus and the Fourth Geneva
Convention, for example, apply with equal force to Arabs as well as to
Israelis."
Equally, for southwest Asians tuning into the Cairo speech, the big question is
what the US president can offer by way of renewed momentum to his AfPak
strategy, which vacillates between failure and avoidance of failure. What the
US needs is a grand idea that can decisively propel the AfPak strategy over the
barren, stony, steep ridge onto the lush green valley that lies beyond. Cairo
could just be the platform from where to introduce such an idea.
It won't happen, but the idea exists. It has been around and may seem a
hackneyed idea but it is still a workable one, which, if fleshed out, could
potentially become a solid underpinning of the AfPak strategy. The fantastic
thing about it is that in a manner of speaking, it is also a "Muslim idea", as
it engages the US with two countries in the topmost rungs of the Islamic world.
It is not only cost-effective but also eminently profitable, as it concerns the
priceless commodity of natural gas. Most important, it creates a geostrategic
matrix involving some of the key countries that can make all the difference
between success and failure of the AfPak strategy - Iran, Pakistan, India and
China.
The time has come for the US to take a serious look at the idea that it should
be the promoter of a natural gas pipeline project leading from Iran's gigantic,
untapped South Pars fields to Pakistan and further on to India and possibly
extending all the way to China's heavily populated southeastern provinces.
As the US's direct engagement of Iran gets going after the presidential
election in Iran later this month, Obama will come across the dilemma of
prompting Iran to think on the "right track": how to make Iran a "stakeholder"
in the region? Offering hot dogs to Iranian diplomats at garden parties on
Independence Day in the sprawling American chancelleries is one way of doing
it, but Iranians have sharp bazaar instincts and are unlikely to be impressed.
Releasing spare parts for Iran's aging fleet of Boeing aircraft could be
another way, or the opening of an Interest Section in the Iranian capital, but
Persians aren't rabbits nibbling at carrots. Persians settle only for
grandiloquent, sweeping conceptions.
No doubt, the moveable feast of US-Iran engagement needs a tantalizing
confidence-building measure as an "appetizer". Iran's archaic energy sector
could just provide the right quarter. Iran's oil industry desperately needs
technology and modernization. And income from oil is Iran's lifeline. Iran's
managerial cadres and technocrats have a high opinion of American oil
technology. Big Oil needs no introduction to Iran, either. The Chinese would
say this is a "win-win" situation.
Provided, of course, Big Oil moves fast. The Europeans are ahead of it, and so
are the Russians. The race for Iran's South Pars promises to be a photo-finish.
As a perceptive American expert put it, the signing event of the Iran-Pakistan
gas pipeline project in Tehran on May 24 by Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari "illustrates the
obsolescence and, increasingly, the futility of an 'isolation' policy that
tries to keep Iranian gas locked in the ground".
Russia's Gazprom is poised to join the Iran-Pakistan project, no matter the US
sanctions. "We are ready to join as soon as we receive an offer," Russia's
Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky said. That offer may well be made to
the Russians on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
summit meeting scheduled to take place in Yekaterinburg in Russia on June 15,
which brings together the leaders of Iran, Pakistan and Russia (and China and
India). The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline meshes with the grand idea that former
Russian president Vladimir Putin (now premier) floated four years ago - a SCO
"energy club".
Gazprom executives have done their homework. According to Kommersant newspaper,
Gazprom can act as a contractor for the pipeline construction work and as the
operator of the pipeline even after its completion. Also, Gazprom is keen to
get access to gas volumes from South Pars which it could then sell to India.
Russia is keen that Iranian gas is diverted to the Asian market. Kommersant
quoted a Russian official as saying, "This project is advantageous to Moscow
since its realization would carry Iranian gas toward South Asian markets so
that in the near future it would not compete with Russian gas to Europe."
Moscow is enormously experienced in the gas market. It anticipates that gas
demand in the Asian market is bound to go up exponentially once the current
recession is over.
In political terms, Moscow visualizes that once the US engages Iran directly in
the very near future, the enforceability of US sanctions will dissipate
overnight and therefore, it is necessary to strike ahead of potential Western
competitors.
To be sure, from the US perspective, there is a lot more to the South Pars area
than highly lucrative business. The Iran-Pakistan pipeline project is one of
those rare business deals where geostrategy comes into play from day one.
