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ONE is familiar with the terms ‘suicide’, ‘fratricide’, even sadly ‘matricide’ and ‘patricide’. ‘Aquacide’ is a new one. It is usually applied to an herbicide used to control weeds. The social scientist Roman Krznaric has given aquacide a different meaning — national suicide by dehydration. He warns in his compelling book History for Tomorrow (2024), that “water makes and breaks civilisations”. The only place, he says, one can find an abundance of water now is in history.
Our planet seen from space looks startlingly blue, saturated by oceans. They cover 70 per cent of the earth’s surface. In reality, only 2.5pc of that water is fresh, and even 99pc of that is trapped in glaciers and underground aquifers.
Throughout history, water as a life-giving resource has been taken for granted, except by the Chinese. Apparently, the Chinese character for the word ‘govern’ comes from ‘water control’ or ‘harnessing the rivers’. While Europe luxuriated in the Holy Roman empire and Great Britain gorged on its imperial surpluses, millions of Chinese laboured to make theirs a ‘hydraulic civilisation’.
Over millennia, from 2,000 BCE onwards, they built canals and dykes to control and regulate the often dangerous flow of its rivers. Today, the Chinese Grand Canal — “the world’s longest manmade waterway” — links five river basins, from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south.
The next Indo-Pak war could well be over ‘white oil’.
Geography has made water a resource common to more than one country. Ancient Romans coined a word for such multiple users — ‘rivalis’ (rival) — ‘someone who uses water from the same river as another’. In Africa, today 11 countries are dependent on the Nile, 10 on the Congo River, and in East Asia, six draw on the Mekong that flows from China to Vietnam.
Such dependence can be fraught with hazards, inflame arguments, even start wars. Mature nations, though, have developed mechanisms for sharing water equitably. For example, the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (conceived in 1856) still works for 19 European countries, while the Great Lakes Commission in the Americas connects five states in the US with Canada (unless President Donald Trump decides otherwise).
In 1947, after the provincial partitions of Punjab and Bengal, both India and Pakistan needed to find a system of ‘equitable apportionment’ of common waters. In 1960, they signed the Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank which stood guarantor of their performance. It gave Pakistan a dowry in dams — Tarbela and Mangla, and the Chashma barrage. Meetings of the Pakistani and Indian IWT commissioners were held regularly until May 2022. None since.
In 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi damaged the treaty by declaring that “blood and water could not flow together”. Tempers flared which have not subsided. Pakistan has hinted that Indian violations of the IWT could lead to war. The next war between India and Pakistan will conceivably not be over a false-flag incident in occupied Jammu & Kashmir, but over ‘white oil’ — water.
Interestingly, World Bank president Ajay Banga, during his recent visit to India and Pakistan, emphasised job creation and other social imperatives, but sidestepped the bank’s responsibilities under the IWT.
Water and war, it has been said, are destined to become “deadly accomplices in a thirsty world”. The Six-Day war in June 1967 between Israel and the Arab states more than expanded the land area of Israel. It also increased its strategic water reserves. Israel gained large aquifers that lay under the West Bank and also control of the headwaters of the Jordan River in the Golan Heights.
If the scramble for oil and gas reserves has dominated the first half of this century, the second half will predictably be devoted to two common, undervalued resources — the air we breathe and the water that sustains our lives. The world has ignored the warnings of humanists including former US vice-president Al Gore, the British zoologist David Attenborough, and the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. “Water and air,” Cousteau cautioned, “the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”
Pakistan is an agro-based economy with a burgeoning population. Water and clean air are, and will remain of critical significance. The UN projects that Pakistan’s present population of 243m is expected to reach 511m by 2100. Over 90pc of Pakistan’s water is used for agriculture. Bottled water cannot irrigate sere fields nor satiate a parched population.
In January 2026, the government convened the first meeting of the Task Force on National Water Security in Islamabad. Pious platitudes were poured into five-star sands. A stronger message of official resolve to ensure water security might have been conveyed had the deliberations been held in the arid Thar desert.
The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk
Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2026
