Indus Valley, Source: NASA Earth Observatory
A potential for water war between India and Pakistan has long been feared by outside observers. An article in today's right-wing Washington Post suggests that possibility is growing greater. The partition of the Raj in the waning hours of British control creating the predominantly Muslim Pakistan and the mostly Hindu India (though India also has a huge Muslim population making it one of the largest Muslim nations) is usually discussed in religious terms. In the bloody aftermath of the partition, Kashmir with a largely Muslim population, remained a major point of contention between the two mostly unfriendly states with Hindu India controlling the crucial eastern section. There have been almost ceaseless and frequently bloody confrontations between Hindus and Muslims and between India and Pakistan, with China later added to the toxic mix, but more frequently than not, the conflict has been discussed in religious and political terms.
In fact the conflict is also over water, for India and China control the crucial headwaters where the Indus River gets the bulk of its flow from melting snowfall and glaciers in the Himalaya. The Indus is a classic example of what the geographer Edward Ullman many years ago termed an exotic river, a stream that after gathering significant flow in a humid zone passes for much of its length through arid areas where rates of evaporation exceed rainfall and little if any water is added to the flow. In the arid zone the river becomes the major, if not the only, source of water and allows human occupation.
One of the oldest areas of agriculture and urban settlement on earth, the Indus Valley, now largely contained within Pakistan, has an almost total dependence on the flow of the Indus. The larger towns and cities use river water for urban and industrial purposes, and agriculture would be impossible were not for withdrawals of Indus water. The critical headwaters, most of the primary sources of the Indus's flow, are controlled by India (and to a much smaller extent by China). India has the ability, and the facilities, to cut off the flow into Pakistan. There is ample demand for the water within India, for its western portions are nearly as dry as most of Pakistan.
A water blockade with most or all of the flows cut off by India would in very short order lead to a collapse of agriculture in Pakistan and intense privation. It could also lead to open warfare between the nuclear armed states. More on this in later postings.
