Pakistan is preparing for a new diplomatic campaign against India in response to the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, with a high-level military and civil-military meeting on Tuesday in Islamabad to discuss its international strategy, top intelligence sources say.
The meeting will be chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir. It will be taken to various international forums given Pakistan's previous attempts to bring international attention to the situation in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) have failed to win its support.
According to intelligence inputs, Islamabad is going to present the Indus Waters Treaty as an international concern and take a tough stand against India’s move to upend the decades-old water-sharing agreement. Pakistan is going to say India’s actions threaten the country’s water security, agriculture, and economy in terms of reducing downstream river flows.
Pakistani officials have maintained that rivers continue to flow across international borders irrespective of formal agreements and have rejected India’s claim that it can halt water flows under the current circumstances.
Pakistan’s Climate Minister Musadik Malik said that India doesn’t have enough infrastructure to stop river flows into Pakistan from now on. But Islamabad will continue to portray the dispute as an international issue and call for international help despite the financial woes of major hydropower projects in the pipeline - namely the Diamer-Bhasha and Dasu dams.
The new diplomatic push comes as tension is mounting after India’s decision to end the treaty after a recent terrorist attack in Pahalgam. New Delhi has always said that cross-border terrorism and changing security circumstances require a re-examination of bilateral agreements like the Indus Waters Treaty.
According to intelligence sources, Pakistan’s current campaign also reflects larger domestic political forces. Pakistani civil-military leadership is now trying to shift the focus as the pressure on Pakistan-occupied Kashmir had not been able to achieve the desired international and domestic response from its global pressure.
Even more recently, Pakistan’s political leadership has elevated its public rhetoric on the matter. Federal ministers have declared that the country will “fight for the restoration of the Indus Waters Treaty” and some top officials have accused India of “water terrorism.” One minister even warned that Pakistan would respond strongly to any perceived threat to its water resources.
The more aggressive language, according to intelligence assessments, is aimed at mobilizing domestic support at a time when Pakistan is experiencing severe economic difficulties, political uncertainty, and growing public discontent.
The country is facing internal challenges: high inflation, financial pressures, energy shortages and delays to big infrastructure projects. Intelligence officials believe the government is attempting to depict the water dispute as a national security issue and thus focus on the problems that are domestic rather than foreign.
Water remains one of South Asia’s most sensitive geopolitical issues, analysts say, because millions of people in India and Pakistan depend on the Indus River system for agriculture, drinking water and power generation. If the treaty is also in dispute for a long time then there is no doubt that it will be a topic of serious diplomatic attention.
India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, after the World Bank helped broker it. But now the deal is under strain and there are doubts about the future of bilateral water cooperation.
With Pakistan preparing to internationalize the issue and India defending its national security position, we expect more diplomatic activity to take place in the next weeks around one of the region’s most significant bilateral agreements.
