India, an observer at the meeting, is reported to have expressed its willingness to joint the project. As part of the MoU, Turkmenistan will supply 3.2bn cuft/d to Pakistan for a period of 30 years. The meeting expressed satisfaction over the pace of progress on the project, and agreed to adopt a strategy to implement it as early as possible for the benefit of the member states and the region generally. The meeting considered the feasibility report presented by the Asian Development Bank. It was agreed to hold a technical experts meeting followed by a TAP ministerial meeting in Islamabad in April to ink-in the gas-pricing agreement. Commenting on the outcome, Pakistan's federal minister for petroleum and natural resources Amanullah Khan Jadoon said that this project would not only open up avenues of co-operation in the oil and gas sector between the member states, but would also help bring the people of the countries closer. Pakistan will face gas shortfall after 2010, and is working on importing gas from Iran, Turkmenistan, and Qatar, besides LNG fuel to meet the growing energy needs of the country linked with the unprecedented upward trend in the growth of the economy. From the time it was first proposed in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the 1,600-km long TAP has always had a certain unrealistic aura to it. Clearly Pakistan has a growing need for energy. Just as clearly, Turkmenistan has a lot of natural gas. The dilemma has always been Afghanistan: would you put a gas pipeline through a country with a raging civil war? For much of the 1990s, American oil company Unocal answered "yes", and hired Afghan consultants – such as the soon-to-be president Hamid Karzai, soon-to-be US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, and soon-to-be minister of mines and industry Sediq – to help negotiate with tribal chiefs and militia warlords. Eventually, Unocal shelved the project, in part because of the Taliban's intransigence, and in part because of pressure from human rights' groups for trying to do business with them. But with the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, and the support of foreign forces to keep relative peace, Afghanistan has suddenly turned into a "safe" investment choice, at least from the perspective of the oil industry. That is the assessment of the Asian Development Bank, which recently commissioned a study that gave its support to the TAP. Security is an issue, the ADB report says, but an issue that can be resolved with a few protective measures. Then there's Pakistan: will it be able to consume enough of Turkmenistan's gas for the project to be viable? At the time the TAP was first proposed, Pakistan's economy was growing at 4.5% a year: today, its growth rate is estimated at 8.5%. Pakistani energy officials estimate that they will run out of domestic gas supplies in 2010. The final cost of the project is currently estimated at $3.7bn, up from the $2.5bn estimated in the 1990s. Unocal is now out of the picture, replaced by Argentine energy company Bridas. For Afghanistan, this project could be a welcome source of jobs and income. After the three-year construction period, annual revenue for the Afghan government would reach around $350-$450m; while this is considerably less than the $2.2bn in Afghanistan's illicit opium economy, it has the advantage of being clean, like the fuel the TAP will transport.