BLOG

WATER POLITICS

Courtesy of Hydro-Logic, an excellent analysis of how transboundary water issues are one of the top three concerns affecting the balance of power in the region that is dominated by China, India, and Pakistan. As the article notes:

“…water and energy are inextricably linked, in a ”nexus” which I shall address in a future post, and in Pakistan there exists a problem for lack of both. It takes a lot of water to generate energy in almost every process that we have invented thus far, and it takes a lot of energy to move water where the people need it most, which is not necessarily in the places where it occurs most naturally. Pakistan relies a great deal on two particular energy generation methods: hydropower, which I’ll talk about in part 2 of this discussion, and nuclear. Recently, Pakistan has been frustrated in trying to coax the U.S. into transfer of nuclear energy technology to their country, primarily because it’s not too far from reactor fuel to more weapons packages, so they’ve gone and asked China instead, and their ”all-weather friendship” is suddenly renewed. This is despite the fact that, as the linked article relates, China is a member of a Nuclear Suppliers Group and Pakistan is not, and according to the rules of the group China should have obtained a waiver in order to transfer technology to a non-member state, which they did not, claiming that this is just an extension of an earlier reactor project in which China supplied Pakistan, well before the Suppliers Group was formed. Lots of other politics surround the issue, including how Pakistan gained nuclear weapons technology in the first place, but let’s sum it up with the recognition that India is not happy about Pakistan’s deal with China.

To top it off, India is also a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, but in 2008 obtained a ”blanket clearance” to re-enter the nuclear trade market without restrictions. India receives nuclear assistance from the U.S. in an effort to build up the Indian civil uses of nuclear energy so that the Indian nuclear weapons programs are de-emphasized. So why didn’t Pakistan strike up a deal with India, instead of raising questions on the legitimacy of a ”renewed” process with China? Oh, right – India considers Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, and has attributed to Pakistani militants the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Pakistan has had trouble dividing its own loyalties: the military, which practically runs the country, has declined more significant action against militants in the North-West Frontier Province (those most often crossing the border with Afghanistan) because to commit more troops to helping NATO there would pull military forces, and the militants they help and train, from the Kashmir region and the border with India, from whom Pakistan perceives a constant threat of imminent war. Even the official U.S. presence in Pakistan

Besides the mutual threat of a nuclear exchange (of the non-civil kind), Pakistan and India maintain differences in the Himalaya – Karakoram Range over the administration of Jammu and Kashmir (which I’ll call JK), two mountainous and water-rich provinces steeped in history and claimed by both countries. Again, though, the map suggests that China maintains a territorial claim to a portion of the disputed territory. In the meantime, the Line of Control between Pakistan and Indian territories has remained unmoved since 1972, and another Line of Actual Control has divided the area claimed by India and China approximately since 1959, though not agreed upon in writing until the 1990s. In all of the interactions between China, India and Pakistan there are both settled and disputed boundaries. In the case of agreement between Pakistan and India, the border dispute has direct and lasting implications for the allocation of water resources originating in JK. I’ll explore the details of the Indo-Pakistan agreeement in my next post.

And now, while India is distracted on its western frontier, China has moved forward with its own hydropower plans. A new dam is under construction in China on the Tsangpo River, which becomes the Brahmaputra River when it crosses into India and joins the Ganges River in Bangladesh. Though recent floods have induced disasters of epic proportions in the region of eastern India and Bangladesh, upstream dams threaten just the opposite impact, and a sudden lack of water in a region so accustomed to plentiful supplies in its agricultural practices could be devastating. China could at least have included the downstream riparians somewhere in the decision process leading to this new project, an irony that will become more evident later. At the least, though, it seems that China’s unilateral behavior on the Tsangpo River is consistent with its decisions in other areas of southern Asia…“