Pakistan is facing a silent but devastating war—one that is being fought not with bombs, but through rivers.
According to water expert Hassan Abbas, this undeclared war is drying up Pakistan’s future and quietly eroding its ecological and economic foundations.
The enemy isn't just across the border—though India’s upstream control of rivers is part of the problem—but also within, in the form of mismanagement, outdated thinking, and institutional inertia.
India has been steadily building up its upper hand, both geographically and strategically, as the upper riparian state.
By pushing through a dam-building spree in occupied Kashmir—Baglihar, Kishanganga, Ratle—India has steadily tightened its grip on the headwaters that feed Pakistan’s rivers.
It hasn’t torn up the Indus Waters Treaty yet, but it has found ways around it, working the loopholes, storing flows in off-season, and letting loose the floods when Pakistan’s fields least need them.
As Abbas puts it, “India doesn’t’t have to abrogate the treaty to wage water war.
It is already doing it through the provisions of the treaty – putting unlimited pollution in our river and building unlimited number of dams on all rivers of the Indus basin.
” For too long, we’ve bought into the illusion that more concrete and more canals will bail us out.
The hydraulic mindset we inherited from colonial engineers taught us to think of rivers as pipes and tanks—objects to be tamed, diverted, and measured in acre-feet.
“We’ve been conditioned to think that storage equals security.
But not all storage is useful—and some of it is destructive,” Abbas warns.
Instead of flowing with nature, we’ve boxed it in.
Instead of looking after our floodplains and aquifers, we’ve paved them over, pumped them dry, or buried them under silt.
We’ve let the Indus Delta wither away, watched seawater creep up into once-fertile lands, and shrugged off the collapse of riverine fisheries as collateral damage.
“The death of the Indus Delta is not the price of development—it is a sign that our development model is killing the very resources it depends on,” Abbas insists.
Abbas proposes that Pakistan must fight back differently—not by mirroring aggression, but by embracing ecological intelligence.
This includes restoring natural flows, reviving inland navigation, and using rivers for low-emission transport.
“A navigable Indus connects our economy to the sea, reduces transport costs, and gives us reason to protect river flows,” he argues.
The fight also lies in community action and governance reform.
Villages must recharge groundwater, cities must harvest rain, and farmers must adopt efficient irrigation.
Abbas calls this “real national defense.
” He urges for transparency in water data, inclusive governance, and diplomatic outreach to expose In-dia's upstream actions on international platforms.
Above all, Abbas emphasizes a cultural shift: seeing rivers not as pipelines to exploit, but as living systems to live with.
“We keep asking: Will there be a water war?
But the war is already here.
The real question is: Will we fight it by killing our rivers—or by giving them life?”
—The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Islamabad.
