When India announced earlier this year that it was ‘suspending’ the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), the warning bells in Islamabad rang loud.

Days later, Afghanistan’s interim government confirmed its intention to fast-track a major dam on the Kunar River, a key tributary of the Kabul that flows into Pakistan’s Indus system. Together, these moves signal a new and deeply troubling phase in South Asia’s hydropolitics, one in which water is no longer just a shared resource but a potential weapon. For a country whose very survival depends on the Indus Basin, the threat is existential: can Pakistan defend its waters before they are cut off, and what kind of defence makes sense in a region already haunted by conflict?

Despite being the lower riparian, Pakistan signed the IWT on September 19, 1960 under the advice and insistence of the World Bank and the US – conceding its rights to the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) during the negotiations. What was presented as a negotiated settlement was, in essence, a strategic renunciation of natural claims. The final outcome, celebrated internationally as a model water-sharing accord, allocated the eastern rivers to India and the western rivers to Pakistan, specifically the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab.

The treaty survived wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999 – and countless crises. Yet in April 2025, India abruptly declared the treaty ‘in abeyance’ after a security flare-up in Pahalgam. Pakistan called it a false-flag provocation and warned that tampering with Indus flows would be an act of war. Experts acknowledge that India currently lacks the infrastructure to cut off western river flows entirely, but the political signalling is unmistakable: suspending the treaty is less about engineering capacity than geopolitical leverage. In........

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