On Tuesday, Uzbekistan signed an agreement to continue supplying neighboring Afghanistan with electricity in 2026.
The agreement was signed following a meeting between Uzbek Energy Minister Jurabek Mirzamakhmudov and Abdul Bari Omar, the CEO of the head of Afghanistan’s power utility, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS).
Omar was appointed CEO of DABS in September 2024 after serving as a deputy health minister and then director general of the Afghanistan National Food and Drug Authority (AFDA).
Afghanistan has long imported electricity from the Central Asian states and Iran; the necessity to do so did not vanish with the change of government in Kabul in 2021.
According to DABS, Afghanistan imports around 800 MW from Turkmenistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, an amount far beyond the country’s domestic generation capacity of 250 MW.
Electricity imports cost Afghanistan $250–280 million annually.
In August, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan signed four agreements worth nearly $250 million to expand electricity transmission lines.
Omar has crisscrossed Central Asia this year, securing supplies for Afghanistan and deepening relations with the Central Asian states.
Although the Central Asian countries are wrestling with increasing domestic electricity demands, they continue to export to Afghanistan.
In May, Omar traveled to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with a delegation to attend a meeting regarding the World Bank-backed $1.2 billion CASA-1000 project.
An agreement for the project was initially signed in 2016. It envisions the export of surplus electricity generated by hydropower plants in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Although the project has made some progress over the years, it has also had to content with the shifting security and political interests of the region.
In August 2021, when the Taliban stormed to power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of U.S. and foreign troops and the rapid collapse of the republic government, work on CASA-1000 in the country ground to a halt.
In a February 2024 Q&A related to the resumption of the project, the World Bank said that when the project was paused in August 2021, “about 18 percent of the towers for the Afghanistan portion of the CASA Transmission Line had been erected and about 95 percent of the materials and equipment needed to complete the project in the country had been supplied.”
The World Bank justified the resumption of the project by noting that work had all but been completed in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, and the countries “have started to repay loans to the World Bank and other financiers.”
“If the CASA-1000 project is not completed and operationalized, there will be significant economic and financial losses for the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, most notably $1 billion worth of stranded assets,” the World Bank continued.
Given a lack of private investors willing to take on the funding, the World Bank decided to re-engage in financing the project in Afghanistan in what it called a “a ring-fenced manner” that would “ ensure all construction payments and future revenue are managed outside of Afghanistan and do not involve interim Taliban administration (ITA) systems.”
Jump ahead to 2025, in March Taliban officials complained that the World Bank funding hadn’t come through and claimed that the project was “70 percent complete in Afghanistan.”
And then in May DABS head Omar traveled to Tajikistan. At that time, he announced that work had resumed in Afghanistan.
Omar said that CASA-1000 would be completed within the next one to two years.
In August 2017, an Indian company won a tender with the then-Afghan Republic government to lead construction of the CASA-1000 project.
The Afghan Ministry of Water and Energy stated at the time that the project would take three years to complete. That, of course, was an overly optimistic assessment.
(Diplomat)
