The Argentine company, Bridas, says it's close to signing a deal worth nearly two-billion dollars with the Taleban Movement in Afghanistan to build a gas pipeline.

The pipeline would carry gas thirteen-hundred kilometres from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, across Afghanistan.

A Bridas spokesman in Kabul said talks were in their final stages and that everything had been drafted in preparation for an agreement.

The deal would be the first major foreign business investment in Afghanistan since the outbreak of war there nearly twenty years ago.

The BBC Kabul correspondent says the Taleban's public position is that they have held talks with two rival consortiums, Bridas and the American company UNOCAL, and have yet to reach a decision.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
 

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