Is Bush having another 'Harriet Miers" moment?

The Taliban remain the fly in the ointment in the Bush administration's push to finalize the long-sought TAP (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan) pipeline. Promoting this deal was a main unannounced purpose of President Bush's recent whirlwind trip to India, with stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan on the way home.

The problem is that the proposed pipeline route would have to cross Taliban-controlled areas in Afghanistan as well as the Taliban-controlled northern region of Pakistan – an area President Musharraf has been reluctant to invade.

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Michael Moore's theory in "Fahrenheit 9-11" was that the Bush administration was working with the Taliban prior to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban ambassador now attending Yale, was a key contact person. Now, waiting for a State Department explanation of why Mr. Rahmatullah was allowed back in the United States, the TAP issue has surfaced once again.

On Feb. 13, officials from Afghanistan, Pakistan and India held pipeline talks in Turkmenistan. The officials were taken on a sightseeing tour of Turkmenistan's Daueletabad gas field, whose vast resources have catapulted Turkmenistan into being listed as having the world's fourth-largest proven natural gas reserves. The pipeline deal was hotly pursued by Unocal during the Clinton administration, but was shelved after Clinton launched a missile attack on Taliban camps in Afghanistan, attempting to kill Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf signed off on a $3.5 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan deal in 2002, only to shelve the deal over security concerns that the Taliban then still controlled large sections of Afghanistan.

At the end of February, just ahead of President Bush's visit, India announced a decision to join the U.S.-backed TAP pipeline project.

Still, Iran has not given up on finalizing the alternative Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. This week, on March 15, officials from India, Pakistan and Iran met in Tehran to discuss the IPI deal. Talat Masood, a former Pakistani general and political analyst, was quoted at the Tehran meeting as opposing the U.S. plan, claiming America's insistence on TAP could undermine peace efforts between India and Pakistan. Masood argued that America was placing its own national interests in the region above the interests of the local sovereign governments involved:

This [America's support for TAP] shows the extreme contradictions of the American policy in the region and indicates that it is only looking after its own national interests, which are completely contrary to the interests of other countries.

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Tehran has applied pressure by dragging its feet on ratifying the June 2005 agreement with India to export 5 million tons of liquid natural gas to India for 25 years, beginning in 2009.

This week Afghanistan's President Karzai criticized Pakistan's effort in battling the Taliban in the tribal region of South Waziristan. Pakistan Foreign Minister spokesperson Tasnim Aslam respond sharply, saying Karzai's comments "do not help the United States, the war against terror, and Pakistan-Afghan relations. Nobody should doubt Pakistan's sincerity to fighting terrorism."

Pakistan has been ambivalent regarding the Taliban, remembering the friendly relations Pakistan held with Afghanistan when the Taliban were in control. Pakistani officials have also expressed resentment that the United States has withheld from Pakistan the type of nuclear technology cooperation that President Bush went to neighboring India to establish. The Bush administration has not yet been given permission by Pakistan to interrogate A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist whose rogue nuclear smuggling network sold nuclear technology to Iran. In a TV interview given this week, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Ryan C. Crocker carefully stated that the United States would not impede an IPI deal, if that were Pakistan's final choice.

While Afghanistan and Pakistan were exchanging barbs over the Taliban, Mullah Omar purportedly issued his own statement promising "unimaginable" violence in a Summer Taliban offensive, claiming "a large number of Afghan youths are pouring into Mujahadeen camps to register their names for martyrdom attacks and to join the resistance." A violent new offensive by the Taliban would almost certainly kill the TAP deal once again.

The State Department has yet to explain why Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban ambassador-at-large, was given permission to enter the United States to study at Yale. Is the State Department so determined to get TAP approved that concessions are now being made secretly to the Taliban?

The State Department would do us all a favor by issuing a detailed explanation, putting to rest once and for all Michael Moore's Afghanistan pipeline conspiracy theory. Please tell us that allowing Mr. Rahmatullah into the United States to attend Yale was just another "Harriet Miers Moment."