DURING a recent closed-door policy meeting, I was asked a question that cut to the heart of the region's hydro-future: is the era of negotiated water-sharing in South Asia truly coming to an end? Or has the age of unilateral control already taken hold, leaving cooperation and regional stability a nostalgic memory?
The answer, sadly, is playing out in the valleys and deserts of our immediate neighbourhood. Pakistan now finds itself caught in a dual chokehold. In April 2025, India suspended the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, the only long-standing negotiated framework between upper and lower riparians in South Asia. Soon thereafter, plans to divert the Chenab through new inter-basin canals were announced. Simultaneously, Afghanistan, unbound by any treaty with Pakistan, declared it would dam the Kunar River before it returns to our territory.
Upstream states are increasingly weaponising water resources. The scholarship is clear, yet, often ignored. As Mark Zeitoun and Jeroen Warner's influential 2006 framework on hydro-hegemony contended, "Power is the most fundamental aspect in controlling water in a transboundary river basin." This provides a clear articulation of how upstream states exercise power over shared waters, consistent with arguments about upstream arbitrariness and dominance in water governance.
Since the 1950s, the unilateral construction of massive dams and diversion projects has remained a preferred strategy to secure water for agriculture and hydropower. But at what cost? Chronic scarcity, ecological collapse, and geopolitical crises have become the unfortunate downstream legacy.
Upstream states are increasingly weaponising water resources.
Let's look at the fate of four other neighbouring basins, arbitrarily bifurcated at the time when the internationally negotiated Indus Waters Treaty was coming to life.
Nile Basin: The foundational example of this trend is the construction of the Aswan Dam, completed in 1970. This massive structure provided Egypt with ultimate control over the Nile's flow, securing its water share unilaterally based on a 1959 agreement with Sudan that deliberately excluded upstream states like Ethiopia. This was a foundational act of hydro-hegemony.
This historical power structure has come full circle. Ethiopia's unilateral decision to fill and operate the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam represents a direct attempt to overturn Egypt's historical control. The past has finally caught up with the hegemon. The result? A future of more frequent droughts threatens to reduce the Nile's flow, adding an existential urgency, and potential for conflict.
Jordan River: This weaponisation of upstream control, first perfected on the Nile, found a more immediate and violent echo along the Jordan River. Israel's National Water Carrier, completed in 1964, was a major diversion project. When the Arab League planned its counter-diversion, it led to cross-border military skirmishes that eventually culminated in the Six-Day Arab-Israel War in 1967. The basin's crisis is exacerbated by being one of the most severely impacted regions globally by rising temperatures and reduced precipitation.
Tigris and Euphrates: After decades of planning, Turkiye initiated the massive Southeastern Anatolia Project, known as GAP, in the 1980s, establishing permanent upstream-downstream power asymmetry with Syria and Iraq. This is compounded by Iran's more than a dozen dams and diversion tunnels on Tigris tributaries.
This structural asymmetry results in the slow death of Mesopotamia as multi-year droughts accelerate the collapse of agriculture and intensify the desertification of the once-fertile floodplains. The consequence is not just local: this creates massive 'Sand and Dust Storms' which sometimes reach as far as Balochistan, proving that water conflicts have profound, border-transcending ecological consequences.
Kura-Aras Basin: In the South Caucasus, the Aras River forms the borders between Turkiye, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Here, water diversion by Armenia does more than just reduce quantity; it carries severe pollution, disproportionately affecting downstream Iran and Azerbaijan who suffer from both scarcity and environmental degradation. The pattern of unilateral control is being tragically repeated across South and Central Asia.
Ganges River: The Farakka Barrage on the Ganges diverts water towards the Hooghly River, significantly reducing the dry-season flow into Bangladesh. Despite the Ganges Water Treaty (1996), the unilateral diversions continue, particularly concerning the critical Teesta River. Bangladesh is affected by the Himalayan glacial recession, and increasingly volatile monsoon patterns exacerbate water scarcity.
The Amu Darya and Kabul River systems: This acute Central Asian hydropolitical stress is a microcosm of a larger regional dynamic, particularly concerning governance by Afghanistan. The massive Qosh Tepa Canal project on the Amu Darya is designed to divert 17-20 per cent of the river's flow to irrigate Afghanistan's northern provinces. This canal poses a direct threat to the established water quotas of downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which rely heavily on the Amu Darya. The absence of a basin-wide agreement ensures that this diversion will deepen existing water conflicts, pushing regional players to the breaking point.
Furthermore, the construction and operation of the Kamal Khan Dam on the Helmand River significantly reduces essential water flows into Iran, directly violating the 1973 Helmand River Water Treaty. Unilateral resource development illustrates a wider trend where new infrastructure projects directly translate to reduced water security for neighbours.
Afghanistan's major river systems (like the Kabul River and its tributary the Kunar) are crucially dependent on snow and glacier melt from the Hindukush. This vital upstream position makes development politically charged, as seen in the recent tensions over the reported plan for a dam or diversion project on the Kunar River that flows into Pakistan's Indus system -- a direct parallel to the pressures India is exerting on the Chenab.
The era of negotiated water-sharing is ending, replaced by the unilateral control of upstream states from the Nile to the Indus. They prioritise rapid development over shared resource integrity, accelerating instability and water stress, which is magnified by climate change into an existential threat. The suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty proves that such agreements are tragically vulnerable to hydro-hegemony. Failure to cooperate leads not just to conflict, but to structural disaster. The global community must recognise unilateral river diversion not as an act of sovereignty, but an act of water aggression.
The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.
Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2025