Courtesy: Reporting Contribution by Anjali Sharma [A Veteran Journalist I New Delhi, India]
New York City, NY/New Delhi, IN: Pakistan emerged from the May 2025 confrontation with India claiming a significant military and psychological victory in the skies. Yet beyond missiles, fighters and air-defence systems, a slower strategic contest is unfolding along the Indus Basin.
India’s upstream geography, expanding hydropower infrastructure and decision to hold the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance have exposed a Pakistani vulnerability that air power alone cannot deter.
The India-Pakistan confrontation has traditionally been measured through military strength: fighter aircraft, missiles, nuclear deterrence and control of the Line of Control.
The May 2025 conflict reinforced that thinking. Pakistan demonstrated that it could impose significant costs in a technologically sophisticated air confrontation, while India subsequently asserted that it too had inflicted aircraft losses on Pakistan.
But the more consequential struggle may not be taking place in the air.
It is unfolding through the rivers.
For Pakistan, the strategic paradox is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: Islamabad may have demonstrated an effective capacity to defend its airspace, yet its ability to protect the country’s long-term water security remains far less convincing.
That distinction matters because aircraft can be replaced and military bases repaired. A sustained disruption in the Indus Basin would penetrate agriculture, electricity generation, food prices, rural employment and ultimately Pakistan’s economic and political stability.
The Air War Changed Perceptions — but Not Geography
During the May 2025 confrontation, Pakistan claimed it had shot down several Indian aircraft. Reuters subsequently reported, citing U.S. officials that Pakistani J-10 fighters had brought down at least two Indian military aircraft, including at least one French-made Rafale.
Pakistan claimed five Indian aircraft had been destroyed, although that larger figure was not independently established.
India later presented its own account. In August 2025, Indian Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh said India had destroyed five Pakistani fighters and another large military aircraft, claims Pakistan disputed.
The competing narratives are important. Calling the confrontation an uncontested Pakistani military victory would therefore go beyond what independently verified evidence establishes.
Nevertheless, Pakistan unquestionably emerged with an important strategic message: India could not assume technological superiority would automatically translate into uncontested control of the skies.
Water presents the opposite equation.
Pakistan cannot move the headwaters of the Chenab, Jhelum and Indus. Geography gives India an upstream position that no squadron of J-10s or F-16s can reverse.
And that makes the water confrontation fundamentally different from the air war.
A Warning Zeeshan Javaid Raised Years Earlier
This vulnerability did not suddenly emerge after the 2025 crisis.
In my April 2022 article, “India Continues to Squeeze Water Tap on a Politically Chaotic Pakistan,” I argued that Pakistan’s greatest problem was not simply India’s construction of hydropower projects, but Islamabad’s repeated inability to respond strategically before those projects became physical realities.
At the time, attention centered on India’s 850MW Ratle and 540MW Kwar projects, with a combined capacity of approximately 1,390MW, on the Chenab system. The article documented Pakistani objections to Ratle’s design, including disagreements involving pondage, freeboard, intake level and spillways.
The broader argument was more important than any individual dam: India builds while Pakistan objects.
Pakistan’s approach has repeatedly become reactive — technical objections, diplomatic correspondence and international proceedings often intensify only after projects have progressed substantially.
The historical pattern extends through Baglihar, Kishanganga and Ratle.
My earlier reporting examined how Pakistan took objections over the Baglihar Hydroelectric Project to the World Bank’s Neutral Expert mechanism and subsequently contested Indian hydropower development through the treaty’s dispute-resolution architecture.
Later academic analysis confirms the broader pattern: Baglihar and Kishanganga became defining cases in which engineering questions — pondage, spillways, diversion and operating flexibility — gradually turned into questions about the strategic meaning of the treaty itself.
That distinction is critical.
A dam does not need to permanently stop an entire river to acquire strategic significance. The ability to influence the timing of flows can itself matter enormously to a downstream agricultural economy.
April 2025 Changed the Water Equation
After the April 22, 2025 Pahalgam attack, which killed 26 civilians, India announced that the Indus Waters Treaty would be held in abeyance.
That was an extraordinary development because the 1960 agreement had survived wars and repeated military crises.
The treaty essentially allocated the eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — to India while giving Pakistan rights over most waters of the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — subject to specified Indian uses.
A recent academic study notes that roughly 80 percent of the basin’s flows were allocated to Pakistan through the western rivers.
Pakistan subsequently rejected India’s unilateral action, arguing that the treaty remains legally binding. Islamabad’s UN ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad said in July 2026 that the August 2025 Court of Arbitration award had reaffirmed the treaty’s continuing validity.
India, however, has maintained its political position that the treaty will remain in abeyance until Pakistan takes what New Delhi describes as credible and irreversible action against cross-border terrorism.
The result is something more dangerous than an ordinary disagreement over dam engineering.
Water has become explicitly connected to national security.
Pakistan’s Real Vulnerability Is Storage
The most alarming figure in this entire confrontation may have nothing to do with India.
It is 30 days.
Pakistan’s effective water-storage capacity has been estimated at roughly 30 days, compared with approximately 120–220 days for India. The Indus system meanwhile supplies more than 80 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural water, according to figures cited in recent analysis.
This exposes the central weakness in Pakistan’s water-security strategy.
Islamabad can challenge India legally. It can mobilize diplomatic support. Its military can threaten consequences for deliberate diversion of Pakistan’s allocated waters.
