The most fundamental resource for civilisation has always been water. Where rivers flowed consistently, empires flourished; where they did not, they collapsed. In the twenty-first century, hydropower dams the size of mountains, satellite imagery that maps aquifer depletion in real time, climate models that predict glacial retreat for the decade, and the political will to use all of these as tools of pressure have all been added to this age-old logic. Pakistan is currently at the crossroads of all four. To build hydropower infrastructure on rivers that Pakistan’s constitution essentially views as the nation’s bloodstream, India has suspended the Indus Waters Treaty to the east, citing national security. On Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo, China is constructing the biggest dam in the world to the north, upstream of all the hydrological systems that supply the subcontinent. Above all, temperatures that the subcontinent did not cause and cannot reverse are causing the Himalayan glaciers, the natural reservoir that supports the whole Indus basin, to retreat. Water security in Pakistan has become more than just a development issue. It is becoming the nation’s main strategic issue.

One of South Asia’s most significant geographical features is the Indus River system. Rising close to Mount Kailash in Tibet, it flows through the Karakoram and Hindu Kush before entering Pakistan. There, it gathers the tributaries of the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej across the Punjab plain before embarking on its arduous trek to the Arabian Sea at the Sindh delta. More than 200 million people are supported by this system, which also provides water to the subcontinent’s most productive agricultural land and sustains the world’s largest irrigation network. The basin’s hydrological reality is simple and harsh: nearly all of its headwaters are located outside of Pakistan. China, India, and Afghanistan all control parts of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan mountain range, which produces the river’s flow. Pakistan depends on what its neighbours and topography permit to flow downstream, making it structurally a lower riparian state.

This geographic reality was partially managed by the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, brokered by the World Bank and signed in Karachi by Nehru and Ayub Khan after nine years of negotiation. The Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab rivers, which collectively supply more than 80% of Pakistan’s irrigation water and roughly one-third of its hydropower-producing capacity, were given to Pakistan by the treaty. The Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej rivers in the east were kept in India. By all accounts, it was one of the most resilient bilateral water accords in history, having withstood decades of diplomatic disruption, four short conflicts, and three major wars without ever being formally revoked. Because those who depend on water for survival cannot wait for diplomats to agree, the treaty was intended to be permanent. That permanence is now, for the first time in the treaty’s sixty-five-year existence, genuinely in question.

The extent of Pakistan’s reliance on the Indus basin must be understood to comprehend what is at risk in the current hydro-political conflict. Approximately 80% of Pakistan’s agriculture and a third of its hydropower generation depend on water from the Indus basin, a dependency that is structurally greater than India’s relationship to the same system. Thirty percent of exports come from agricultural goods, and the agricultural industry directly employs forty-two percent of the working population and contributes about twenty-three percent of the GDP. Agriculture uses around 95% of Pakistan’s freshwater, making it the nation’s main water user as well as an economic pillar. But Pakistan’s two largest reservoirs, Tarbela and Mangla, built in the 1960s and 1970s and filling up with silt, only have thirty days’ worth of water, and their storage capacity is woefully insufficient for that reliance. The world standard for water security is a storage capacity of 120 days. Pakistan ranks 14th among the world’s seventeen most extremely water-stressed countries, a list that includes desert nations whose situation is structurally far less complicated than Pakistan’s. The country has the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system, but cannot provide water security to its own people. 

 In the wake of the incident in Pahalgam, India decided on April 23, 2025, to put the........

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