India-Oman Pipeline: Redrawing the Connective Map

This proposed India-Oman deepwater natural gas pipeline represents a potential major shift in the connectivity networks linking Central Asia to South Asia. Once laid, pipelines help determine geopolitical realities for decades, as a glance at the legacy impact of Soviet-Russian pipelines on Central Asian politics reveals. If the Gulf serves as an effective workaround to bypass the Afghanistan-Pakistan transit route, it would dramatically reduce the strategic logic of stabilizing the Af-Pak region. The fact that Iran is involved in this deal as a source country is also a major plus, as it applies additional commercial constraints on Tehran to keep the Gulf open and stable.

Ironically, Iran's participation in the IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India) pipeline route would have further reinforced widely shared interests in a stabilized Afghanistan. But the Pakistan-India rivalry proved even stronger than the U.S.-Iran enmity toward scotching that deal. This strikes me as an even better alternative, because it doesn't come attached with the need to maintain a dodgy and unreliable strategic partnership with Pakistan. And though the U.S.-Iran relationship moving forward is far from a cakewalk (see this Marc Lynch post that deserves all the attention it's gotten), I think Washington and Tehran have a better chance of reaching a modus vivendi than New Delhi and Islamabad do.

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