The Struggle to Build the TAPI Gas Pipeline Through Afghanistan

Amid a thicket of hopeful rhetoric surrounding the construction of a trans-Afghan pipeline that would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan to South Asia, tangible signs of progress are hard to find.

The pipeline, known as TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India), has been on the drawing board for decades, and construction of the first leg of the route, a 153-kilometer stretch from the Turkmen border at Serhetabat to the western Afghan city of Herat, is by most accounts inching along.

Turkmenistan’s paramount leader,…