India and Pakistan to press ahead with Iran pipeline …

India and Pakistan are pushing ahead with a pipeline that would ship gas from Iran to the South Asian rivals, despite American opposition to the plan, Pakistan's prime minister said Thursday.

India and Pakistan have one of Asia's longest-running enmities, but the pipeline linking the two with Iran is shaping up to be a rare issue on which they both agree, and on which both are at odds with the U.S.

India and Pakistan face potentially severe energy shortages, and "as our economies are growing very rapidly, we need additional hydrocarbons and energy resources," Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told the private NDTV news channel.

"Iran is one country which can supply this to us," he said in the interview after he met his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, following a regional summit in New Delhi.

Asked about U.S. resistance to the plan, he said: "Our public opinion, our governments, our people want us to pursue our national interests and we will pursue that."

Pakistan and India have fought three wars since the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947. But a peace process has in recent years led to a warming of relations, and Aziz said the pipeline would push the nuclear-armed neighbors even closer together.

"What we are trying to do is have a linkage between Iran, Pakistan and India, and this will be much more than an energy relationship. We have coined it the peace pipeline," Aziz said.

While Washington is a strong supporter of the peace process — Pakistan is a key ally in its war on terror, and New Delhi is emerging as a strategic partner after decades of Cold War tension — it fears the pipeline would further strengthen Iran, which the United States accuses of running a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

American diplomats in New Delhi have repeatedly expressed opposition to the pipeline, which would run for 2,600 kilometers (1,620 miles) and carry 150 million cubic meters (5.2 billion cubic feet) of gas a day.

It's price tag — pegged at US$8 billion (euro6.25 billion) and likely to grow — and the difficult logistics of building it has led American diplomats to privately scoff at the plan.

But with Islamabad, New Delhi and Tehran pressing ahead, American opposition has grown more vocal.

"I have made it clear at the highest levels of the Indian government that the United States opposes the development of the Iranian pipeline to India," U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said last month in New Delhi.