But none of those responses substitutes for reservoirs.
A country with limited storage remains vulnerable not only to upstream pressure but also to drought, changing snowmelt, extreme monsoons and inefficient domestic water management.
This is where Pakistan may be losing the water war partly to itself.
From Scarcity to Flood: The Two Faces of Water Warfare
The word “water war” often produces an image of India simply turning off a giant tap.
Reality is considerably more complicated.
India currently lacks the infrastructure necessary to permanently stop the enormous western river system from flowing into Pakistan. But infrastructure can provide greater capacity to regulate timing, temporarily store water and manipulate operational flexibility.
The opposite danger is excessive water.
Pakistan’s Punjab has repeatedly suffered catastrophic flooding. During the 2025 floods, Pakistani officials accused India of using water as a weapon through upstream releases.
Yet independent experts cautioned that extreme rainfall, saturated reservoirs, climate change and inadequate Pakistani flood management were also major factors. India had itself experienced severe flooding upstream.
That produces Pakistan’s strategic nightmare:
Too little water when farmers desperately need it, and too much water when the system cannot absorb it.
The weapon is therefore not necessarily complete deprivation. The greater strategic concern is unpredictability.
The Data War May Be as Important as the Dam War
The Indus Waters Treaty was not merely a mechanism for dividing rivers. It created institutional communication.
Hydrological information allowed Pakistan to anticipate abnormal flows and manage downstream infrastructure.
When political cooperation and systematic data exchanges weaken, uncertainty increases.
For a country exposed to both drought and flooding, advance knowledge of upstream river conditions can be almost as important as the physical quantity of water itself.
Pakistan therefore faces three interconnected fronts: physical infrastructure upstream, treaty enforcement internationally and information management domestically.
Winning only the legal argument would not solve the other two.
Pakistan’s Institutional Failure Cannot Be Blamed Entirely on India
This is where Pakistan’s political establishment must confront an uncomfortable reality.
India’s policies deserve scrutiny, particularly where unilateral actions undermine a treaty specifically designed to insulate water cooperation from political hostility.
But blaming New Delhi for every Pakistani water crisis would be strategically self-defeating.
Pakistan loses enormous quantities of water through inefficient irrigation, deteriorating canals, inadequate storage and outdated agricultural practices. Water-intensive cropping patterns further increase pressure.
The institutional problems extend deeper.
My earlier reporting on Pakistan’s telemetry controversy documented years of difficulties surrounding efforts to establish reliable real-time measurement of river flows, including a failed earlier project associated with WAPDA and later government investigations into the handling of telemetry initiatives.
That history matters enormously today.
Pakistan cannot accuse another state of manipulating river flows while lacking sufficiently transparent, trusted and technologically sophisticated mechanisms for measuring every important flow within its own irrigation network.
Water security begins with knowing exactly how much water exists, where it is going and where it is being lost.
India Builds Infrastructure; Pakistan Builds Cases
That may be the most consequential imbalance of all.
India has steadily expanded hydropower infrastructure in Jammu and Kashmir while Pakistan has frequently responded through the Permanent Indus Commission, World Bank mechanisms, Neutral Experts and arbitration.
International adjudication remains essential. Pakistan should aggressively defend treaty protections.
But courts cannot store water.
Lawyers cannot modernize canals.
Diplomatic statements cannot construct reservoirs.
And military deterrence cannot replenish groundwater.
Pakistan’s challenge is therefore to transform water security from a diplomatic issue into a comprehensive national-security doctrine encompassing reservoir capacity, telemetry, groundwater regulation, agricultural reform, flood protection, climate adaptation and international law.
The Treaty Still Matters
The Indus Waters Treaty should not be dismissed as obsolete simply because it is under unprecedented pressure.
Its greatest achievement was not eliminating disagreement. It was preventing disagreements over water from automatically becoming military crises.
Recent academic research describes the treaty as remarkably resilient precisely because it survived decades of wars and political hostility before the rupture of 2025.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar warned again on August 28, 2026 that attempts to deprive Pakistan of waters allocated under the treaty could have “profound consequences” for regional peace and security.
Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal similarly said on August 25 that India’s decision had created a serious new security challenge by effectively introducing the weaponization of water into the bilateral confrontation.
But warnings cannot become policy substitutes.
The Fire Was Dramatic. The Flood Is Strategic.
Pakistan’s performance in the 2025 air confrontation demonstrated the importance of preparation, technology, intelligence, integrated air defence and credible deterrence.
Water security requires exactly the same seriousness.
The difference is that military victory can sometimes be measured within hours. Water wars unfold over decades.
India’s strongest advantage is not merely its military budget or larger economy. It is geography combined with infrastructure. Pakistan’s strongest defence therefore cannot be another missile system. It must be resilience.
The lesson from the reporting I began years ago on Baglihar, Kishanganga, Ratle and Pakistan’s own telemetry failures is increasingly difficult to escape: the greatest threat is not simply that India might control more water. It is that Pakistan may enter that confrontation without having adequately controlled, stored, measured or conserved its own.
Pakistan demonstrated in the skies that military asymmetry does not necessarily determine the outcome of a confrontation.
On water, however, the equation is harsher.
Pakistan may have won an important battle in the air, but unless Islamabad turns water management into a genuine national-security priority, it risks losing a far longer war on the ground — one river, one reservoir and one wasted season at a time.
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