Indian tactics 'World's most risky railway route' from Afghanistan to Iran

India is setting up to construct what could be the world's most hazardous railroad from Afghanistan's mineral-rich heartland to an Iranian port on the Arabian Sea in endeavor  to launch a new business road and decrease Kabul's reliance on Pakistan.

Features of the fresh plan come out on the eve of the Istanbul conference on security and economic development in Afghanistan in the accumulation to the planned pulling out of US forces in 2014.

Washington has supported India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to assist in building up a new 'Silk Road' of trade ties to break the new doubts which ruins political relations and limits potential trade.

India waits for US opposition to its plan, however, because it will strengthen Iran's sea competence by creating a biggest port at Chabahar on the southern tip of the country facing out over the Gulf of Oman. 

 For India, the reward is a potentially extremely profitable agreement to mine Afghanistan's iron reserves, which are likely to be valued up to $3 trillion – many times the size of India's rising economy – and the strategic benefit of a new trade and logistics route to Afghanistan which goes around Pakistan.

In spite of latest developments in diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan, trade is still exceedingly controlled and while Afghan imports trickle gradually through Pakistan into India at the Wagah border, between Amritsar and Lahore, Indian exports to Afghanistan through Pakistan are about non-existing.  The newly way would permit Afghan minerals and products to be shipped to Surat, Mumbai or private ports in Gujarat on India's Western seaboard.

Sources close to the project said an Indian delegation from its foreign, railways, shipping and commerce ministries, will tour to Iran next month to carry on talks on the new strategy which are must to have been negotiated between the two countries when Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met in New York in September.

The plan is a revitalization of a proposal which has been negotiated rarely between the two countries since 2003, but it has got back thrust following the discovery of massive reserves of iron ore and other coveted minerals in Afghanistan in the last few years.

As previous plans expanded the new Iranian rail system to the Afghan border in the north and associated to Chabahar via a prompt from Bam and Faraj in the south, the latest plan enlarges the rail connection to Hajigak in the heart of Afghanistan's Bamiyan province, 80 miles north-west of Kabul.

India accounts for in excess of half the 22 companies requesting for iron ore mining agreements in the territory.

A confidential communication from India's Ministry of External Affairs to its Railways ministry said the trade potential of the mineral reserves entitled for a new approach. "To mange the plan for investment in Hajigak in the background of the security, infrastructure, economic and local challenges linked, there is an essential to plan and craft our strategy to describe these challenges," the memo stated.

The plan shows to have Afghanistan's support. An Afghan officer last night told The Telegraph: "Whenever it suits them, Pakistan can close the border. We don't desire to be reliance on them."

One figure close to the mission said though India's strategy look to use Afghanistan's mineral reserves, the risk to any rail development from the Taliban and other insurgent groups would be so great that it would have to be looked upon as a strategic rather than money-making project. "They could hit it up at any time," he said