While oil may have triggered many of the conflicts of the 20th century, many believe that this century’s wars will mostly be over water. Four years ago, many in Pakistan feared that India was bent on denying water due to us under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. In 2010, Pakistan went into a partly successful appeal before international arbitrators to halt the construction of the Indian Kishanganga hydroelectric dam across the Neelum River in Kashmir.
In the heated rhetoric that accompanied this legal action, media pundits and TV chat room 'experts’ denounced the treaty as a 'sell-out’ by Ayub Khan. However, the real danger to our water security comes not from India but China. For most of us, Tibet barely registers on our radar, and events there may as well be taking place on Mars. We are vaguely aware of its claims to independence and China’s brutal suppression of these aspirations.
What we are unaware of is the region’s crucial role in supporting life in the Subcontinent. Home to 37,000 glaciers, Tibet is described as the 'third pole’ as it contains the world’s third largest ice deposits after the Arctic and the Antarctic. In the summer, the melt-off from these glaciers provides the water that feeds five major delta systems in China as well as in South and South-East Asia: the Indus in Pakistan; the Ganges-Brahmaputra in India and Bangladesh; the Irrawaddy in Myanmar; the Mekong in Southeast Asia; and the Yangtze in China.
Although the world has been largely unaware of China’s exploitation of the Tibet plateau, there has been an unrelenting move to settle Han Chinese there to dilute the numbers of native Tibetans. Forests have been cut down, and minerals — specially rare ones like lithium — have been mined. And now there are reports of grandiose plans to divert water from Tibet to China.
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