The eye catching headlines are familiar. “Water Wars” are imminent or already underway in the latest drought or dam-building hotspot. Such “wars” often extend to farmers battling over irrigation diversions, but at times countries are the players. Senior leaders are often quoted suggesting transboundary water theft constitutes a casus belli. Security officials are obliged to investigate.
South Asia, with its hundreds of millions dependent on some of the world’s largest rivers, is not immune to these glaring headlines and concerns. Intense development and water demand along shared rivers among security heavyweights Pakistan, India, and China present a jumble of upstream downstream dynamics contributing to security concerns.
What should security-minded observers keep in mind when trying to go beyond the specific details of tensions on the Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Indus? What do we know about transboundary water conflict and cooperation in the past and are those patterns likely to extend into the future?
Systematic assessments of all bilateral and multilateral water interactions between states on the world’s 286 shared rivers confirm one commonly held assumption and disprove two others. Confirmed is the sense that transboundary water is critical to national security, and tensions over sharing water among countries are real. Plenty of political and military leaders are willing to rattle sabers. Water is critical to fundamental economic underpinnings.
Undercut is the intuitively appealing notion that countries fight over water given its critical roles in agriculture, industry, transport, energy, ecosystem services, as well as culture and religion. The historical record just does not find evidence of “water wars” that politicians and newspaper headline writers so commonly extol. Those instances where organized violence did emerge are heavily concentrated in Arab-Israeli interactions. Invasion is not a particularly effective strategy for securing the benefits of water. Water is tough to carry home as conflict’s bounty, and importing food (virtual water) is most often a more efficient strategy.
It may be surprising to learn how much countries cooperate over water, both formally and informally. Water cooperation, often along technical management terms in basin commissions, is something countries are able to (or compelled to given interdependence) come together around. Older agreements, such as the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, have proven useful tools for managing tension over water even in the face of multiple wars between India and Pakistan for example. In this way, technical water coordination can serve as a “lifeline for dialogue” during the hard times. In some instances, those avenues for confidence building have contributed to an eventual wider peace (Israel-Jordan peace treaty in 1994).
Of course, not all rivers have robust sharing agreements, and the weak institutional arrangements on the Brahmaputra River, for example, are causing considerable alarm between upstream China and downstream India and Bangladesh.
Where does complex historical record leave us in South Asia today? Water-inspired tensions are clearly in evidence, but could there be a break from past experience and could the saber rattling become something more?
New realities in South Asia do suggest it is worth watching whether the future may be unlike the past. Given the paramount importance of GDP growth and the massive energy needs to achieve it, China’s ambitious hydropower plans make large-scale dams a dominant feature of all major rivers originating on the Tibetan Plateau. Plans for massive water transfer diversion schemes heighten that fear.
While not as clearly tied to regime survival, India’s accelerated development plans in conjunction with unsustainable groundwater extraction makes increased water infrastructure imperative. Pakistan’s downstream vulnerabilities to extreme flooding and what appears to be new evidence of a five percent net decline in yearly flow from the Indus, put political and military leaders on edge.
Climate change is serving as a “threat multiplier” (as assessed by the U.S. military and intelligence community), as it magnifies the changing timing and amounts of monsoon rains, snow and glacial melt, and temperature spikes in the region. And more mundane yet nevertheless critical changes, like the region’s tens of millions of new middle class consumers who drive higher consumption levels, notably higher animal protein diets, insuring prodigious increases in water demand.
So as analysts gauge the impact of water in South Asia through a security lens, they should keep a few key factors in mind.
Perception matters. India does not actually have to be “stealing our [Pakistani] water” for Kashmiri separatists to use that rallying cry. Ironically, perception can become salient, because water flow data are often classified as secret on a national security basis in India and Pakistan. Ironically, secrecy can lower tensions when countries are out of compliance with treaty agreements.
Climate change as a threat multiplier will test the institutional structures to deal with extremes. As flagged by a 2012 National Academy of Sciences report, the massive floods across wide swaths of Pakistan, like the one in 2010, pose critical challenges to the stability and legitimacy of the government.
Sudden changes in water access, not absolute scarcity, are what create “basins at risk.” Large water infrastructure projects that can literally cut flow overnight are seen as the biggest destabilizing threat. With China always in the powerful upstream riparian, coordinating institutions are challenged to constrain unilateral behavior.
While not glamorous, technical cooperation produces diplomatic and security benefits. Building bilateral and multilateral technical water management institutions and data sharing regimes have proven to be resilient mechanisms for continuing to cooperate on the ground while incendiary headlines dominate.
There will continue to be lots of smoke when it comes to transboundary water in South Asia. It would be a new chapter in transboundary water interactions if there was real fire between states specifically over water. Ad hoc cooperation or muddling through will likely be the bottom line result.
But security analysts must remain vigilant, as an unprecedented mix of factors may mean the future may not look like the past. As the 2010 U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment indicated, confidence that patterns of tension but no outright conflict would persist in the next 10 years does not extend to out years over the longer-term horizon.
