Water is an existential imperative for Pakistan

The twentieth century was shaped by oil. The twenty-first will be shaped by water. Ismail Serageldin saw it coming in 1995 when, as World Bank Vice President, he warned that the wars of the next century would be fought over water, not oil.

Water is no longer only an environmental concern. It is inseparable from national security, food, energy, migration, and political stability. Population growth, groundwater depletion, glacier retreat, erratic rainfall, and upstream control are converging into a harsher reality: demand is rising while reliable supply becomes less predictable. Unlike oil, water has no substitute.

More than 260 international river basins and hundreds of transboundary aquifers cross national boundaries. States tried to discipline shared rivers through law and institutions: the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, the Mekong cooperation framework, the 1997 UN Convention on Non-navigational Watercourses, and the Nile Basin Initiative. Each reflected a simple belief: rivers that cross borders must be governed before they become instruments of pressure.

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 was long considered the strongest expression of that belief. Brokered by the World Bank, it divided the Indus Basin between India and Pakistan. Pakistan received the three western rivers, carrying roughly 80 percent of system flows. India received the three eastern rivers. For more than six decades, the treaty kept a minimum legal order around a source of existential dependence.

That order is now under stress.

On 23 April 2025, following a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, India placed the treaty in abeyance, citing national security. Data sharing and joint oversight were suspended, leaving Pakistan without advance information on rivers, floods, and droughts. In June 2025, the treaty’s Court of Arbitration, administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, held that India’s abeyance position did not limit its competence. In August, it issued a further award on issues of general interpretation. India rejected the proceedings. The treaty remains in abeyance, and the uncertainty this has produced is without modern precedent in the Indus Basin.

Pakistan is not alone in facing this new water politics. Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has altered the equation for Egypt and Sudan. The Mekong faces upstream construction and unilateral regulation. The Colorado River, over-allocated and climate-stressed, is forcing painful negotiations in the American West. In each case, scarcity weaponises geography. When trust collapses, rivers become leveraged.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali once warned that the next war in the Middle East would be over water, not politics. For Pakistan, that future has arrived not as a prophecy, but as a policy challenge.

Pakistan is one of the most exposed nations on earth. The Indus Basin underpins national survival. It contributes more than a quarter of national GDP and sustains nearly 90 percent of food production. Agriculture employs over a third of the workforce and depends overwhelmingly on the Indus canal network. Per capita water availability has fallen from about 5,260 cubic metres in 1951 to around 900 today, below the scarcity threshold. Between 40 and 80 percent of river flows originate as glacial and snowmelt in the Hindu Kush, Himalaya, and Karakoram, where warming is altering timing and reliability.

The pressures compound. Groundwater is being depleted by largely unregulated tube wells. Salinity affects millions of hectares. Flood irrigation loses enormous volumes before water reaches crop roots. The Indus delta is shrinking. What appears in policy papers as basin stress appears in daily life as a cracked field, an empty well, a weak canal turn, or a higher roti price.

Honesty demands precision about the external threat. The conventional fear is that India will simply stop Pakistan’s water. Geography and treaty architecture make wholesale diversion of the western rivers difficult. That does not make the threat less serious. It makes it more technical, and therefore easier to misunderstand.

The more serious frontier is timing.

India’s run-of-river hydropower projects on the Chenab and Jhelum may not permanently remove large annual volumes, but they can affect the pattern in which water arrives. Daily and seasonal fluctuations matter profoundly in an irrigation economy. WAPDA’s hourly discharge records at Marala already show sharp oscillations associated with upstream turbine operations. For a farmer, water received too late for sowing or too suddenly near harvest is not the same water. A crop is not saved by an annual average. It is saved by timely delivery.

This is the new frontier of the Indus dispute: not only how much water crosses the border, but when it crosses, how predictably it arrives, and whether Pakistan has the data, institutions, and diplomacy to respond. In an irrigation-dependent country, predictability is power.

Pakistan’s case cannot rest on general appeals to rights. It must be built on evidence. If the issue is hydraulic timing, Pakistan needs credible, real-time records of flow behaviour. It must show where upstream operations alter daily and seasonal patterns, how those changes affect canals, crops, flood management, and food security. Vague anxiety will not persuade the world. Data can.

This is where external threat and internal weakness meet. Pakistan cannot demand transparency from others while tolerating opacity at home. Its water governance remains weakened by poor measurement, weak enforcement, politicised allocations, and chronic distrust between provinces. We have not lacked laws, policies, authorities, or commissions. What we have lacked is implementation discipline.

The first answer is measurement. National telemetry, tamper-resistant flow data, and public reporting of river and canal deliveries are no longer technical luxuries. They are instruments of sovereignty. Without trusted data, every shortage becomes a political accusation. With trusted data, denial space narrows.

Pakistan’s largest recoverable gains also lie inside its own system. Canal rehabilitation, transparent measurement, better on-farm water management, drip and sprinkler irrigation where suitable, and demand-responsive pricing can improve reliability. Crop choices must also be confronted. Sugarcane and rice cannot keep expanding in water-stressed zones as if supplies are infinite. Groundwater regulation can no longer be deferred because it is politically difficult.

Pakistan’s downstream rights under the treaty and customary international law should be advanced through legal forums, diplomacy, and coalitions with other lower riparian states. Its strongest argument is that cooperative river governance cannot survive if one party can suspend obligations unilaterally whenever relations deteriorate.

China also warrants attention. Beijing is an upper riparian across several major Asian river systems and has deep investments in Pakistan’s water, energy, and infrastructure sectors. Pakistan should engage China not as a substitute for treaty rights, nor as a party to the treaty, but as a regional actor with an interest in Himalayan hydrology, climate adaptation, infrastructure resilience, and basin stability.

The lesson from the Nile, Mekong, Colorado, and Indus is the same. Water frameworks take decades to build and moments to weaken. Once trust collapses, the costs fall on farmers awaiting irrigation, families facing food inflation, cities searching for groundwater, and communities receiving flood warnings too late.

The age of abundant and predictable water is ending. A harder era of hydro-political rivalry, climate-driven scarcity, and weaponised timing has begun. Pakistan’s future will be decided by whether the state can measure honestly, govern fairly, negotiate intelligently, and act before uncertainty becomes collapse.