The War for Water: Hydrology of State Disintegration

The water crisis in South Asia is not an “environmental emergency,” but a direct expression of capitalist relations of production and interstate competition for control of vital resources. In a region where agriculture employs over 40% of the workforce and accounts for a significant portion of the gross domestic product, control over water is a matter of survival for the local bourgeoisie.

Afghanistan and Iran: Water Sovereignty Versus Ecological Collapse

The issues surrounding the Helmand River, which originates in Afghanistan and ends in the Hamun Lakes on the Iranian border, perfectly illustrates this contradiction. A 1973 treaty that was never fully ratified provided for a minimum supply of 26 m³ per second to Iran. But the reality is that no treaty can survive the capitalist dynamic of resource appropriation. Afghan dams—particularly Kamal Khan and Bakhshabad—drastically reduce water flow, contributing to the collapse of the Iranian ecosystem downstream.

In May 2023, tensions led to armed clashes. On the one hand, the Taliban claims absolute “sovereignty” over the country’s water resources. On the other hand, Iran, threatened by desertification, threatens to use force. The Hamun marshes, once covering over 4,000 km², have shrunk to less than 10% of their original size in just over two decades. This has had devastating effects on the population and agriculture.

International mediation attempts, like those by the UN Environment Program, have proven to be completely irrelevant. Diplomacy is powerless in the face of the dominance of capitalist production and the resulting disruption of the biosphere’s equilibrium.

Pakistan-Afghanistan: Water as the Currency of Betrayal

The Kabul River basin, on which a significant part of Pakistani agriculture depends, is at the center of another dispute. Afghanistan, now controlled by the Taliban, has announced the construction of 12 dams that will reduce the flow to Pakistan by 16-17%. There is no formal agreement between the two countries on the management of shared water resources. Islamabad, which for years hosted the Taliban as a strategic reserve, is now paying the political price for that alliance. Capital has no loyalty.

India and Pakistan The Indus Water Treaty and the Existential Threat

The 1960 Indus Water Treaty was brokered by the World Bank. It gave India control over the eastern rivers and Pakistan control over the western rivers, with restrictions on India’s use of the latter. But with growing demographic pressure, water scarcity, and climate change, the technical margins of the agreement have turned into geopolitical trenches.

India has built hydroelectric dams on “Pakistani” rivers. These are formally within the limits of the treaty, but are perceived by Islamabad as hostile acts. Per capita water availability in Pakistan has fallen from 5,600 to less than 1,000 m³, placing the country in the category of “severe water scarcity.” The Indus River system supports 90% of agriculture, 26% of GDP, and over 40% of Pakistan’s workforce. Any reduction in water flow means famine, unemployment, and social disintegration.

The founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafiz Saeed, has long incorporated the water narrative into jihadist propaganda, linking Indian dams to the need for “defensive jihad.” The phrases used are “water terrorism,” “economic destruction,” and “nuclear cause.” These reflect the underlying logic.

The attack on Pahalgam and India’s subsequent unilateral suspension of the Indus Water Treaty represent a very serious escalation. The statements made by the World Bank and humanitarian agencies regarding “concerns about food security” do not change the material reality. Water, privatized, divided, and weaponized, has become a political lever of power. The bourgeois state, in whatever form, manages resources according to the laws of accumulation and permanent war.

Water Is Not a Commodity, It’s an “Asset”

In South Asia, control over water resources is now indistinguishable from territorial control, economic warfare, and political domination. There is no such thing as “cooperative management” under capitalism. The war for water is a war between bourgeoisies, fought on the backs of the working class and peasantry, who are sacrificed for the interests of conflicting imperialist blocs.

Rational planning of water distribution comes up against insurmountable barriers posed by bourgeois state fragmentation. Political borders, imposed by imperialism and defended by military force, fragment river basins that constitute natural geological units. The contradiction between the physical unity of natural resources and the artificial division of bourgeois states is one of the most visible aspects of the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production.

The case of the Indus river is emblematic. It is divided into “Pakistani rivers” and “Indian rivers” by a treaty imposed in 1960, its basin is managed according to competitive rather than complementary principles. The hydrological unity of the system is negated by the existence of competing states, each with its own exploitation and management plans. The same logic applies within states between regions, provinces, and administrative units competing for the same resource.

