Why India and Pakistan won’t go to war over water

It sounds like the opening scenes of a World War III dystopia: Deep in the Himalayas, engineers quietly shut off the sluice gates to a little-known dam. Like the assassination of an Austrian archduke, the butterfly effects from that one obscure incident could blow up into a nuclear conflict drawing in much of the planet.

Right now, it seems like a remote but genuine possibility. Since Sunday, India has almost entirely stopped water flows across the border through the Chenab river, a tributary of the Indus, according to Pakistan's government. New Delhi earlier withdrew from a 1960 treaty governing the Indus that remained in place through decades of skirmishes and actual wars. 

That's part of tensions simmering after 26 tourists were killed in a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. New Delhi has since carried out military strikes inside Pakistan, which said Wednesday it had shot down five Indian jets in response. 

In a worst-case, wargaming scenario, cutting off Pakistan's water supplies could amount to a casus belli, parching cotton and rice crops that ultimately account for about 60% of its exports and threatening dams that provide about a third of electricity. Pakistan's ties with China and India's warming relationship with the US risk such tensions spiraling into global war.

That's the theory, at least. In reality, the "water wars" thesis — the idea that, on a warming planet racked by ever-more-variable river flows, nation-states will inevitably clash as they fight over a dwindling supply of fresh water — has hardly ever played out.

The first recorded battle may have been a water war. Around 2,500 BC, the Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma came to blows over a tract of irrigated farmland, commemorated in a broken bas-relief in the Louvre. According to Aaron Wolf, a professor specializing in water and conflict at Oregon State University, it's also the last time in human history that states turned their perpetual threats of water wars into an actual conflict.

"On the international scene, there is very little violence around water," he said. "What happens is that there is an awful lot of rancor and speculation, and then all that attention helps turn the ship to where you have the conditions for dialogue, and negotiation, and a treaty that lasts in perpetuity."

In a database hosted at Oregon State compiling more than 7,000 water-related international incidents between 1948 and 2008, actual violence broke out only 38 times. All but 10 involved Israel, mostly during the 1950s and '60s. Two-thirds of international interactions over water were cooperative, and didn't reach the level of mild verbal criticism. That's even the case between nations that are usually hostile, such as India-Pakistan, Turkey-Armenia, and Israel and its Arab neighbors.

This shouldn't really surprise us. Tensions over river flows are alarming precisely because water is potentially a weapon of mass destruction. Famine has killed many orders of magnitude more people during wars than swords and bullets. In common with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, however, we have done remarkably well at defusing the threat of water conflict through humdrum protocols and treaties.

As with those other WMDs, the water weapon is also a lot easier to speculate about than to actually deploy. Despite the provocative threats of India's water minister that "not one drop" of the Indus will make it across the border into Pakistan, humanity's ability to permanently hold back the hundreds of cubic kilometers of H2O that flow down major river systems every year is distinctly limited.

Hydroelectric dams, for instance, can't impound water for very long without threatening their own structural integrity. To follow through on the "not one drop" threat, India would have to either divert the rivers into channels that don't exist, or irrigate vast tracts of land. Either option would take many years, and billions of dollars.

Using crops to suck it up is pretty much the only large-scale way we can prevent upstream flows from ultimately finding their way to the sea. That's one reason that irrigation in India is so tightly regulated by the Indus Waters Treaty, a fact that in turn has long fueled persistent local pressure for New Delhi to withdraw from the agreement.

That may be the best context in which to understand the latest conflict. Climate change provides a fresh challenge to the hundreds of treaties and agreements that govern our use of water, but not one that will break them. The mutually assured destruction that would result from water wars has prevented them from breaking out for 4,500 years. The current round of brinkmanship is likely to follow the same path — heated words that end not with bombs and bloodshed, but with lawyers hashing out revisions to a 65-year-old treaty in a sleepy courtroom in The Hague. 

War, as one of its most celebrated theorists once argued, is the continuation of politics by other means. That's even more the case when it comes to threats of war.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.