Death Ground: What comes after the Indus Treaty

In 1950, the American lawyer David Lilienthal travelled to Pakistan and India to report on the emerging disputes between the two new nation states. Lilienthal was a prominent public servant in the United States. In the post war atomic era, he had been appointed to lead the United States Atomic Energy Commission. His visit to India and Pakistan, however, happened because of his credentials as director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, where he was responsible for managing flood control on the Tennessee River and charting plans to harness this mighty river for hydroelectric power. 

During his time in the two countries, Lilienthal made some decisive observations. In a report written for Collier’s Magazine, he claimed that the Kashmir dispute was intractable, but there were other areas of mutual concern of the two nations where agreement could be found - such as the allotment of the water of the Indus River. The issue of water, Lilienthal felt, was the most vital to the future stability of the region, and it was Pakistan in particular that stood threatened. 

“No armies with bombs and shellfire could devastate a land so thoroughly as Pakistan could be devastated by the simple expedient of India's permanently shutting off the source of waters that keep the fields and people of Pakistan green,” he wrote in a report that would later become vital in efforts by the World Bank to broker the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. 

That devastation is now knocking at our door.