Pakistan and Turkemenistan signed yet another agreement on the TAPI gas pipeline that is to be built with a total cost of $7.6 billion. While one should not have any reservations against measures to fulfil the current demand and supply gap, the fact remains that the project is fraught with serious risks. Indeed why our government has been so much desirous of pursuing the pipeline is the US interest in it, which has propped it up as a substitute for the Iranian gas pipeline. This is part and parcel of the widely touted US strategy of isolating Iran and trying to sever its economic links even with regional friendly countries The TAPI project was first introduced to Pakistan during the early 1990s, though some international oil companies and experts had dismissed it as fanciful. The reason being that the pipelines route stretched across Afghanistan that was witnessing civil war at that time, a violent insurgency and even in areas free of unrest, the harsh and arbitrary rule of the warlords prevailed. It was rightly argued that with peace prospects in Afghanistan uncertain, the project should be abandoned and instead the Iranian gas pipeline should be pursued. The present state of chaos in Afghanistan especially towards the south, from where the TAPI pipeline would cross over into Pakistan remains embroiled in insurgency only goes on to prove that the project has been a non-starter from day one. But given a peaceful Afghanistan, Pakistan would need both TAPI and IP (the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline) to meet the growing shortage of power. In an interview with this newspaper, a former American diplomat Dennis Kux, urged the need for Pakistan to decide whether the IP pipeline project was in its interests, ignoring the US pressure against it. The bottom line is that we have our own interests to watch. The US could have earned the goodwill of the people of the country, if it had simply allowed the IP project to proceed back in the 1990s.