DeansMusings

  Water Wars II: India finally acts In my earlier blogpost on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), written in 2023, referencing my paper on Pakistan of 2016, I argued that India did not need to abrogate the treaty to put pressure on Pakistan. It first needed to fully utilise the rights that the treaty already gave it. The points made were: 2023 Blogpost on the IWT -India is not utilizing even its (20%) share of river water. -India is not utilizing the power and irrigation capacity on the Western (Pakistan’s) rivers  that is entitled to. Consequently J&K, where the rivers flow through, has a power and w ater shortage. - India has taken no steps to divert any water from Pakistan’s rivers – in fact, we should have  actively helped Afghanistan negotiate an equitable water sharing treaty for rivers rising in Afghanistan and flowing into Pak.  The reality since 2025. We cannot simply `turn off' water to Pak. If all the current and planned projects  are completed on sc...

Background ( Rahul Deans) : I used to do business in Afghanistan some 25 years ago. At the time, `business’ in Afghanistan consisted of importing goods from Dubai, into Afghanistan, at zero duty and smuggling it into Iran and Pakistan, which taxed those imports heavily. Control of the border crossings and the smuggling business was heavily contested, between various warlords, as was the other business in Afghanistan – opium cultivation and smuggling out of Afghanistan. To me, that was what much of Afghanistan’s civil war was about.    In more recent times, I found that every account of the situation in Afghanistan was by reporters who had never been to Afghanistan and were relying on old cliches to describe the situation. To give a first-person view, as I did in my recent blogpost on Myanmar, I had invited an old contact, a person from the Afghan army, who had been in intelligence and was unable to leave he country after the Taliban takeover. Unfortunately, he and his social...

 I decided to write this after seeing a flood of articles, videos and social media discussion on Operation Sindhoor. A lot of it either focussed on the wrong subject – possible Indian aircraft losses, or does not put the operation in context, or speculates on why we agreed to a ceasefire – with the underlying assumption that Pakistan, or at least its air force, could have been finished off if the conflict had continued. Operation Sindhoor has to be evaluated in terms of its context, what its objectives were, the extent to which they were achieved and what our alternatives were at each stage of the conflict.   Background : In 1991, at the time India started economic reform and Pakistan chose an Islamist path, Pakistan’s GDP was 27% of India’s. At the time of the Kargil war in 1999, it was 20.7% of India. In 2025, Pakistan’s economy is projected to be just 9% of India’s. At current rates of growth, in 2031, Pakistan’s GDP will be 7% of India’s. In other words, India will sta...