A particularly aberrant aspect of this fragmentation is the classification of hydrological information as a “state secret.” Data on river flows, rainfall, dam storage capacity, and planned releases are considered strategic information, subject to manipulation and concealment. India has classified detailed data on the flow rates of the Chenab River as confidential, while Pakistan has concealed information on actual consumption in the provinces. Afghanistan does not share reliable data on withdrawals from the Kabul River basin.

This absurdity reaches its peak with “militarized” dams. The management of reservoirs is under military control and data on water releases is classified as a national security secret. In India, the Baglihar Dam is considered a “strategic asset,” and in Pakistan, the Tarbela Dam is under partial control of the army. Floods resulting from sudden and uncoordinated releases have caused hundreds of casualties in recent years, but the data essential to preventing such disasters remains inaccessible.

The political economy of water under capitalism reproduces all the contradictions of commodity production. Water is simultaneously an essential use value and exchange value, a common good and a strategic commodity. In 2023, the World Bank explicitly labeled water as a “strategic tradable asset,” reducing the issue of access to a mere price calculation, ignoring its fundamental biological and social function.

Private ownership of water manifests itself in various ways. We see state concessions to private companies, distribution monopolies, dams built with private capital but defended by public armies. In Nepal, water concessions to Indian multinationals allow them to control flows that could irrigate Bihar. In Pakistan, Chinese capital finances dams that leave Sindh dry. In Afghanistan, European consortia are planning water collection projects that will starve the Iranian Helmand.

The water market in the region is already up and running. Water is bought, sold, traded, valued, and financed like any other asset. Water futures were introduced in 2020 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, transforming a vital resource into an object of financial speculation. The agricultural industries of Punjab, India, the mines of Balochistan, and transnational bottling plants compete for the same aquifers on which millions of farmers depend.

Private ownership, whether in the form of individual rights to water or in the form of state sovereignty over water basins, prevents any rational planning. The coordination efforts promoted by institutions such as the Mekong Commission or the International Conference on Indus Waters remain formal, lacking real power and subordinate to the logic of competing national interests.

The Indus Treaty was presented as a model of cooperation, but its very structure reveals the impossibility of transcending competitive logic. It does not provide for integrated management of the basin, but only its division. It does not incorporate principles of intergenerational equity or sustainability, but only fixed withdrawal rates. It does not recognize the rights of local communities, but only those of states.

The solution will not lie in the signing of new or better treaties, nor in the intervention of supranational institutions. Only the international revolution of the proletariat, by abolishing the regime of property and commercial production, can liberate water—like every other resource—from the logic of profit, returning it to the human community.

The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, transcending national borders, will enable the unified management of river basins according to scientific rather than commercial principles. Planned production will eliminate the contradiction between the unitary nature of resources and political fragmentation. Hydrological data, released from military and commercial secrecy, will be made universally available. Hydraulic research, currently subordinated to the interests of profit or power, will be reoriented towards the conservation of resources and the satisfaction of collective needs.

The abolition of private ownership of the means of production will include water, which will be managed as a common good with a rational distribution criterion based on the real needs of communities and ecosystems, not on purchasing power or military force. Large-scale irrigation plans, currently subject to profit motives or national prestige, will be rethought in terms of the general interest of the productive masses.

Centralized planning will not only be technical, but also social. It will enable us to overcome the structural waste of water imposed by market laws and competition. Agricultural and industrial production will be reorganized taking into account overall water availability, not immediate capital appreciation needs.

In arid and semi-arid areas, the revolutionary dictatorship will be able to impose restrictions on population and production concentration in water-vulnerable areas, overcoming the anarchy of settlements and economic activities that characterizes capitalism. Parasitic megacities that have sprung up in desert areas for reasons of real estate speculation or political prestige, such as Karachi or Dubai, will gradually be reoriented toward a balance with available resources.

Only international production planning, free from the laws of value and profit, can solve the problems that capitalism has created and continues to exacerbate. Water, restored to its status as a common good, will be removed from private and state ownership, returning to what it naturally is: a fundamental condition of life, not a commodity to be sold.