This time, the prize is not land but access to the Caspian's vast hydrocarbon reserves, estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration at proven reserves of 17 billion to 49 billion barrels of oil; proven natural gas reserves are estimated at up to 170.4 trillion cubic feet, with possible reserves of an additional 293 tcf.

In this new vision, Russia represents the czarist Russian Empire, while the United States has supplanted the British Empire.

Both sides have scored victories and defeats. Western capital and the Baku-Supsa pipeline, and more recently the $3.6 billion, 1,092 million-barrel-per-day Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, have removed Azerbaijani oil exports from Russian exploitation via the Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline, with its tariffs five times higher than that charged by Baku-Supsa.

The picture is more nuanced in Kazakhstan, which, while permitting Western investment in its massive offshore Kashagan and onshore Tengiz fields, nevertheless remains wedded to Russia's Transneft-dominated Caspian Pipeline Consortium pipeline to Novorossiisk.

Accordingly, the Great Game Two arena has shifted to the greatest undeveloped prize in the Caspian, Turkmenistan's immense natural gas reserves, estimated to be at 29 tcf, the fifth-largest of the world's recoverable reserves, a resource that not only Russia and the United States, but China and India as well, would dearly love to acquire.

While under Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmen gas exports moved via the Transneft network, Turkmenbashi repeatedly expressed his unhappiness over Moscow's low rate of remuneration and sought alternative markets. His death last December opened possibilities and dusted off Western plans for a proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan natural gas pipeline to supply the energy-hungry markets of Pakistan and India.

A TAP pipeline would fulfill Washington's twin policies of thwarting transit routes through the Russian Federation or Iran. While both producers and markets would greatly wish for the project to succeed, the geopolitical realities for the present deem otherwise.

Turkmenistan's export options are limited; a trans-Caspian westward pipeline linking up to Azeri facilities is unlikely as long as status talks on the final division of the Caspian's offshore waters among Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan remain deadlocked.

Moving Turkmen natural gas via liquefied natural gas shipments is also a non-starter, as Turkmenistan does not have the finances to build liquefaction facilities, ports or tankers, and even if it did, the Caspian's sole egress to the world's oceans is via the Volga-Don Canal, and it seems most unlikely Russia would agree to the untrammeled traffic of tankers bearing away Turkmen LNG. Accordingly, pipelines remain Turkmenistan's sole option for the foreseeable future.

Notwithstanding the political and logistical difficulties last month, the Pakistani government awarded a contract for the construction of the 1,367-mile TAP pipeline to the U.S. International Oil Co. TAP, as envisaged in Islamabad, has an estimated cost of $3.5 billion and projected construction time of three years. Besides a pipeline, the project as envisaged would include two oil refineries and four thermal power plants of 1,000 megawatts apiece, running from Turkmenistan's Dovetabat natural gas deposit to the Indian town of Fazilka near its border with Pakistan. Last November Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar said, "We hope that Pakistan will open its territory for an international pipeline to India as soon as possible."

TAP first came to life 12 years ago when in March 1995 an inaugural memorandum of understanding was signed between the governments of Turkmenistan and Pakistan. The following year a Unocal-led consortium established the Central Asia Gas Pipeline Ltd. group. In October 1997 CentGas was incorporated in signing ceremonies in Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat, as several Western oil companies initialed agreements with the Turkmen government. Unocal subsequently withdrew from the consortium the following December.

While the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks swiftly removed the Taliban from power, it did not destroy the militia's subsequent guerrilla movement, which was paralleled by rising radicalism in Pakistan east of the Durand Line delineating the Afghan-Pakistan border. Pakistani Pashtuns in the turbulent Northwest Frontier province increasingly picked up their guns to contest Islamabad's control. Nonetheless, a new TAP pipeline contract was signed in December 2002 among Turkmen, Afghan and Pakistani officials, and in 2005 the Asian Development Bank submitted the final version of a feasibility study drawn up by the British company Penspen.

The agreements flew in the face of the mounting violence in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even worse for TAP backers, Pakistan's Balochistan province became increasingly restive, raising the question for potential Western investors as to how Kabul and Islamabad proposed to quell their rising insurgencies. While Washington, New Delhi and Islamabad earnestly hoped somehow the situation would settle, the fact remained significant portions of the proposed TAP route remained outside of central government control of either Afghanistan or Pakistan, and the situation has only worsened with time.

Nevertheless, across the Hindu Kush hope springs eternal; on Sept. 6, after announcing the establishment of "an Energy Security Division in the Ministry of External Affairs," the Press Information Bureau of the Indian government issued a statement saying, "We have also formally conveyed India's interest in joining the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan Gas Pipeline project."

As an editorial last month in Pakistan's Daily Times noted with understatement, the pipeline security agreements have "to be taken with a pinch of salt."

So, where do things stand?

The producers (Turkmenistan) want it, as do the consumers (Pakistan and India). Unfortunately, people living on the territory to be traversed by the proposed pipeline seem determined to contest the centralized governmental control of Kabul and Islamabad, which makes attracting significant Western investment in the project problematic at best. TAP seems to remain a product of wishful thinking in Ashgabat, Kabul, Islamabad and New Delhi, for the moment a "pipe dream."

(e-mail: [email protected])

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