A few weeks ago, I was invited by a group of senior diplomats to offer my assessment of India’s suspension of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. The setting was serious, the tone strategic. Yet the central question they posed was startlingly narrow: What could Pakistan offer India to persuade it to reinstate the treaty?

The discussion did not begin with hydrology, climate science, or treaty law. It pivoted almost immediately to concessions. One proposal was particularly alarming—grant India complete freedom to construct dams on the western rivers without objection.

A complex, science-based water-sharing framework that has governed one of the world’s most fragile basins for over six decades was being reduced to transactional bargaining. It revealed more than anxiety; it exposed a diplomatic failure to grasp the technical and geopolitical stakes.

The Indus Waters Treaty has long been regarded as one of the most durable water agreements in modern history. Signed in 1960, it survived wars, military crises, and decades of hostility between two nuclear-armed neighbours. Its endurance was not accidental.

The treaty rests on detailed engineering criteria, technical annexures, and a carefully calibrated allocation regime grounded in basin hydrology. It was designed to remove politics from rivers. Suspending such a framework is not symbolic. It alters the strategic architecture of a river system that sustains hundreds of millions.

Yet rigorous technical discourse is often absent from Pakistan’s policy debates. Climate change, glacial melt, sediment transport, seismic instability, and river engineering require interdisciplinary expertise. Engineering itself plays a dual role in the climate era: it contributes to emissions through infrastructure expansion, yet it also provides tools for mitigation and adaptation. Without credible scientific oversight, water policy becomes reactive and vulnerable to manipulation.

Pakistan’s climate funding landscape illustrates this weakness. Foreign-funded NGOs operate with minimal performance audits, and no independent authority consistently evaluates the environmental outcomes of funded projects. In India and Bangladesh, supreme audit institutions review public expenditures, including environmental and development programmes. In Pakistan, scrutiny is limited. The vacuum has consequences.

In 2012, a Pakistani NGO and a diplomat began advocating revision of the Indus Waters Treaty under the banner of climate modernisation. Updating international agreements to reflect changing conditions is not inherently misguided. But reform must be grounded in........

© The Friday Times