The Colorado River crisis carries a warning for Pakistan: allocating water is not the same as governing scarcity. The Colorado River is running short of the water around which the American Southwest built its farms, cities and political bargains. Lake Mead and Lake Powell have fallen sharply, and seven American states remain divided over who should bear the burden of adjustment. Pakistan should pay attention. Not because Colorado offers a success story. It does not. Its value lies in what it reveals about a river system whose legal expectations have become increasingly difficult to reconcile with physical supply.

The American response has been to build successive layers of operating rules around its foundational agreements: shortage triggers, reservoir guidelines, conservation arrangements and scenario modelling. Political disagreement remains, but scarcity can increasingly be managed without renegotiating the entire allocation bargain whenever the river falls short. That is the lesson Pakistan needs.

Our interprovincial water debate returns to familiar arguments whenever supplies tighten. Punjab and Sindh do not generally dispute the basic allocations written into the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord. The recurring disagreement concerns how shortages should be shared, how Paragraph 14 should be interpreted, which operational formula should apply, and whether forecasts and measurements are reliable. The Accord divided the river. What Pakistan never completed was the operating system beneath that bargain. The answer is not to reopen provincial shares. That would risk converting a difficult management problem into a fundamental federal dispute. The more practical course is to make the existing settlement work under increasingly unpredictable conditions.

The Council of Common Interests should approve an Indus Scarcity Operating Protocol beneath the Accord. It would establish agreed hydrological conditions, from normal availability through severe shortage and emergency, with predetermined operational consequences attached to each. The Indus cannot copy Lake Mead's reservoir-elevation........

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