Last week saw the addendum to Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Little America as USAID handed the work to complete the Kajaki Dam project over to the Afghan government.

This week, it was a major current in the book Ghost Wars that saw a major twist in the news headlines. The Unocal trans-Afghanistan pipeline that played so strongly in the activities in Steve Coll’s book was upstaged by the announcement of the agreement that will see the completion of the pipeline connecting Iran and Pakistan, skirting Afghanistan’s southern border. The agreement flies in the face of current sanctions directed against Iran by the United States who maintain that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons technology.

Just when you thought politics in this part of the world could not get any more complex. Right at the time when US and Pakistan relations have cooled enough to allow land transport for all the materials the US wants to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next few years.

On the brighter side, maybe we can view this as an easing of the strain in the relationship between Sunni and Shia elements.

I first saw this story reported by Al Jazeera;

Pakistan defies US with gas pipeline to Iran