TAPI deals nudge pipeline nearer reality

Robert M. Cutler

Negotiations this month have opened the way to conclusion of a Gas Sales Price Agreement for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline, despite a number of obstacles still remaining.

On August 18, a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan meeting at the level of technical experts from the two countries' competent ministries reached agreement on a number of implementation and construction issues, also including their economic provisions, according to reports by the State News Agency of Turkmenistan.

Agreement has also been reached bilaterally between Turkmenistan and India over the price of the former's natural gas to the latter. India had proposed a price of US$460 per thousand cubic meters (tcm) to Ashgabat, which had counter-offered $505-$525/tcm. New Delhi did not want to pay a price making TAPI gas more expensive than the liquefied natural gas (LNG) that it already imports, mainly from Qatar. Natural gas represents only 6% of India's total energy consumption, and the country is keen to increase that proportion.

The four countries signed in Ashgabat last December 11 an intergovernmental agreement that was complemented by a framework document approved by the respective energy ministers. According to Turkmenistani sources, it confirmed that the 1,735-kilometer pipeline would be built in Afghanistan alongside the road from Herat to Kandahar (and at least partly underground to deter terrorist attacks), then routed by way of Quetta and Multan in Pakistan to reach the Indian border town of Fazilka.


The Opposite of Silence

Amal Hanano

[This is the twelfth and last installment of Amal Hanano's diary of her trip back to Aleppo. You can read previous posts here.]

There is always a certain acclimation period needed when moving from east to west or west to east, a few days to re-situate yourself. It disguises itself as jet lag, but it is more of a re-calibration of your inner compass. This time, my resetting lasted for weeks not days. The phone kept ringing, from family and friends in the U.S. making sure I was okay and asking endless details. I had to say, ma fi shi, so many times it irritated me. Even non-Arabs were shocked when they found out I had gone back, and my response was like a broken record, “Where I was, in Aleppo, there was nothing happening.” “Oh,” was their relieved but slightly disappointed reply. Tell me about it.

My few short weeks in Syria had felt like months, yet I returned to an America unchanged. Everything around me felt tired: tired tastes, tired radio, tired news about corrupt media moguls and dead pop stars, tired politics and an exhausted economy, a tired, mad world occupied with vampires and wizards. I was tired, living in black and white, any color existed only in this journal, and it was quickly fading. I lived through my words, extending my trip line by line, fighting, as always, against letting go.

I was disconnected from the Syrian-American community around me, the ones who could not go back this summer, the ones from Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Daraa. The ones who flew to D.C. for protests, drafted petitions, and posted videos on Facebook every five minutes. There was a split between us, they labeled me as the girl from Aleppo, the land of greedy merchants and silent masses. I expected the sentiment, but felt resentful and defensive at their hypocrisy. In their eyes, I was much closer to the silent Aleppo elite than I would like to admit. But in mine, they were acting like victims while living in their posh suburban bubbles. They demand Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustafa’s resignation now, but conveniently forget that they were honored to rub shoulders with him a few short years ago. And so, I came back to be treated as an outsider once more. In Aleppo I was a mundasseh, an infiltrator, and in America, I was apathetic.

I wondered if this confusion I felt about home and belonging, was not exclusively my own, as I had always believed. Have we all lost the sense of what home is, or what it should be? Are we searching for an elusive, utopian place that didn’t exist? Anthony Shadid wrote in my favorite article about the Arab Spring: “Across the region, the Arab revolution has inspired a rethinking of identity, even as older notions of self hang like a specter over the revolts’ success. In its most pristine, the revolution feels transnational, as demands of justice, freedom and dignity are expressed in a technology-driven globalism.” He believes a driving factor of the regional uprisings is what he calls a search for “a new sense of self.” Why are we searching for a new sense of self? When did we lose our selves? How did we let our selves slip away? It is sad, but the reality is for decades, all Syrians, there or here, by the sheer force of our brutal history, were robbed of our true selves.


NATO'S Planned Bloodbath In Tripoli

Stephen Lendman

NATO is a killing machine, a destructive US-led evil force everyone needs to understand, condemn, and struggle to abolish.

NATO intends to get the bloodbath it wants through intensified terror bombing and low-level strafing of civilians and nonmilitary sites. No matter that it grossly violates international and constitutional law, what Washington-led member states long ago trashed.

Through August 22, air operations included 19,877 sorties and 7,505 strike ones, with no elaboration of their intensity or deadliness. What is known is that powerful, high-explosive munitions are used, able to cause deadly force casualties and destruction.

In recent days, strikes intensified. Without them, rebels would disintegrate and collapse. Most of them are little more than ragtag mercenary hooligans, imperial tools, used for what won't benefit them.

It's largely true of all wars, especially America's waged for conquest, dominance, plunder and exploitation, never for democracy or humanitarian reasons Washington doesn't give a damn about and never did.

NATO is no different. Established in April 1949, a previous article said it calls itself a "political and military alliance for peace and security."

In fact, it was more for offense than defense. Cold War hysteria was contrived to incite fear and assure an arms race for corporate enrichment. Napoleon once said, "Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self-interest."

Until the Soviet Union dissolved, communism was the alleged enemy. Today it's terrorism, as bogus now as then. Both, however, were used for hugely profitable imperial wars from Korea to Libya to numerous proxy ones, as well as trillions of dollars for military readiness - in fact, scandalous amounts in America without enemies for justification since WW II.

Strategically intervening under US control, NATO, in fact, threatens world peace and human survival.


Fierce fighting continues in Tripoli

Bill Van Auken

Major European oil companies saw their stock prices rise precipitously on expectations that they would reap bonanzas from renegotiated deals with a NATO-installed regime in Libya.

The so-called “revolution” has in fact been a coup sponsored by the major imperialist powers working with the big energy conglomerates and executed by US, British and French military and intelligence. Using the upheavals in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia as cover, and a “humanitarian” mission as pretext, these powers launched a colonial-style war with the aim of toppling the Gaddafi regime and installing a more pliant client regime in Tripoli.

Fierce fighting raged into the night in Tripoli Monday, even as leaders of the major Western powers proclaimed the end of the 42-year-old regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and maneuvered for position in the scramble for Libya’s oil wealth.

After their surprisingly rapid advance into the Libyan capital, the armed groups backed by NATO have encountered stiff resistance from forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime. The crowds that initially greeted the so-called “rebels” melted away and streets remained largely deserted as the two sides exchanged automatic weapons fire as well as mortar and anti-aircraft rounds.

Heavy fighting continued around Gaddafi’s fortified Bab al-Aziziya presidential compound, while smoke billowed over sections of the city. A spokesman for the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC) based in Benghazi predicted that the fortified compound would not fall easily and fighting there would be “fierce.” The huge Tripoli compound has been subjected to heavy bombardment by NATO warplanes.

While the NTC has claimed to control between 80 and 90 percent of the Libyan capital, reporters in the city have described the situation as “fluid,” and few checkpoints have been set up to secure the streets.


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