What sold: urea and a desulphurised diesel fraction, bed linen, cotton yarn and flannel. The sellers: Turkmenhimiya and Turkmennebit. Purchases settled in manat over the same period, among them polypropylene, wheat flour and cotton yarn, came to more than 80.634 million manat.
So the state service can count a week of Afghan buying to the nearest thousand dollars.
The memoranda were signed at Torghundi, in Herat province, between Turkmengaz and the Afghan Gas Corporation: one covers Afghan purchases of gas under the TAPI project, the other the gasification of Herat. Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who holds the title of national leader, met Afghan deputy prime minister Abdul Ghani Baradar there. Regional agencies carried both documents at the time.
Read the gap as a lag rather than a decision.
The state service has kept writing about TAPI since. A feature on the country's energy potential, published on 20 August and edited again at 16:32 on 25 August, cites Afghanistan's mines and petroleum ministry on 101 kilometres of pipe laid and 126 kilometres of corridor prepared. It names neither memorandum. That edit was made today.
Read the gap as a lag rather than a decision. What it removes is the option of treating Turkmen state media as a record of what Ashgabat has agreed to.