Consider the following.
Making Iran a stakeholder in regional stability will immeasurably strengthen
the hand of the US's AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke when he
negotiates a "grand bargain" with Tehran for Afghanistan's stabilization. In
short, the gas pipeline project can be a vital component of Holbrooke's
"regional initiative". Diplomacy gains in momentum when it deals with
tangibles.
Holbrooke should also speak to the Indians to shed their reservations about
participating in this project. Delhi is presently holding back for two or three
reasons, which seem tenuous at best. One, Indians are wary of having anything
to do with a capital-intensive project that involves Pakistan. They say
Pakistanis are an unpredictable lot and might cut off the gas supplies, which
could put in jeopardy billions of dollars worth of downstream investments in
the Indian economy.
They say the ground situation in the Pakistani province of Balochistan through
which the pipeline passes is highly volatile and disruptions in supplies can
ensue. Finally, Indians are ostensibly unhappy with the price structure offered
by Tehran. At the back of it all, there are unspoken considerations. First,
Delhi is upset that Tehran retracted on a massive gas deal that Delhi thought
it had wrapped up in 2004.
Second, Delhi is petrified as to what Washington would think if it stepped out
of line and dealt with Iran so long as the US-Iran standoff continued. Then,
there is the increasingly influential pro-Israel lobby within the Indian
establishment. On top of it all, there are powerful Indian energy conglomerates
that are the driving force behind the government's energy policies and who fear
the price for gas in India's opaque gas market will be affected once Iranian
gas enters the Indian grid.
But Obama can easily wade through this South Asian mumbo-jumbo. Arguably, he is
the only man under the sun today who can do so. The Indian strategic community
would be hard-pressed to say "nyet" if he proposed. Therefore, Washington
should step forward as the guarantor of an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline
project. At one stroke, that takes care of the Indian elite's angst.
Obama should tell Indians that the huge gas pipeline project is the right thing
to do for stabilizing the India-Pakistan relationship and for putting it on a
predictable footing. The relationship is inherently brittle because it lacks
content. Content engenders mutuality of interests, creates leverages and locks
partnerships. Washington's regional policies stand to gain if the
India-Pakistan relationship is stabilized and therefore, Obama is an interested
party.
Big Oil should also play a part in the project on the lines Gazprom offered. In
fact, one of the biggest energy markets in the world opens up in the Indian
sub-continent in terms of activities such as developing a South Asian gas grid,
retail trade and petrochemical industries.
China will be eager to join the South Asian gas pipeline project. In strategic
terms, the US has an opportunity to get Iran, Pakistan, India and China on
board on one single project. The strategic implications for US regional
policies are far-reaching. The Cold War experience on the European theater is
that mega-pipeline projects can act as stabilizers in East-West relations.
If German policies toward Russia are transforming so visibly today, the
principal reason is the bond that ties them together via energy deals. The
proposed North Stream project will accentuate the trend in German-Russian ties;
Russian-Italian relations gain from the South Stream and Russian-Turkish
relations from the Blue Stream pipeline.
In the ultimate analysis, the answer to South Asian region's severe instability
lies in economic development. An editorial in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper said:
"Fears have been expressed that the turmoil in Balochistan will threaten the
security of the pipeline since a great length of the 1,000 kilometers inside
Pakistan passes through that province which borders Iran. Islamabad could
convert this factor to its advantage if it can ensure that in the construction
of the pipeline indigenous labor is hired and the gains of the economic
activity generated by projects of such magnitude are focused on Balochistan for
the benefit of its poverty stricken people."
Obama would know that according to hearsay, the troublesome, one-eyed Taliban
leader Mullah Omar got onto a motorbike and rode into the night towards these
very same poverty stricken people of Balochistan for shelter when he was driven
out of Kandahar in the winter of 2001.
The US's regional policies must, therefore, refocus. Whereas today India and
Pakistan are locked in a deathly dance - with Indians determined to become the
pre-eminent military and nuclear power in the region and Pakistanis ensuring
that doesn't happen - Obama can gently initiate them into the Third Way.
No American president in living memory has had Obama's measure of humanism.
Cairo could have been the platform from where Obama spelt out an "AfPak dream",
to use the words of Dr Martin Luther King.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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