TEHRAN, April 21 (UPI) -- Iranian, Pakistani and Indian leaders are to meet in Tehran next month to discuss extending a planned strategic pipeline from Iran to energy-short Pakistan to India as well, a project the United States has repeatedly sought to wreck.
First mooted in 1994, it's been under discussion off and on for 16 years but has constantly run into difficulties largely because of Iran's pariah status and the violent rivalry between India and Pakistan.
The Tehran talks could determine the fate of the overland project, known as the "Peace Pipeline" because it would link India and Pakistan.
The $7.4 billion project was originally intended to pump 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day from Iran's huge, and largely untapped, South Pars field in the Gulf to densely populated eastern Pakistan and then on to India.
On May 24, 2009, Iran and Pakistan signed an accord to start construction of a 1,310-mile pipeline between them to be completed in five years.
New Delhi withdrew in 2009 over repeated disputes on prices, transit fees and security issues -- and after signing a nuclear energy deal with Washington. India feared Pakistan could cut off gas supplies if their old enmity flared again.
Another factor is that China has expressed interest in taking India's place if it bows out and importing 1 billion cubic feet of gas a day.
India, like Pakistan facing severe energy shortages, seems to have had a change of heart, despite U.S. pressure to keep out of the project to undermine Iran.
Last March, New Delhi called for the talks in Tehran next month in an apparent bid to hammer out a deal.
This has brightened prospects that the original plan may yet go ahead.
But, "should an exacerbation of the region's various security threats occur, for instance another attack inside India by Pakistan-based terrorists, the prospects for the peace pipeline will become extremely bleak," says Sunjoy Joshi, a specialist in energy and environmental policy at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
As it is, many obstacles remain. These range from fears that U.S. sanctions on Iran could jeopardize the flow of gas from South Pars to doubts about the commercial viability of the pipeline and Pakistan's security nightmare as it grapples with the Taliban and al-Qaida.
U.S. antipathy toward the Islamic Republic, part of George W. Bush's infamous "axis of evil," and a determination to undermine its economy has long been one of the main obstacles in the way of the ambitious project.
These have taken on added weight as the administration of President Barack Obama seeks support for tough new international sanctions over Tehran's refusal to abandon its alleged quest for nuclear weapons.
Security has been a perennial problem and that may intensify, particularly in the stretch of pipeline that runs through Iran's turbulent Sistan-Baluchistan province on its eastern border and in the neighboring Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
The terrorist attack on Mumbai, India's financial capital, Nov. 26, 2008, by Pakistan-based Islamist militants, in which 166 people perished, was a major setback to a rapprochement between India and Pakistan.
In the longer term, the need for the United States to keep Pakistan and India on side in the widening struggle against militant Islam could take precedence over the American obsession with bringing Iran to its knees.
Analysts say that if the United States worked more toward stabilizing the India-Pakistan relationship, by dropping its opposition to the "Peace Pipeline" it would achieve its strategic objectives much faster.
But for now the Americans still appear to be trying to torpedo the project. In January, Washington pushed Islamabad to abandon the pipeline and get U.S. assistance to receive electricity from Tajikistan through Afghanistan.
The Americans have long touted a pipeline running from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to India and Pakistan, despite the war in Afghanistan that shows little sign of ending.
Calls in Washington for the Obama administration to extend its deadly airstrikes by missile-armed drones on jihadist leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan's Baluchistan, from where they control their forces, could pulverize the pipeline plan.
In Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan, anti-regime Sunni insurgents allegedly financed by the CIA could sabotage the pipeline project there. "The threat to the pipeline from this group can be considered to be serious," Joshi wrote in Jane's Intelligence Review.
