http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/uclicktext/20040108/cm_ucru/pipedreams-snip-
It's not the sort of thing the U.S. media cares to report, but there has in fact been movement on the proposed Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP). The Asian Development Bank, which hopes to finance a consortium of oil companies to finance the $3.5 billion (originally $2 billion) project, has already spent millions of dollars on feasibility studies and surveys along the proposed route from Herat, a city near Afghanistan's northwest border with Turkmenistan, to Kandahar, the former Taliban spiritual capital close to the southeastern frontier with Pakistan. The U.S.-led occupation coalition has promised to make paving the future TAP service highway the nation's top rebuilding priority. The ADB has hosted meetings between officials of Afghanistan and the two nations on each end of the thousand-mile-long conduit: Turkmenistan, which would ship Kazakh crude oil and its own natural gas from its Daultebad refineries, and Pakistan, which hopes to export the energy resources to deep-sea tankers via its Multan port on the Arabian Sea.
-snip-
Delays and overruns are typical for big construction projects, but based on the news so far there's no reason to change my 2001 assessment. Until we inevitably withdraw our forces a few years from now, once again abandoning the Afghans to a cycle of death and horror we helped perpetuate, Bush and his Asian allies will keep trying to build their doomed pipeline.
------------------------------------
I've always said that all that big bombing we did was to clear the way for the pipe